I'm Jane Van Galen. I was a first-generation college student who took great pride in figuring out how to choose a college all on my own. I only learned much later that kids like me in a small town in rural Wisconsin had access to only a fraction of the information that other students had when making that choice.
I stumbled into a great interdisciplinary program at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay, did a masters in Special Ed at Eastern Kentucky University while I was teaching in a K-8 school in the Appalachian mountains, taught kids in Raleigh and then did my PhD in the Social Foundations of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
I taught at Youngstown State University for six years and then moved to Seattle to be the Founding Director of the Education program at the brand new campus of the University of Washington in Bothell. At both campuses, I taught hundreds of first-generation students.
I am the creator and facilitator of the First in Our Families digital storytellling project. The stories in this project were created in workshops for first-generation students across the country and served to break students' complicated silence about their own social class backgrounds. I've written articles and book chapters about education and class and also edited a number of books on education and class to foreground others' voices.
What's This About?
For years, I wrote an Education and Class blog (on Wordpress) and learned a great deal from the conversations that people brought to the comments. Posts from that blog were used as course readings, were recognized in the media as offering unique perspectives, and served as a place to think through questions that I have about education in an unequal society.
In my reading about "first-generation students" in scholarly literature, I see too little conversation between those of us who think about education sociologically and those whose (large and growing) professional literatures inform supports for first-gen students on campuses. At least one goal of this site is to encourage more of that dialogue. I've opened comments here and hope to hear your ideas, experiences, pushback, and of course what you find valuable.
No Data Tracking, No Algorithms
I built this site on Ghost, open source software that I'm hosting on Reclaim Hosting, a team long committed to supporting academics and others in "reclaiming their digital identity" liberated from corporate platforms.
I pushed my tech skills to build a site that will always be free, where no one is extracting data on users or readers, where there will never be advertising. It's about the conversation. That's it. It's about sharing ideas on a platform beyond the reach of Big Tech.
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Comment Norms: My site, my rules.
Discussion. That's it. No trolling, insults, selling things, any of the "isms" or otherwise being a a willful idiot. I get to decide what "willful idiot" looks like. Go be an idiot on your own site. Everyone else is welcome. Let's talk.