Over the holidays, I worked my way through FirstGen Forward's Instagram posts on the recent national First Gen Celebration Day[s] that they coordinate. Now in its 7th year, this celebration is held on hundreds of campuses across the U.S. on or during the week of November 8. Nearly 60 campus' activities were cross-posted on the First Gen Forward account with descriptive text, links, and hundreds of photos.
I kept pages of notes as I scrolled through these posts, noticing what was captured in the images and listening for what language was invoked during the events and in accounts of the days. I listed all the featured activities and documented how first-generation students were described. I listened for students speaking on their own behalf.
There were so many balloons.
There was not a single mention of social class.
Why a First-Generation Celebration Day?
First Gen Forward describes the event as "an annual opportunity to raise awareness of the first-generation college student identity by advancing an asset-based, national narrative of these students’ experiences and outcomes".
On their website, national leaders encourage campuses to "leverage Celebration Day to deepen your community’s understanding of the systemic barriers plaguing higher education and the supports necessary for this resilient population to continue thriving across education, career, and life".
These celebration days are planned and staffed by students support staff, some of the most caring people working within some of the most understaffed and underfunded units on campus. They are not in the position to easily change campus policy or to deepen the resources available to students. But I do want to listen closely to the messaging about being a first-generation to students aspiring to social class mobility.
What Were Students Offered?
Many campuses followed the suggestions of First-Gen Forward's planning documents, so there was a lot of commonality across campuses. In post after post, I saw:
Informational Session:
- Lectures and keynotes with students seated in rows or around 8-top banquet tables, typically featuring a staff member or alum speaking of how they succeeded as a first-gen student and beyond. Some seemed to have experience as motivational speakers.
- Advice for Success Panels (alum, faculty/staff/peer/graduate student).
- Break out sessions (listed on schedules of the more elaborate events) on such things as student clubs, study abroad, wellness, stress management, graduate school, or personal finance. On three campuses, there were brief faculty/staff "training" sessions but no description of what was covered.
- There were many images of resource fairs with students walking among colorfully decorated tables with staff offering student supports: career services, academic support offices, counseling services, violence prevention initiatives, or preparation for job interviews. Most of these images featured swag: First-Gen or program branded water bottles, tote bags, buttons, pens or stickers.
- On at least 20 campuses, staff and/or students rocked special T-shirts with mottos such as "First to Soar" or "First-Gen Pride".
The audiences for these sessions were overwhelmingly first-gen students themselves. They were simultaneously celebrated for their (rarely specified) accomplishments and reminded – over and over – that they should seek help from the many campus resources.
Social Activities:
A laudable goal of the day for many campuses was to connect students to others so as to deepen a sense of "belonging" and "community". Most campuses organized fun for students: Free throw contests, dance parties, chalk art, movie nights (pajama themed/in the campus pool). Students were invited to pet gorgeous dogs, to enter talent shows, play corn hole or do yoga.
And students were fed: perhaps depending on campus budget, students were invited to everything from "cupcakes and community hour" to lunchtime BBQs to elaborate dress-up dinners.
Photo booths were very common (signs and bling provided).
On multiple campuses, tables were covered with white paper with prompts to encourage students to briefly respond : "First-gen means", "First gen proud", or "I pledge to graduate".
The Language of Celebrating First-Gen Students
I took pages of notes on the language invoked in the lecture slides and signs in the images and in the post descriptors. I wanted to better understand what organizers intended students to understand about themselves and their differences with peers. Overwhelming, the messages focused on ways that students could/should improve their own circumstances. Signs and swag and featured comments from keynoters sought to inspire students:
- Make your future yours.
- Persist
- Determination. Resilience. Perseverance.
- Seek help. We're here to help. Ask for help. Seek support.
- Students are "diamonds in the rough".
- Most commonly, messaging encouraged students to embrace the identity itself: Pride. First-Gen Pride. Proud to be First.
- On multiple campuses, students were provided postcards or notecards to write messages of gratitude to mentors or others who supported them.
In these dozens of posts on campuses observances, I didn't see anything intended to help students to understand why, relative to their peers, they need to be so determined and resilient, why they arrive in campus "in the rough" or why supporters are so concerned that they feel shame instead of pride.
Trailblazers in well-trod territory:
I paid particular attention to language representing students' experiences relative to family and community. What does it mean to seek upward mobility though education?
Commonly, t-shirts, banners, and speakers evoked language that described students as distancing from family:
- First to Fly or First to Soar (as though family members and neighbors hadn't excelled at work, raising children, or contributing to their communities, often after leaving home countries under duress).
- Trailblazers (as though the trail wasn't already well-trod by all the other people who have ready access to maps).
