The Read: Rachel Gable, The Hidden Curriculum: First Generation Students at Legacy Universities

Friday's Child is Loving and Giving

Why did I get this book?

I’m deeply involved right now in the issues covered in this book in my work for the Aydelotte Foundation and in teaching the writing component of the Summer Scholars Program at Swarthmore. I’m especially interested in what Gable is writing about, as it’s a topic I’ve been putting in the center of a workshop I do for Swarthmore students every fall that focuses on reading in college—I have tended to refer to it as “cultural capital” or “social capital”, but I think I’ll prefer “hidden curriculum” going forward.

Is it what I thought it was?

Yes. This book is a useful and interesting part of a canon that has taken shape recently that includes Anthony Abraham Jack’s The Privileged Poor, Jennifer Morton’s Moving Up Without Losing Your Way, Lauren Rivera’s Pedigree, Peter Felten’s Relationship-Rich Education, Paul Tough’s The Years That Matter Most, Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs’ How College Works, and a number of other works. There’s essentially a kind of public syllabus visible in these books, a deeply intertwined conversation, and Gable’s book fills out some important subjects that are referenced but not deeply treated in the other works.

What continuing uses might I have for it?

Of all the books I might lob at incoming first-year students, I think I’d choose either Gable or Tough, though I also think Morton’s focus on the ethics of social mobility is really meaningful to many students (first-generation and otherwise), and Chambliss & Takacs has the widest scope with some really important tangible advice for students and faculty. The anecdotal stories in Gable’s book are really specifically evocative of some repeated experiences that I’ve heard students at Swarthmore recount over the years.

I’m also likely to fold the book into any conversations with colleagues or committee work that focuses on these issues—again, I think it adds some important dimensions to ongoing conversations and in some ways speaks more to faculty practice in a directly actionable way than some of the other work on related topics.

Quotes

“[First generation students] tended to narrate academic successes in the context of turbulence: as slow or even false starts, meteoric rises, and, at times, savage disappointments. By contrast, continuing generation students did not describe their academics as exhilarating peaks or petrifying cliffs. Instead, they described their faculty as coaches and their coursework as incremental exercises designed to help them achieve external goals.”

“When I asked first generation students at Harvard and Georgetown why they selected their majors, they frequently explained that they were unaware of the academic choices available to them when they first matriculated, and so their choices were made in the context of limited information. They selected classes based on their level of familiarity with the subject in high school…Over time, either through serendipity or purposeful exploration through general education requirements, many first generation participants described finding their academic home outside their original or intended major.”

“Even though Anthony was considering pursuing an academic career, he suspected that what was expected of him in class discussions was some kind of ritualized speech performance, the rules of which he failed to grasp.”

“Very few continuing generation students spoke of feeling intimidated by their professors or the academic process, while this was a significant theme among at least one-third of first generation students interviewed, many—though by no means all—of whom came from high schools where content memorization was favored over class discussion and oral argument.”

“For some first generation participants, the burden of choice to disclose their life experiences or stay silent when class discussions addressed social inequality or mobility proved a heavy toll. Listening to peers discuss issues with which they had no personal experience could be infuriating.”

“Anthony and Jackie’s evolving sense of empowerment to speak from a position of authority on issues that matter to them is just one among many examples of the evolving approach to academics underscored by first generation participants in this study. It is an evolution that enables them to own their own education, and to forge the academic experiences they wish to have.”

“One first generation participant described the shock she felt at her roommate’s habit of ‘blowing through a sixteen thousand dollar a month budget’.” [Let me just say that I’d be shocked too, even though I know it happens.]

Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints

Taken as a whole, Gable’s book provides strong qualitative confirmation of some of the current consensus within selective higher education: first-generation students need to be explicitly introduced to practices like “office hours” not just for the academic assistance they provide but also because they’re important to forming mentoring relationships, they need to be encouraged to study together and to form robust social networks that aren’t just composed of first-generation students, they need sensitive mentoring from faculty and administrators whose life experiences give them direct insight into the situation of first-generation students, that faculty need to rethink curricular pathways that presume the kinds of preparation that continuing generation students have had (e.g., not just formal classwork but knowledge of ‘the hidden curriculum’), that institutions need to find ways to make sure that every service and opportunity they offer is not gated either by money or implicit knowledge. The book is a robust endorsement of both policies and conversations going on right now within selective higher education aka “legacy universities”.

Though along those lines, there’s some familiar dilemmas that crop up here as well. When institutions acknowledge and seek to destigmatize the instrumental outlook of some first-generation students (and their families) towards a course of study, they can have the effect of reinforcing the choices made from that perspective, which then in turn actually reproduces a strong distinction between continuing generation and first generation students and also leaves some first generation students uneasy when they finally do decide to study something that has no immediately clear career pathway because they feel welcome and engaged by that course of study. Thinking about extracurricular activity and social networks in transactional or instrumental terms makes some first-generation students avoid them even more, “corroding” the relationships that the students are looking to create. Trying to make the social and economic trajectories of first generation students more transparent to faculty, staff and continuing generation students sometimes has the effect of giving those groups permission to bring first generation experiences into class discussions or community deliberation in a way that forecloses the agency of the students themselves, but on the other hand, waiting for the students to decide all by themselves when their own experiences are important to raise also puts a weighty burden on them.

One limitation of the mixed-method approach that Gable and almost all the other authors writing in this space use is that putting the experience and perspectives of first generation students in the center of the inquiry at least slightly forecloses the possibility of “reading” the hidden curriculum’s content and consequences from some other vantage point that might reveal the parts of it that no one is particularly conscious of or able to testify to. For example, first generation students are never fully privy to the kinds of conversations that faculty have about students (first generation and continuing generation alike), and how those conversations develop into more and more elaborated narratives that condition how faculty teach to individual students that they know of through other faculty’s narrations. They never see directly the evaluative mechanisms and forms, they don’t get to hear what the admissions staff knew about them or their backgrounds or their schooling. They don’t directly witness the specific workings of pipelines and social networks that are attached to specific socioeconomic networks unless they form really strong friendship or romantic connections to another student who is present in those networks.

Even including the continuing generation students in her study doesn’t give Gable a way to talk fully about what the continuing generation students don’t know that they know. I’ve been using my own old undergraduate essays as I talk about writing and revision with my students this summer, and re-reading them the main thing that strikes me is that I was completely unfazed when my professors basically said (accurately) that I was way overdoing an argument or was just plain kind of wrong in my characterization of a particular author. There’s one really cringy paper where I’m trying to use what I understood about the Annales historians as a cudgel to beat up William McNeill for not being enough like the Annales historians without really knowing what I’m doing. But the thing is, I heard the message and later papers were more careful, more knowledgeable, more precise, more based on the text. It’s just that I was never worried about the feedback or about a lower grade—my confidence was never even slightly perturbed. I did not know that I was feeling that in a distinct way or that it was important to my academic success. I just did it. I knew I belonged, I was full of piss and vinegar and completely unwarranted confidence, and if you’d asked me to reflect on that then, I couldn’t have done it until my senior year. Maybe it’s slightly different now, but there are still things that students don’t know that they don’t know about the hidden curriculum, and maybe even things that none of us know that we don’t know. There has to be a method for finding and describing that part of institutional life and so far I don’t think any of these studies have really worked in that direction. The closest methodological blueprint I can think of is Michelle Lamont’s How Professors Think, but maybe also some of the ways that some people in critical university studies “read” institutions could come into play usefully.

