What’s Your Student Story? Using Language as an Intentional Tool for Equity in the Design of Online Professional Development for Community College Educators

Author: Jamie A. Thomas, Cypress College

We All Have a Story to Tell

“I have three learning disabilities that were caused by a stroke I had at birth,” offered Jasmine,^[1] one of my students, after class one day. “So, understanding the English language was always difficult, and having the help I got was very beneficial.” Unique but not entirely unheard-of, her educational journey hinged upon compassionate educators and disability accommodations. Not only had Jasmine described intense personal challenges that were beyond her control, but she had also chosen to articulate the fundamental role of language in facilitating her growth and possibility. Hers was a bilingual student story recognizable across our community college student population in the United States, and particularly in California, where the number of bilingual and multilingual students (including those who are English proficient) amounts to 39.5% of all students in K–12 public schooling (“Facts”).

Jasmine had returned to school after a five-year hiatus that enabled her to gather work experience. Our asynchronous exchange had taken place “after class,” in the online context of an introductory course on language and communication. This was different from the typically quiet, in-person chats initiated by one or two students while I extinguished the classroom LCD projector and cleared up my stack of teaching props, handouts, and bits of leftover chalk before carting my things back up the stairwell to my office on campus. Instead, through online pedagogy, I had seen firsthand how meaningful it could be to invite students to share their personal stories, in the form of writing, video, and audio via group discussions or private, individual check-ins. Framed first by my own authentic sharing, storytelling has remained a powerful tool in cultivating a sense of welcome, care, and confidence in the learning of any subject.

“Though I am half Puerto Rican,” Diego shared of his personal story on a separate occasion, “I look white and do not speak Spanish. Thus, I am simply overjoyed to be learning more about my close friends and communities’ languages and more about how that intersects with society.”

The role of language as a conduit of identity, knowledge, and access features in students’ personal accounts, because the languages we speak and the concepts we are expected to know and understand frame our connection with new people and information. Accordingly, the very words that community college students choose to describe themselves—and that we, as educators, use to portray the student story—have an outsized impact on our orientation to higher education as a change-making and access-building opportunity, as opposed to a burden and trial.

Yet another student, Aurora, shared, “In the course materials, I see that Asian Americans are being represented. Lots of Asians that I know have some accents, and it is sad they are often perceived negatively or doubted due to their accent alone. It reminds me of moments when I’ve experienced people, from my own native state of Louisiana, believing that I was not from Louisiana because of my ‘proper’ California accent.”

Having solicited these students’ anonymized reflections and consent as part of action research during my participation in the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship (2021–22), I identified which elements of the course content students most personally connected with, assisted by each student’s journal entry (optionally submitted within any of five online course sections I taught in the fall semester). Their optional journal entries also became an opportunity for me to reply to each with words and emojis of appreciation for students’ disclosures and insights. Our exchanges continued at regular intervals throughout the semester, strengthening my investments in their learning. In this way, I came to appreciate even more about my students, including what they wanted to learn and become.

What I have since learned as an African American woman, linguist, and equity advocate has transformed the way I teach, and the way I lead as a community college administrator and professional development facilitator, because I have grown into greater respect and conscientious support of the educational journeys of both students and colleagues. The student feedback I gathered through my action research continues to be an invaluable resource in informing revisions to course modules and overall course structure and has helped me to tangibly improve course retention and success rates (for details, see Thomas). The revised course also demonstrates the efficacy of strategies I began experimenting with, in an effort to address disparate, sustained patterns of success across marginalized student populations, particularly Black/African American and Indigenous/Native American students, whose languages and cultural practices are often the subject of concentrated linguistic study and fascination but whose identities garner narrow acceptance within the profession (e.g., Rickford; Tsikewa; Thomas and Bucholtz; Conrod et al.).

