WHAT WE’VE LEARNED ABOUT POVERTY AND LEARNING
Recently while surfing cable channels in my hotel room, I came upon a scene portraying a police officer pushing in the flimsy door of a downscale apartment, the kind I lived in during my teenage years on North Gary Avenue in Pomona, California. Inside, a mother sat crying on a couch with her two wide-eyed children. Her husband, after an all-day drinking binge, had broken some glass and cut himself badly, proceeding to beat his wife and flee the scene. The officer notified the family that they had the man in custody down the street. The novelty of watching cable, an amenity I don't have at home, now worn off, I turned off the TV.
This chilling scene has stuck with me because of its similarity to experiences I’ve heard my students describe. With luck, the two small children on the couch will get over the trauma of their youth and have successful educational experiences and rewarding lives. However, after repeated experiences like this one, how well will they be prepared for college level study in its entirety? Will they be able to concentrate and focus amid academic pressures; to see education as relevant to their lives?
Many of my students have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and many still experience violence on a regular basis in their neighborhoods and homes. The morning of our first pilot course of the Academy for College Excellence (ACE)[1] eighteen years ago, one of my students was cut by a knife in a small gang tussle in the parking lot of the college campus in Watsonville. Cabrillo’s Watsonville campus is in a Norteño neighborhood, which means students from Sureño neighborhoods must cross this invisible territorial line in order to attend their college courses.[2] Attending college is more than academics for some students. It can be about risking their own lives.
While ACE was originally piloted with Latino students from rural, often agrarian backgrounds, we have found the program to work for all students, especially those who have exhibited post-traumatic stress symptoms. From students in inner-city Oakland to students in Broward County, Florida, the ACE curriculum and pedagogy is broadly applicable. I believe this is because the trauma from living in neighborhoods impacted by poverty is universal for those who have experienced it.
There are multiple symptoms of trauma stemming from poverty that I have witnessed over the eighteen years I have spent in my college’s classrooms. In the first weeks of class, the emotional wounds from previous educational experiences are reopened and the students revert to old patterns, reactions, and feelings of inadequacy. These include bio-reactions (fight, flight, freeze, or appease, all of which are stress-related reactions) due to a misinterpretation of college culture, apathy because of the irrelevance of academics in the face of daily realities at home, tardiness, fear of participating in discussions, and an inaccurate sense of self-efficacy. It is no wonder that attrition is so high for academically underprepared students from difficult backgrounds.
Our students’ lives outside of school have a real impact on their success in college. Everyday traumas create conditions in their minds and bodies that sometimes do not allow them to perform at optimal levels. These students’ habitual behaviors, while necessary for survival in difficult situations, sometimes hinder their development as successful students in higher education. Watching your back will prevent you from getting killed on the street, but doing so in school will sometimes keep you from processing important information that you need to do well in your classes.
For educators, determining how to best support our students can be a daunting task. Some of us might feel that while addressing trauma is necessary and important, it would take years of counseling and months of non-credit courses to create the right learning conditions for these students. Not to mention finding and allocating funding for likely expensive programs to address this facet of our students’ needs.
I know there is an alternative and affordable way to address these issues, but it requires a shift in our thinking. We need to change our current conception of teaching and learning in the classroom and reevaluate our integrated support services.
Over the last eighteen years, I’ve worked with many wonderful people to develop ACE. We’ve found or created activities that leverage current neurological research, built a comprehensive behavior system that provides students feedback on their progress in developing professional behaviors critical for academic and career success, and developed a social system for creating a strong cohort bond where students provide and receive 24/7 peer-to-peer support (a service that costs the college nothing).
If there’s one thing I’ve witnessed my students do time and time again it is survive. This strength and ability is the key to their liberation. It is amazing that students who have faced harsh and chaotic life experiences have the ability to succeed, thrive, and persist in college. Our students can step up to the plate. I’ve seen it happen countless times. We can put these students on the path to academic success with the proper pedagogy, teacher/staff training, and support. If we build it, they will thrive.
Our work is to help them translate their strengths in persistence and survival to their academic and career goals. Once they have successfully made this transition nothing will stop them from success. We have the longitudinal research evidence to show this.
[1] ACE was formerly knowns as the Digital Bridge Academy.
[2] The ‘Norteños’ and ‘Sureños’ are Mexican gangs founded by families in Salinas and Watsonville areas.