I follow FirstGen Forward both to learn how campuses are serving first-gen students and to track what this influential national advocacy group is recommending be done for them. There, I learned about how St. Joseph University holds a Day of Dialogue each year to support its mission of campus inclusiveness. Classes are canceled and keynoters and concurrent sessions highlight first-person experiences as the spark for discussion throughout the day. Sessions are intended to be "practical, interactive, and action-oriented events". Last year included a session for first-generation students. I know almost nothing about this campus, but I do want to look closely to how this first-gen session seems to have differed in important ways from what happens elsewhere during this event.
Planners of days like this take for granted that many undergraduates and others on campus have limited experiences or knowledge of people different from themselves. They work on days like this because the goal of inclusion has not yet been fully realized. The session planners and the administration supporting an entire day of dialogue on inclusion assume that for everyone to feel that they belong, the campus community will hold spaces where more powerful actors listen to and dialogue with the less powerful.
So what happens on these days? One must have a campus email address to access the schedule for recent events but there are other online traces of the day.
One trace is the header image for the event log-in website that features multiple covers of books written in the first person by minoritized authors to educate those from more privileged groups about their history, perspectives, agency, and experiences – all from a perspective of critique of injustice within those histories and experiences, all toward making the campus more inclusive.
The student newspaper has also published write-ups of some of what transpires in sessions in recent years. Sessions were organized to build awareness of issues such as the politics of Black hair in the workplace, neurodiversity, or the "white savior" complications of service trips abroad. Another year, there was session on breaking stereotypes of Latinas and another on "learning the perspectives and experiences of others" in civil dialogue across differences.
In all of these, administrators, speakers and session organizers assume that the social structures of the campus were built upon the naiveté and/or the indifference and/or the intentional harm of more powerful others. The work of inclusivity is far from done on campuses.
And Then There Was a First-Gen Session
The recent session for first-gen students was based on very different starting points. With the deepest respect to the student who organized this session, the focus in this session reflected the national framing of first-generation programming that is more typically organized by professional staff. It's that national programming I want to question, with this particular day on this particular campus as an example.
In other groups on Dialogue Day, participants seem to have spoken in the first person about actions and policies that negate the intent of "inclusion", in dialogue with those in positions to enact change.
In the first-gen session, students, faculty, and staff did not engage in dialogue with others on campus. Instead, the session focused inward, in conversations with one another, on "imposter syndrome" as a personal psychological trait that can get in the way of personal success. Students in the session were reminded to believe that "I belong here too", as if inclusion is within their own control. There is nothing in the program write up of anything beyond the students' own mindsets that might be making them feel as if they're imposters.
The session did not seem to discuss that membership in any community is always relational, built within daily encounters with those already on the inside and within institutional policy and practice that render some groups invisible. There was nothing in the write-up of the session about anyone else on campus – intentionally or not – creating barriers to first-gen students's inclusion and belonging.
As in so much of first-gen programming, there was nothing about being a student who may have attended underfunded schools in economically struggling communities and only realized that other students had much more when starting classes. There was nothing about how they may have learned to hide their class* backgrounds to avoid stigma. There was no acknowledgement that first-gen students can't compete with peers with very different access to resources. There was nothing about growing socio-economic inequality or how public policy that sustains educational inequality could be examined within the curriculum. There's no mention of faculty assumptions or institutional norms that enable those in power to confer or deny "belonging" to those seeking inclusion.
Even while the identities of first-gen students intersect with those of students in many other sessions, discussion of the "first-gen" dimensions of experiences focused personal, not institutional troubles. There was nothing about how first-gen students trying to join other identity groups face the "hostile ignorance" about class differences from more- privileged peers leading these groups.
Students learned in the first-gen session that imposter syndrome is conquered internally by learning to "reframe self-defeating thoughts and mindsets". Students themselves were applauded for offering one another encouragement and understanding. Participants were reminded of available resources on campus equipped to "help". Unlike the messaging in other sessions that even well-intended helpers will learn by listening to diverse students speaking on their own behalf, the implication in the first-gen session was that the helpers should be inherently trusted.
And this session offered first-gen students exactly the type of programming and messaging encouraged by national first-gen advocacy organizations which has typically been distanced from broader advocacy for diversity and inclusion on campus.
Earning the Right to Speak
On Dialogue Day, other minoritized students and faculty and staff were speaking directly to and with their more privileged peers and staff about their collective encounters of naiveté, misunderstanding, and discrimination.
It seems fair to ask why first-gen students were in a room with other first-gens and encouraged to psychologically "reframe" their own negative thoughts about whether they belong on campus. It seems fair to ask why the burden is placed on them, not the broader campus, to recognize their strengths when a session goal encouraged them to "Empower themselves to see their first-gen identity as a source of strength not as a limitation".
Will they be granted the right to speak to more powerful others of their own experiences only after they work to repair their own negative mindsets?
Because unlike the theme of Dialogue Day – that the campus still falls short of full inclusivity – first-gen students were encouraged to believe that regardless of their interpretations of their experiences of exclusion, privileged peers, faculty and staff have been there with welcoming and open arms all along.
*Footnote: It is common when people talk about social class on campus in the contexts of first-generation students, someone trained within the Student Affairs field will jump in to say that not all first-gen students are poor and working class. This is true, and at the same time, that gesture of inclusion toward middle class and higher-income first- students is often leveraged to shut down talk of class inequalities experienced by most first-gen students. The median income of the families of first-generation students is less than half that of continuing education students. Income, and parents who by definition do hold undergraduate degrees are strong indicators of the prevalence of poor/working class students in this population.