Therefore, in 2023, when I was invited to coauthor an extensive update to the four-week, asynchronous, facilitated course Equity and Culturally Responsive Teaching for the California Community Colleges—a professional development training frequented by professors, counselors, librarians, and administrators across our state’s 116 institutions—I jumped at the opportunity to contribute.^[2] As a result, the revised course newly reflects a shift away from achievement gaps, a concept that focuses on students’ relative academic performance as a product of their innate intellectual abilities on standardized tests and other normed measures (Williams). Instead, engagement with established and emerging education research (Ladson-Billings, “From the Achievement Gap,” “Pushing Past”; Carter and Welner; Fowler) redirects attention to “education debt,” or what students, particularly of African American, Native American, and Latine/x communities, are owed as a result of centuries of persistent, systemic exclusion from educational opportunity in the United States. This justice-oriented research identifies and addresses opportunity gaps, relaying an understanding of community colleges as racialized and nonneutral organizations (McCambly et al.; Carter and Kendi; Rabi), while promoting an understanding of myriad external factors impacting students’ learning and success in rural and urban contexts (Comstock; Hardy). Such external factors include societal norms, culturally affirming expectations, socioeconomic differences, access to a home Internet connection, and opportunities for personalized learning.

In this essay, I describe some of the winning engagement strategies I developed as a result of my involvement in this recent professional development course revision project as well as the discursive shifts (language-focused interventions) that I advocated for. More specifically, I focus here on module 1 of the four-module course, in which I did a lot of heavy lifting for the revision, particularly through research review and original prose writing, to reorient the course toward opportunity gaps. This included incorporation of excerpts from recent statewide qualitative survey data that amplify appreciation for the student’s story as well as for the educator’s journey and everyday professional challenges. An additional emphasis in the course revision was to integrate insights gained from the COVID-19 pandemic and the unprecedented challenges of delivering a safe, compassionate, no-contact version of higher education. Instigating these discursive shifts has helped us to make this professional development more responsive to the updated needs and concerns of community college educators and students.

Welcome Video: What’s Your Student Story? How Did You Get Here?

A sequence of weekly online modules forms the backbone of each four-week offering of Equity and Culturally Responsive Teaching, a course provided by the California Virtual Campus’s Online Network of Educators (CVC@ONE). Participants successfully completing the course produce a new digital, or “liquid,” version of their course syllabus, which can be easily distributed to students via a hyperlink included in a course welcome email or message. Importantly, the redesigned syllabus incorporates language and images to communicate a welcoming and encouraging tone, inclusive course policies, and resources for basic needs (e.g., campus food pantry, library and Internet resources) and academic and career advancement (e.g., tutoring, campus career-counseling services, career-specific resources and opportunities for internships, summer programs, and student conferences). In fact, as part of this online professional development, course facilitators (who are themselves current community college faculty members and administrators) guide participants in examining and undoing the punitive or nonpersonable language typical of their existing course documentation and syllabi. The implicit hope, at least for me, is that redesigning the outline of their courses encourages instructors to reexamine other elements of their teaching and their approaches toward students. See table 1 for a list of themes covered in the previous and new versions of the course’s primary module.

Table 1

Previous and Current Outline of Key Themes in the Course

Informal and Collective Language as a Discourse Strategy

Each module’s introduction page offers facilitators a chance to welcome and orient participants through a personal welcome video they can record and add to the page, and I use this as a means to ask participants to consider their student story. We were all once students, after all! Punctuated by an on-screen title, “What’s your student story?,” and calming background music, I extemporaneously narrate in my original one-minute video:

One of our activities that we’re doing in this unit is to try to think about our story. Where we received assistance along the way that helped us close the gap in our own experience. And to try to put ourselves in the shoes of our students. What do you remember about your experience in going through college, or in gaining much of the training that you use toward what you teach today? And how does your identity, and the ways that you are perceived, impact how other people feel about you being in these spaces of achievement?

For participants who have never considered these questions, I hope that this constitutes a warm invitation to explore what cultural norms and expectations have supported their success as an inevitable certainty. Accordingly, my goal in this welcome video is to avoid being preachy about doing equity. Rather, I take up use of collective language such as “we’re” and “our story” and “our own experience” to emphasize a focus on collaborative sense making and knowledge production. In this way, I aim to demonstrate that I am invested alongside participants in these reflective activities rather than merely advising them to consider these questions for their own benefit. I use informal language that initiates connection with all participating educators, across social differences in identity and opportunity, and their various possible experiences with enacting student-centered approaches. The hope is that this assists in cultivating greater empathy with all students we encounter in community college settings and helps us to break cycles of harm—some of which we may be reproducing from our own personal experiences.

