For-Profit Colleges as Literacy Sponsors: A Turn to Students' Voices

For-profit University;College Writing;Higher Education;Online Education;Education;Social Sciences;English & Education

Tucker, BonnieYergeau, Melanie R ;

University of Michigan

关键词: For-profit University;    College Writing;    Higher Education;    Online Education;    Education;    Social Sciences;    English & Education;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/145802/bmtucker_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

For-profit colleges and universities (FPCUs) have become increasingly popular in the US recently, with first-time undergraduate student enrollment at these institutions more than tripling from 1990 to 2009 (Deming, Goldin, & Katz, 2012). Existing news reports and research often present FPCUs as either institutions that prey upon low-income students (US Senate, Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, 2012; Field, 2011), or alternatively as potentially revolutionary reformations of non-profit institutions (Schilling, 2014; Gumport, 2000).In this dissertation, I offer an alternative perspective of FPCUs centered on student learning about writing—after all FPCUs are still institutions of higher learning. I ask the question: what kind of literacy sponsorship do FPCUs provide student writers?I use literacy theorist Brandt’s definition of literacy sponsors as ;;any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy-and gain advantage by it in some way” (p. 166) to analyze large publicly traded for-profit colleges’ writing courses and students’ reports of their literacy practices in these courses. I combine students’ reports with recent news media descriptions of literacy at FPCUs to provide a fuller view of literacy sponsorship at these unique universities. This mixed methods study then incorporates 1) qualitative data from three sets of interviews conducted over a nine month time period with 14 currently enrolled adult female students at two of the largest publicly traded for-profit universities in the US recently enrolled in writing course as well as 2) corpus linguistic analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA) of a self-created corpus of 99 news articles about student writers and literacy at FPCUs published in the US between 1994 and 2016. At the same time, I maintain within the purview of this study the privatized context of FPCUs—as unique for-profit, corporate higher education institutions that must meet shareholder’s needs, but also open access institutions that have expanded the possibility of attending college to a more diverse student body.I find that although news media reports describe students as ignorant, illiterate victims of aggressive recruiting tactics at FPCUs or even criminals complicit in federal financial aid fraud, my participants’ reports contradict these findings; by contrast, even before attending a for-profit college they had extensive experience with a variety of literacy practices, and many are enthusiastic about writing. Nevertheless, I also find that large publicly traded for-profit colleges provide a narrow model of literacy in writing courses focused on conventions and disciplining students’ grammatical or citation errors. Even further, writing is often an asocial activity for students at FPCUs, particularly within online writing courses, which means students do not gain a sense of writing as a rhetorical, social activity or understand audience awareness, and literacy activities are generally completed by students ;;on their own.” Perhaps most disturbingly, I conclude that this privatized literacy sponsorship model shifts both the risks of high college costs and the responsibility for benefiting from writing courses onto students themselves—resulting in a system where the few rare well-prepared, focused students flourish, but the majority flounder.