- Pioneers (as if campuses with decades of history are uncharted territory rather than sites with far too few way-finding signs though they've been talking for decades about opening access).
So much of this language invokes moral approval for students doing what their families did not, but there seemed to be nowhere for students to learn anything about why generations before them didn't or couldn't find their ways to college, as if individual bravery and ambition were what most mattered.
What Didn't Seem to Happen?
- There were very few outward-facing activities to enlist the broader campus to reduce "barriers" working against these students.
- Students seemed to rarely speak for themselves beyond peer panels advising about how to leverage existing campus resources ("ask for help!" "find your tribe") or brief scripted written written responses in featured student profiles.
- Faculty were essentially invisible in their roles as scholars. Small numbers of first-generation faculty and staff did serve on panels to offer advice about success, but there was no mention of any faculty presenting research on social class or educational inequality or structural barriers to poor and working-class students' success (with one exception: Professor Anthony Jack who wrote a book about class barriers at Harvard keynoted two events: one in person and one virtually, neither Ivy League).
- I saw no mention of supporting students in responding to the classism to which first-generation students are often subjected.
- I saw no mention anywhere that first-generation students could learn to be activist and to work collectively to work for change on their campuses and communities. Though the First-Gen Celebration is held on November 8 to commemorate the 1965 signing of the Higher Education Act that was intended to open opportunity, the importance of politics and policy disappear in these commemorations. Only one (elite private) campus reported holding a break-out session for students on how to influence political change beyond voting and one campus featured a photo of TRIO students from across the state spending a day at the state capital to urge support for federal TRIO programs.
- There was no mention anywhere in a day designed to clarify a first-gen "identity" that social class is one of the primary differences between first-generation students and their peers. The "first-gen" label may be confusing and in need of clarification (indeed, multiple campuses had signs, banners, or lecture slides defining "First-Gen) but students likely have personal knowledge of class-related economic vulnerability, under-resourced schools, and the "hostile ignorance" of others. They likely have questions about these things.
What If: Advocacy Within Celebration
The celebration days look fun and inspirational, and those are very legitimate goals. They are entirely different goals than those of supporting a "national narrative of these students’ experiences and outcomes." And it's a far cry from work that leads to "understanding of the systemic barriers plaguing higher education and the supports necessary for this resilient population to continue thriving across education, career, and life." Little in the planning documents of First-Gen Forward supports events that would go beyond increasing students' familiarity with existing campus resources, no matter how stretched those resources might be.
I completely support the goal of normalizing help-seeking as so many of these activities seemed intended to do. I am less clear why the focus on "needing help" isn't contextualized within "and here's the bigger picture of why peers seem to have it easier".
Yes, many campuses remind students that parents who went to college can advise their children in ways that first-gen parents cannot. I'm much less clear about why it's taken for granted that it's parents' job to explain the rules of college success, any more than it's parents' job to explain the HR benefits and policies of students' eventual workplaces because everyone takes for granted that employers don't just tell employees about those things.
Any employer who left it to parents to explain workplace policy and practice to their own children would clearly be dropping the ball; it's hard to imagine that any workplace would plan a day to celebrate the resilience of workers who managed to figure out how to file insurance claims or report harassment on their own because no one just explained these things.
So. What If?
We always, always encourage poor and working-class first-generation students to imagine futures that those around them have not yet known. So what if we imagine these days differently?
Yes to gorgeous dogs to pet and corn hole tournaments. And. What if "celebrating" first -generation experiences included opening space to listen to students about "systemic barriers" that aren't yet fully recognized by the kind staff at the resource fairs?
What if breakout sessions or keynoters openly talked about the immense private support (tutoring, test prep, educational travel, PTA-funded school extras) that many peers had. What if we went further to outline significant differences in public resources available to children in different communities so that fewer first-gen students came to realize these differences only when peers drop status markers into conversation?
What if students were then encouraged to demand help as a matter of fairness, not to simply ask.
What if breakout sessions were devoted to recruiting students to research projects investigating their campuses' successes and shortcomings for students like them and then presenting their findings to administrators? And faculty showed up to sponsor these projects and to introduce the team to scholars in relevant fields? Because student research is a documented "high impact practice" through which community and belonging can be nurtured while deepening academic engagement.
What if the t-shirts and photo booth signs didn't say things like "First to Soar" [that suggest students distanced somehow from family] but instead made visible those actual structural barriers that celebration organizers mention: "Ask Me How To Get To College When Campus Recruiters Skip Your School" [obviously needs work, but barriers, not vague superiority to family as the main point].
So what if, in the end, students' right to justice was confirmed as they also munched free cupcakes and got advice on resumes?
