First-gen in the classroom: Teaching by and for first-generation scholars in higher education

Abstract

First-generation scholars are individuals who are the first in their family to attend a four-year college or university. In response to affirmative action bans, admissions committees have begun to use first-generation status as a way to promote a diverse student body, leading to an increase in the number of first generation students. Within the sociology of education, first-generation scholars are typically discussed from a deficit-based perspective that emphasizes their lack of preparation, lower degree completion rates, and enmeshment in reductive discourses such as impostor syndrome. Although we see value in naming and challenging the systemic barriers that encumber first-generation scholars, we propose that the field of linguistics and its allied disciplines are especially well suited to pursue an asset-based perspective of the first-generation experience. First-generation students are disproportionately bilingual, heritage speakers, and/or immigrants, and even monolingual first-generation students without a recent immigration background often have exposure to stigmatized dialects and sociolects. First-generation experiences of transitioning and translating between different language ecologies in home, school, work, and/or activist spaces foster resilience, resourcefulness, and metalinguistic awareness that can be leveraged in the linguistics classroom. We provide a collection of best practices in teaching and course design geared towards undergraduate-level linguistics courses rooted in a philosophy of universal design that demystifies the hidden curriculum and gives greater pride of place to the study of language in sociocultural context. Not only do these interventions increase first-generation belonging and success, but they improve the quality of learning for all students, including continuing-generation students.