A candidate for a faculty position at a community college usually faces some version of the question “Why are you particularly well suited to working with the kinds of students who come here?” Having been interviewed for a number of such positions and having served on several search committees charged with filling them, I speak from experience. At least superficially straightforward and appropriate, the question seldom surprises job candidates who have even casually attempted to prepare for their interviews. But that the question arises at all reflects widely held misconceptions of community-college students that job candidates, and even interviewers — who should know better — may have unconsciously internalized. For the incautious candidate, answering that unsurprising, but sometimes surprisingly loaded, question can be perilous.
As a novice job candidate myself, I simply (and perhaps naïvely) took the question at face value, accepting that community-college students differ significantly from students at other kinds of institutions. I genuinely wanted to teach at a community college. Having dutifully done my research and formulated my “statement of teaching philosophy,” I began my first interview by stating my familiarity with the particular challenges that many community-college students face: being a first-generation college student, coping with economic hardship and lack of intellectual confidence, balancing academic responsibilities with competing obligations to employers and families. After emphasizing my desire to work with exactly those kinds of students, I declared my commitment to “student-centered learning.” I emphasized my ability to help students succeed in the face of their challenges and to recognize the myriad “learning styles” that students bring to the classroom. I spoke of my ability to use various teaching methods to engage students, always being mindful of the need to stress the subject matter’s “real-world connections” and “workplace value.”
That kind of answer works well enough, if you make it with conviction and avoid any hint of irony when speaking the buzzwords. It is true that candidates must convey a clear understanding of the allegedly unique characteristics of community-college students, along with a sincere desire to teach such students. But at the same time, it is essential to steer clear of even the slightest suggestion that one considers community colleges or their students in any way inferior to four-year institutions or students who attend them. That is especially important if the interviewer’s tone or framing of the question implies that he or she might hold that view.
Even early in my first job search, the question made me uneasy, mainly because of the subtle implication that teaching at a community college amounts to settling for second- or third-rate students. Merely asking the question somehow suggests, however faintly and unintentionally, that there is something wrong with students who choose to attend community colleges.
In later phases of job hunting, with more experience as an interviewee and as a teacher at various kinds of institutions (a private research university, a large land-grant university, two community colleges, and an institution in transition from two-year college to regional university), I gently challenged the question’s underlying assumption that one finds totally different students at community colleges than at universities. In my experience, first- and second-year students, regardless of the type of institution they attend, are more alike than different. At every institution where I have taught, including the private research university, I have found poorly prepared first-generation students with few economic, academic, or social resources. And at every institution, including the community colleges, I have worked with well-prepared, intellectually gifted students with friends in all the right places and money to burn.
In four years at the same community college, I have watched the ebb and flow of students through several semesters, during some of which I have raved to anyone who would listen about how wonderful my students are, and during others of which I have whined incessantly, whether anyone listened or not, about how shockingly clueless my students are. While it is probably true that there were more high-caliber students in my honors classes at the private university than there are in my standard classes at the similarly sized community college where I teach now, only the proportions — not the types — of students have varied.
Although I have not conducted formal research in this area, I suspect that if one looked at essays from a representative sampling of students in freshman-composition classes at a university and at a community college, one would find it difficult to determine which essays came from which institution. In writing classes at both community colleges and universities, I have encountered intellectually gifted students who can write deeply analytical essays in eloquent prose, brilliant students who cannot write a shopping list that makes sense, students who write beautifully but fail to say anything of substance, and students who can hardly read, much less write clearly or think critically. At both kinds of institutions, I have also found students who manage to complete a full load of classes successfully while working three jobs, rearing multiple children alone, caring for elderly relatives, and coping with chronic illness or disability, as well as students who take a relatively light load of courses and don’t do much else (except illicit drugs) but still manage to fail all their classes, despite considerable intelligence and ability.
Students are students, wherever they are.
The danger is that the perception of difference between the two groups of students can lead to low expectations of community-college students and an institutional culture that enables them to live down to those expectations. Unfortunately, the false belief persists among the general public, students themselves, and even some faculty members that students choose to attend community colleges because they couldn’t survive academically at a university. That might be true for some, but many students choose community colleges for a variety of good reasons, such as cost, location, emphasis on teaching, and flexible class schedules.
Regardless of why students come to community colleges, we welcome them with open arms and make every accommodation we can to help them succeed. We want them, of course, to become well-adjusted, well-informed, clear-thinking citizens who can contribute productively and ethically to our society. We also want the enrollment figures that bring in revenue, the graduation and retention rates that impress accreditation teams, and the glowing evaluations of our teaching that earn us promotions and tenure. If we even unconsciously assume our students’ inferiority while pursuing those goals, however, we risk lowering our standards rather than teaching our students how to meet them.
In seeking to satisfy our students while enhancing our own performance ratings, we might also yield too easily to educational fads of dubious value, as when we embrace and carry out the advice of the alleged pedagogical experts, who, as far as I can tell, denounce the lecture style of teaching while insisting that students learn most when they teach themselves and insist that hands-on learning is best (provided of course that people never touch each other), that teaching cannot occur without at least one computer in the room, and that, because every student has a different “learning style,” professors must cater to the whims of all their students individually but simultaneously.
Do not misunderstand: Teachers should be willing to do whatever it takes, within reason, to engage students with the course material — to “meet students where they are.” And it is true that the one thing worse than a bad lecture is a bad lecture with PowerPoint slides. But I am skeptical that there even is such a thing as “learning styles,” for example. In my view, teachers will achieve better results by determining their own strengths and using them effectively than by attempting to use pedagogical methods that make them feel incompetent or uncomfortable because some expert says that is the “right” thing to do. In my experience, most students respond favorably to professors who teach well and respond negatively to professors who teach badly, regardless of the teaching methods employed.
If current and potential community-college faculty members allow ourselves, or even worse, our students, to accept the myth of community-college students’ inherent inferiority, we may be, despite all our efforts to “retain” them as successful students, enabling them to fail. The means would be our own failure to uphold high performance standards and our willingness to make allowances for shoddy work, plagiarism, missed deadlines, chronic absence, and other academic sins because so many of our students have hard lives.
Let us again consider the question “Why are you particularly well suited to working with the kinds of students who come here?” Regardless of where “here” is and what kind of students it is known for, the best answer might be “I have learned to maintain high standards, expect students to meet them, and do whatever I can to help students meet those expectations.” To lower our standards is to accept the false assumption that students “here” are inferior to students “there.”
T. Allen Culpepper is an associate professor of English at Manatee Community College.
http://chronicle.com Section: Community Colleges Volume 53, Issue 10, Page B30