To some extent, staying largely within the perspectives and knowledge that students themselves generate gives us an account of a “hidden curriculum” that is actionable and tractable from the perspective of faculty and administrative leadership, and de-emphasizes the deeper kinds of habitus that are harder to uncover, harder to openly discuss and harder to change. For example, as Gable notes in a footnote to Chapter Six, continuing generation students generally will not discuss any consultative assistance their parents might have employed to get them into Harvard or Georgetown (I would assume especially not in the wake of the Varsity Blues scandal) even though admissions professionals are frequently certain that this kind of assistance was available to many continuing generation students coming from wealthy or upper-middle class backgrounds. As Gable observes, everybody suspects but nobody does anything because doing anything involves changing everything.

I really appreciated Chapter Six, “The External Influences on Alma Mater”, which I think is a dimension that is missing from some of the other studies that deal with similar issues.

There’s one story in the book that really stuck with me. It’s a student who at the end of her sophomore year was confident that she was going to be a math major but when Gable reconnects with the student during her senior year, she’s a religious studies major. At first she narrates that as a happy story of really finding something that excites her and has given her a strong feeling of mastery over her writing in particular, which she says she didn’t feel earlier on. But as the conversation goes on, it uncovers a real sense of trauma. It’s not that the student failed at math—she still feels very academically competent at it. It’s that she had a faculty advisor whom she felt reasonably connected to and then she made a faux pas and addressed him by a familiar informal name that other faculty and colleagues used for him. He reprimanded her harshly in an email and subsequently became basically unresponsive to even routine requests for advice. She switched to another advisor, but the humiliation of the mistake haunted her. When she started to feel really connected to a religion professor, it not only provided her a new area of academic interest but also a chance to escape from the shame of that one moment. I feel like a decent number of faculty have no idea that those kinds of moments can be that powerful. Maybe because they were like I was as an undergraduate: unperturbed by those kinds of interactions both because faculty hesitated to rebuke them thus and because even if they were they didn’t even notice that it had happened. Maybe just because they are missing what some would call emotional intelligence, or maybe they’re people who simply don’t think it’s their job (or their life) to work towards the maintenance of sociality in the first place. Or maybe simply because the moment passed and they realized afterwards that they could have done that better and differently but oh well.

I’m sure I’ve made my mistakes of this kind, and only repaired a few. But that’s what I think is the most urgent work going forward—not to formalize allyship or mentorship or support as a routine or an apparatus, and not even to just be more human and humane and acknowledge error and build up a culture of care and connection. I think the hardest work embedded in that one story—and referenced throughout Gable’s book—might be stopping to reflectively explain and understand the kinds of norms and expectations that the “hidden curriculum” is built from. By reflectively I mean, don’t just tell a student or a colleague what to do or not do but have a conversation that puts those expectations up for rethinking and renegotiating. Why doesn’t that student get to call that professor that name? You can’t just say don’t do that or even the cop-out bullshit version some of us fall back on, oh I don’t care for myself, but don’t do that because other people won’t like it and I don’t want you to get slapped back more harshly by those people. In every organizational culture, there are all these implicit understandings and rules that are effectively used to identify insiders and outsiders, owners and renters, leaders and subjects. Sometimes not consciously, sometimes to the advantage of the outsiders (e.g., they enable modes of petitionary address or demands for reciprocity). Sometimes they’re harmless or quirky, sometimes conscious instruments for concentrating wealth and power. But what they are almost never, whatever they are, is explained. Because many of them—like much of everyday culture—have no defensible or consistent explanation, because many of them aren’t anything anybody decided to do or want but just something they understand is Done or Not Done. At least sometimes in almost thirty years of working at one college, I’ve found myself in a room with old-timers and new faculty and we start asking, “Just why is it that we’ve been doing this one thing in this particular way?” without fear that someone’s going to come down the mountain from the burning bush and tell us wrathfully BECAUSE! And what we find as often as not is that there’s no reason, or that the specific reason we started is long since irrelevant or gone. So in addition to all the extremely useful concrete policies Gable suggests, I’d add this idea to the list: we can only be deliberate authors of our hidden curricula if we are always called to patiently, reflectively, kindly explain ourselves when we invoke a norm, a tradition, a Done and Not Done, and to be ready for both curiosity and reconsideration to follow.