I have been communicating with some first-rate
teachers, most of whom are—as I was—a non-traditional graduate student.
Generally, that means we were first-generation and didn’t transition smoothly
from undergraduate to graduate school. So we were late-arrivals. I won’t go into
all the complications involved in being a late-arrival (linked to James Paul
Gee’s notion of being true first-learners), but they often involve marriage,
careers, locations, geographical dependency, children.
[An aside: I recently had a
conversation with a close friend, born to wealth, who had no idea of what a
first-generation student meant.]
I have been wondering how
being a first-generation PhD (much less baccalaureate) shapes the new
professor’s attitude toward academic discourse and the resistance or
capitulation to it. This is just a question. I would assume first-generation PhDs might resist, for obvious reasons, more than old family
PhDs, the genuflect to academic discourse (Gary Tate was a revealing exception).
I realize that by saying
“genuflect,” I betrayed myself. Still, my suspicion might be worth considering.
I have a deep-seated resistance to “academic discourse,” a discourse than
announces itself as being other—exalted.
I remarked in a political
diatribe elsewhere how people are basically monkeys. We hear chatter that seems
to work, and we ventriloquate the chatter so that others will mark us.
We of course love to imagine that our chatter is new, but it’s mostly chatter.
I wonder whether the more
privileged classes intuitively know the secret of chatter and whether first-generation
professors don’t.
Irv:
ReplyDeleteYou ask a great question, I think. As a first-generation student who is finishing a PhD and who has taught at a community college for eight years, I think there is a secret discourse or language of the academy that I and my students are often trying to figure out. I didn't understand this as an undergraduate--it was a felt thing. I felt it even more keenly during my MA program. For me, it was teaching at an urban community college that brought it all together for me. I'd love to hear more of your thinking on this.