Teaching Struggling Students: Lessons Learned from Both Sides of the Classroom

Abstract

This book tackles the phenomenon of limited learning on campuses by approaching it from the point of view of the author, an educator who writes about the experience of being, simultaneously, a college student and a college professor. The author lays out her experience as a student struggling in an introductory linguistics class, framing her struggles as sites ripe for autoethnographic interrogation. Throughout the book, the author melds her personal narratives with the extant research on college student learning, college readiness, and the interconnectedness of affect, intellect, and socio-cultural contexts. This book poses a challenge to the current binary metanarrative that circles the college student learning conundrum, which highlights either the faculty or student perspective, and unfolds this unnecessary binary into a rich, nuanced, and polyvocal set of perspectives.