University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Theses, Student Research, and Creative Activity: Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education Education 5-2017 "Off rF om Lost": Generation 1 Learners' Transition From Adult ESL to Developmental Education Emily Kyung Jin Suh University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/teachlearnstudent Part of the Adult and Continuing Education Commons, Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons, Curriculum and Instruction Commons, and the Language and Literacy Education Commons Suh, Emily Kyung Jin, ""Off rF om Lost": Generation 1 Learners' Transition From Adult ESL to Developmental Education" (2017). Theses, Student Research, and Creative Activity: Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education. 77. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/teachlearnstudent/77 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses, Student Research, and Creative Activity: Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. “OFF FROM LOST”: GENERATION 1 LEARNERS’ TRANSITION FROM ADULT ESL TO DEVELOPMENTAL EDUCATION by Emily KyungJin Suh A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Major: Education Studies (Teaching, Curriculum, and Learning) Under the Supervision of Professor Jenelle Reeves Lincoln, Nebraska May, 2017 “OFF FROM LOST”: GENERATION 1 LEARNERS’ TRANSITION FROM ADULT ESL TO DEVELOPMENTAL EDUCATION Emily KyungJin Suh, Ph.D University of Nebraska, 2017 Advisor: Jenelle Reeves Immigrant students access community colleges with increasing frequency (Teranishi, Suarez-Orozco, & Suarez-Orozco, 2011); however, the majority of research focuses on Generation 1.5 students who completed K-12 education in the U.S. Generation 1 learners are defined in this study as adult immigrants (Rumbaut, 2004) and adult learners (Knowles, 1970) who began American education in adult ESL. Learners’ unique experiences and social roles motivate their transition to higher education and produce distinct linguistic and cultural needs. Many immigrant students begin in developmental education (Teranishi, Suarez-Orozco, & Suarez-Orozco), which is strongly influenced by the adult learning theory of andragogy (Knowles, 1968). This multiple case study explored how Generation 1 learners experience transition into developmental education, conceptualized as placement testing, advising, tutoring and integrated reading and writing class at one community college. Findings indicate that learners exit adult ESL when they feel it no longer meets their academic and personal needs. Transition is a complex process by which learners’ identities become sites of contestation as they negotiate membership into imagined communities of various college spaces. Misalignment between learners’ understandings of what it meant to be a college student and college expectations, which were rarely explicit, resulted in others’ delegitimization of learners’ participation or rejection of the learners’ chosen identities. Learners’ participation rights were dependent upon their abilities to apply symbolic capital to gain acceptance of their specific identities. The study highlights essential differences between Generation 1.5 students and Generation 1 learners based on learners’ multiple social roles and previous experiences; the work problematizes andragogy (Knowles, 1968) suggesting that educational contexts powerfully shape Generation 1 learners’ transitions. The work concludes with practical applications for supporting Generation 1 learners in developmental education. iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank the many people who have supported this work, most importantly, my chair, Dr. Jenelle Reeves: for your endless patience, guidance and encouragement during the Ph.D program and this dissertation. I would also like to thank the members of my committee. Dr. Hunter Boylan: for encouraging me to connect my research to practice and infuse my practice with research to best serve developmental students of all backgrounds and your invaluable mentorship in the Kellogg Institute and beyond; Dr. Theresa Catalano: for your constant mentorship, illuminating the connection between critical scholarship and social justice practice, and fostering my interest in immigrant education; Dr. Loukia Sarroub: for strengthening my critical thinking and writing skills and deepening my theoretical and methodological knowledge; and Dr. Rachel Wendler Shah: for your enthusiastic interest in Generation 1 learners and the teaching of them, and your sage writing advice. Finally, I would like to thank my family. Juhwan: for your unceasing love and support as I juggled the multiple social roles of partner, ohma, developmental educator and Ph.D student. SueYoung, SeokJoon, HyunYoung, and WonJoon: you are too young to remember life before this Ph.D (two of you were born during it), but I am eternally grateful for your love and patience, and the privilege of being your mother. My parents: for teaching me how family, work and learning all shape our identities. Jennifer Stout, Lois “Grandma Roses” Schulenberg (R.I.P.), Sarah and Mike Frain, and the countless other friends who became family: for being the village raising our children and making Nebraska home. v This dissertation is dedicated to Al Share, Labiba, Mariam, Olan, Qadira, Rebecca, and other Generation 1 learners transitioning to enact their desired roles in the multiple imagined communities of their new home country. vi Preface I began this research in the summer of 2014, employing a reiterative process (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011; Merriam, 1998) of data analysis as I collected additional observations and interviews. At the time, Barack Obama was finishing his second term in office, and his talk of free community college and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy shaped federal and institutional discourses about immigrant students which were often (although not always) supportive. And then on November 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States. Trump’s election had an immediate effect on discourses about immigrants in and out of institutions of higher learning. Whereas I had previously observed learners being encouraged to share their immigration experiences at the data collection site, in the weeks following Trump’s inauguration, a student without papers was threatened with deportation by a classmate. The college felt like a different institution; the national attitude felt different, too. On January 17, 2017, Trump issued Executive Order 13769 which banned incoming travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations. All six of the learners in this dissertation were from or had lived in countries on the ban list. Nearly a month later—two days after I sent my dissertation to the readers, The New York Times headlined a piece entitled, “Immigrants Hide, Fearing Capture on ‘Any Corner’” (Yee, 2017) describing mounting fear even among immigrants with legal permanent resident status, like five of the six learners in this study. (The sixth became a U.S. citizen during data collection.) In today’s political climate, a dissertation about the ways adult immigrant learners access various forms of symbolic capital, including their experiences as refugees, to vii transition from adult ESL to developmental education may appear out of touch with reality or even to depict immigrants as attempting to capitalize on past trauma for academic gains; however, I attempt to describe these learners’ efforts to present themselves as students in the context of Gee’s (1996) notion of discourse as an “identity kit” (p. 127) and to examine the sites of contestation (McKay & Wong, 1996) which emerge from their positioning efforts within multiple completing discourses. Through such a framework, identity enactment, or the forefronting of specific characteristics, is a natural activity, neither shameful nor conniving, in which all humans engage while demonstrating connections to (or distance from) others. In this dissertation, I present research on a previously understudied group of immigrant students and attempt to honor their linguistic and academic abilities as well as their perseverance as they situate themselves within the multiple discourses surrounding transition. I argue that community college educators have a duty to recognize and serve their immigrant students. Failure to explore the Generation 1 learner experience inadvertently contributes to the hostile language infusing our country’s immigration debate. It is my hope that recognizing the strengths Generation 1 learners bring to transitioning, and thus their colleges, can help change the tone of conversations about immigrants and reiterate their invaluable contributions to our nation. Rather than allowing our silence as educators to make us complicit in the threats from which some immigrants now hide, it is our duty to support immigrant learners as they claim their right to engage in discourses about immigration and education: issues which shape their identities but which, as this dissertation illustrates, they can