9 Recommended Resources for Educators
Throughout our work with audio storytelling and documentary, we’ve found a number of important resources -articles, scholars and places – that helped us make sense of what we were doing, what we were observing, and what this work might mean for our colleagues in higher education …
Robert Coles’s book, The Call of Stories provided a model for empathy and interest in the lives of those around us. Of course, David Isay’s book Listening is an Act of Love and StoryCorps.org gave us a clear model for audio recording and engagement with the lives of others.
No one academic article has been more important to our work than “Closing the Social Class Achievement Gap: A Difference-Education Intervention Improves First-Generation Academic Performance and All Students’ College Transition” by Stephens, Hamedani, and Destin. The article examines how first-generation students benefit when messages about college are infused with realistic discussions of the way social class backgrounds impact the college experience. The research uses a sophisticated methodology and, we believe, makes a strong case for mentoring interventions like the Finding Your Place Podcast as we work to provide this “difference-education” through the stories of our student producers.
Cultural disconnects are certainly at play in college. One of the strongest voices for critical theory in higher education, Gloria Ladson-Billings conceptualizes culturally-responsive teaching as a deep exploration into the lives of students, seeking out the moments of disconnection between them and their learning.
There are important, intersectional social class issues as well. Jennifer Silva’s book, Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty challenged us to see how an intense focus on self-esteem and personal development might push students towards a confessional “therapy narrative” and away from skill-building activities that might help them compete for 21st century jobs.
Facing Social Class: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction promoted important thinking about class-based differences. Editors Susan Fiske and Hazel Rose Marcus have chosen an array of academic articles to challenge standard practices in higher education. We referred frequently to “It’s Your Choice: How the Middle-Class Model of Independence Disadvantages Working-Class Americans.” In one of that chapter’s cited studies, exposure to the mere defining framework of college as a place to pursue individual goals was enough to impair working-class students’ ability to process instructions and complete cognitive activities. As you can hear in many of our episodes, college is often seen as a place to better the lives of their families and those around them, not merely as a means to set themselves apart.
And there’s a growing body of evidence to support the idea that seemingly unlimited choices in their education are not serving our students well. One of the central arguments in Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, by Thomas Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars and Davis Jenkins, is that students in the greatest need of support and guidance in the process of building schedules and choosing educational pathways are the least likely to seek them out. As a result, the community college “cafeteria” of choices leaves students with either too much, too little or the wrong stuff on their plates.
Wing Young Huie’s The University Avenue Project continues to inspire us to approach this work with curiosity, wonder and skill.
We have completed several courses at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, NC. They offer a wide range of classes for building documentary skills,, including one-week intensive courses in the summers, which are ideal for educators.
For online resources, Transom.org offers a wide variety of helpful guides, equipment reviews and blog posts to help get you started.
There are more, of course. Please see the cited references page in this guide for additional resources.
