"Who We Are" Published in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning

 

I never listened very closely to my students at PSU until I started teaching Freshman Inquiry courses four years ago. What those students had to say startled and moved me. I quickly decided that teaching them was far more important than researching and writing another book and that listening to them should become a central feature of my teaching.

Neera and Vicki are two friends and colleagues in University Studies who have modeled that way of teaching to me, and two years ago we started listening together with three students, Yarina, Ceci, and Jasmine (a pseudonym) about their journeys to and at Portland State and exploring how we might amplify their voices.

I'm delighted to report that Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning just published the stories of Yarina, Ceci, and Jasmine.

Their stories are compelling. At the age of six Ceci demanded that her father 'buy me a small chalkboard because I wanted to become his English teacher." Now, a junior at PSU, she is determined "to be that lawyer my brother did not have." Yarina's path to and through PSU was especially difficult: "I'm the first in my family to attend college, a brown, gang-affiliated youth who found her way here, alone." She graduated a year ago and is preparing to apply to law school.

If you would like to read their stories, please access the current issue of Change through your library if it subscribes to the periodical, or go here, to my (limited number) of free downloads.