Considering the Words and Messages We Have Become Used To

What I describe above, in terms of intentional language use, draws upon research-driven ideas about how word choice plays a role in our affective responses and assists in framing our expectations. Indeed, applied linguists and linguistic anthropologists have long upheld the concept of language socialization to describe how our normative perceptions—particularly our expectations about language—are shaped, from an early age and throughout our lifespans, by the language used by our parents and caregivers, teachers, neighbors, peers, and media (Schieffelin and Ochs; Diao). In turn, the language that communicates this normative messaging also contributes to our ideals about language itself, including what dialects are legitimate and valid for certain contexts and purposes. Furthermore, our expectations (and regulation) of academic language, as in the formal and authoritative modes of communication we anticipate, teach, and correct for in academic settings, are influenced by the ways of speaking, writing, and demonstrating knowledge—including stereotypes—we observe as rewarded and empowered in our places of schooling and higher education (Duff).

Our students, in turn, may respond to these stimuli by adapting to accepted modes of academic writing and speaking and by experiencing feelings of inadequacy or exclusion when they are unwilling or unable (as in my student Jasmine’s case) to produce expected language. Additionally, racialized expectations of our students (as in Diego’s case), based on perceptions of their personal names, physical characteristics, and ancestral origins, may eclipse their actual talents and career interests. In this way, the individual life experiences of educators, and their cumulative and systemic socialization, are well worth exploring because it undergirds their approaches toward stewarding the next generation of community college learners.

Upon personal reflection, I have come to further view language socialization as relevant to the broader “cycle of socialization” framework outlined by social justice scholar and educator Bobbie Harro (“Cycle of Socialization”). Through a focus on undoing the internalized oppression that accompanies the range of unequally empowered social identities we are trained to inhabit, as in gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, economic class, ability/disability status, and citizenship status, Harro identifies “introspection, education, and consciousness raising” as part of the “transition from intrapersonal to interpersonal liberation” (“Cycle of Liberation” 620–66). As we grow toward liberation as educators, our language can reflect these shifts, and we may begin to question the assumptions that regulate our daily actions. For example, we may rethink the monolingual bias that has us expecting Standard American English to be the typical medium of authoritative academic language. We may become more open to appreciating information presented in other languages or English dialects, including Black and Indigenous languages, or through the lenses of Latine/x experience, as legitimate and intellectual knowledge sources (cf. Johnson et al.; Lanehart; Wiley and Lukes). We may also intentionally seek opportunities to learn from student voices and implement interventions aimed at scaffolding the success of wider cadres of students.

Student Voices: Unlearning Our Socialized Assumptions about Who Is Ready to Learn

Student #1: “The rent price, in addition to food and other necessary bills, has caused difficulties in my planning to attend college. Due to this, I severely lack the capacity to attend college at this time and don’t desire to take a loan when I don’t need to.” 

In revisiting module 1 of Equity and Culturally Responsive Teaching, I sought a means of centering student voices in the description and impact of opportunity gaps—those more familiar to educators as well as the emerging vulnerabilities laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, I turned to data-driven insights from pandemic-era surveys and reports on community college student experiences, needs, transfer, and enrollment. For example, a 2021 report of statewide student survey results, compiled by Katie Brohawn and her colleagues at the RP Group, revealed that thirty-three percent of our previously enrolled California community college students have not reenrolled because they need to prioritize work. Further, thirty-three percent of our students cannot afford to attend, while twenty-two percent of our students have needed to prioritize taking care of family or other dependents.

The same 2021 report also included prose anecdotes gathered from respondents. After reviewing some of these anecdotes, I chose to include a representative sample so as to enable student voices to narrate the myriad challenges our students face both from within and beyond the classroom. The anonymized respondents further explained:

Student #2: "A little wiggle room with many professors’ unrealistic expectations for students who have to juggle life to get an education. Examples—small-window time frame for tests 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. or peer discussions due by 6 p.m. on an assignment handed in at 10 a.m. that morning (due times do not always line up with work and parental duties). If a student falls ill, too bad; assignments or tests have hard deadlines. Death in the family, easier to drop classes than risk failing a course due to needing a day or two to grieve."

