Restorying pathways: listening to two-year branch campus student-writers to reimagine cross-institutional access and alliance-making
Date
2021
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation draws attention to relationships among students and teachers, researchers and participants, courses and programs, and institutions separated by academic hierarchies that obscure coalitional possibilities and cross-campus alliances geared toward equity and justice in education. I take up theories and methods of storying, following decolonial theory and indigenous rhetorics (Powell et al.; paperson; Wilson), Critical Race Theory (Delgado; Martinez), and narrative inquiry (Connelly and Clandinin; Jones) to (re)tell students’ writing experiences on the Wilmington, DE Associate in Arts Program campus of the University of Delaware. Following a youth participatory action research framework (Payne; Fine; Caraballo et al.) and two-year writing studies praxes of teacher-scholar-activism (Andelora; Sullivan; Toth et al.), I center student stories and knowledge-making by collaborating with undergraduate researchers, graduates of the AAP campus. This project (re)stories several datasets including institutional texts and materials contextualized with attention to DE’s educational history and interviews with campus administrators on both campuses, with current AAP students conducted by undergraduate co-researchers, and with the undergraduate researchers. ☐ Putting forward a theory of prismatic storytelling, attending to stories’ multiple dimensions, purposes, audiences, and tellers, I analyze institutional and student stories to understand the rhetorical imaginary (Chávez) around the AAP that informs the first-year writing classroom. The institutional stories, humanized through fictionalized dialogues between composite characters, illustrate how dominant stories of sameness can elide students’ unique literacies and identities; stories of difference envision AAP students as less than their main campus peers; stories of institutional benevolence tout the program as a generous access opportunity; stories of institutional neglect highlight settler universities’ long histories of racism, ableism, and oppression. Storying institutional discourses, moving them out of the abstract, makes visible their relationships to the lived experiences of people within them and where they fail to live up to equity and diversity promises and, in this way, this storying corresponds to practices of institutional critique (Porter et al.). I engage with students’ stories differently. Working within a stance of relational accountability, I stand under students’ stories (Royster; Rosenberg) of first-year writing in this “in-between” institutional site, holding space for students to detail how their experiences of the classroom can lead thinking toward antiracist pedagogies of care that recognize the complexity of students’ lives. The stories’ complexity and contradictions inform this project’s recommendations for classroom, program, and institutional change in the AAP and across other intra- and inter-institutional relationships, and its call for further relational research working within theories of teacher-scholar activism, coalitions, alliances, allyship, and accountability.
Description
Keywords
Access-oriented education, First-year writing, Participatory action research, Storytelling, Teacher-scholar-activism, Undergraduate research