Higher Education and First-Generation Students: Cultivating Community, Voice, and Place for the New Majority

Offers readers a rich understanding of the experience of students who are first in their family to attend college. This book is a theoretically informed study of the lived experience of FG students and draws on their voices to demonstrate how their insights interface with what we, as educators, think we know about them.

Table of Contents:
PART I: GETTING THERE: FIRST-GENERATION STUDENTS AND THE ROAD TO COLLEGE A Long Way from Home: Deeping our Understanding of First-Generation Students Strangers without Codebooks: Isolation and Marginalization PART II: BEING HERE: SURVIVING THE TRANSITION TO COLLEGE Re-Imagining with University: Theoretical Approaches to Serving First-Generation College Students Toward Community, Connectedness, and Care PART III: GETTING THROUGH: LESSONS FROM FIRST-GENERATION STUDENTS Rationale and Design for the Multicultural Learning Community Belonging and Finding Place Claiming Self: Identity and Academic Voice On Critiques and Possibilities

About the Author :
Rashné R. Jehangir is Associate Professor in the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, USA.

Review :

"This is a brilliant, engaging, and well-written book on first-generation, mostly low-income college students, which offers creative suggestions regarding how to reorganize the academy to include learning communities, partnerships between academic divisions and student services, multicultural competence training, and creative pedagogy to make the academy more welcoming and inclusive." - Joseph L. White, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Psychiatry, University of California, Irvine

"Jehangir deftly weaves commentary about what it means to conceive of education as a public good. At the center of the book are students' voices, providing timely and compelling descriptions of effective pedagogical practice. Their questions - raised several years after their learning community experiences - point to needed improvement in colleges. Jehangir's conclusions provide clear approaches for campus teams to make their institutions work better for first generation, low-income students."- Emily Lardner, Co-Director of the Washington Center for Improving Undergraduate Education, The Evergreen State College

"Perhaps the most helpful aspect of Jehangir's book is her call for changing the way we help students learn . . . Jehangir's model . . . may benefit a a large number of students who enter twenty-first century North American classrooms." - Teaching Theology and Religion