Student #3: "Caregiving plus poor mental health made it difficult to focus; I was exhausted a lot of the time."

Put together with insights from a 2022 special report by Michael Burke and Daniel Willis of EdSource and Debbie Truong of the Los Angeles Times, these student-centric data illustrate that a system-wide and campus-oriented educational shift is needed in order to counteract declining enrollment and expand the range of students experiencing success across both rural and urban campuses. My choice to include these data within the revised course module was meaningful, because the course had not previously embraced the student story in this form. Apart from the voices of education experts, experienced faculty members, and others, including this segment in the professional development training meant that students could tell participants in their own words what they most needed: increased affordability, compassion, flexibility, and opportunities to recover their mental health. These student testimonials should encourage us to reevaluate the socialized assumptions that may come to mind when we observe students being absent, dropping courses, or experiencing challenges with accessing course materials or meeting academic expectations.

Conclusion: Language Is the Tool You’ve Been Waiting For

Subsequent to completing the professional development course revision of Equity and Culturally Responsive Teaching, my coauthor and I advocated for an opportunity to co-facilitate and pilot the updated version of the four-week asynchronous course. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and enrollment remains robust to this day. We take these results as a sign that participants find the course to be in timely alignment with their needs.

Another change that my coauthor and I chose to make to module 1 of the course was to add a brainstorming activity prior to detailing definitions of equity, equity gap, opportunity gap, and achievement gap, or any student-centric data. We wanted to present participants with an enhanced opportunity for active engagement and collaboration before diving into their personal student stories. With this in mind, we crafted a brainstorming activity using the Padlet platform, through which we invite participants to respond to a question in their own words: “What does equity mean to you?” The range of responses we receive to this question before offering our own working definitions in the course is illustrative of the varied priorities that educators contribute to their encounters with the student story.

In the final module of the online course, module 4, we ask participants to return to their definitions of equity and explore what they might adjust. Here are some anonymized results of this exercise:

• “Equity means that instructors are open to working with students and providing accommodations to ensure student success.”
• “Equity means taking the time to learn from our students to understand how we can best learn from them.”
• “I hope equity looks like prioritizing the human, the individual, over content.”
• “With equity comes access. For example, students should be allowed to take the courses they need. This may mean offering courses at different times throughout the day, and in different modalities. Many college students are also parents, caregivers, and full-time employees, and these responsibilities should not be an impediment to their college careers.”
• “To me, achieving true equity is not just about providing physical resources but also about balancing inequities in areas such as social capital. This means providing opportunities and connections that some students might lack due to their background and circumstances, helping to level the playing field in terms of knowledge, networks, and future opportunities.”

Ultimately, what I take with me from the experience of revising a large-scale, facilitated, online course is a sense of optimism about the value of this professional development endeavor as a whole—even as the challenges we face with our students are complex and multifaceted. On behalf of all the students like Jasmine, Diego, and Aurora, and others, I fully hope that the discursive and liberatory shifts I instigated through the prose, images, and student-centric data in this revised course will continue to pay it forward with future community college instructors. If you have been waiting for an opportunity to explore the difference that language can make on your local community college campus, district, or broader system of campuses, I encourage you to explore how you might incorporate these elements into your own local practice and leadership. Today is the day!

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to ACLS for this opportunity to reflect on lessons learned from recent equity-minded efforts. I am also greatly appreciative of the helpful feedback I received from project editors and the motivating and eye-opening discussions I was lucky enough to have with other Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellows during our fall 2023 convening. Finally, my deepest thank-yous are reserved for my community college students and my @ONE co-facilitator “buddy” and friend, Kristin Smith.

Works Cited

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1. All student names mentioned in this essay are pseudonyms so as to protect students’ personal identities. ↑

2. In 2023–24, I collaborated with another faculty member, Kristin Smith (City College of San Francisco), to coauthor an extensive update to the CVC@ONE professional development course Equity and Culturally Responsive Teaching. More information about CVC@ONE (California Virtual Campus Online Network of Educators) can be found at onlinenetworkofeducators.org. ↑

3. I would like to extend my gratitude to the California Community Colleges educators who originally co-developed the course in Equity and Culturally Responsive Teaching several years ago. Thank you, also, to all of those who have and continue to thoughtfully facilitate this course.↑