The Privilege of Stability

Privilege derives its roots from Latin, roughly a "private law" that applies to some but not all people.
Stability ... I like the fourth and fifth definitions quoted here from dictionary.com:

4.Chemistry . resistance or the degree of resistance to chemical change or disintegration.

5.resistance to change, especially sudden change or deterioration: The stability of the economy encourages investment.

Today I write about  resistance to disintegration and resilience. 

I attempt within these essays to weave together idea strands from the multiple facets of my life.  Privilege of Stability has been on my mind lately relative to my work with students with low test scores and the faculty who teach them.

Students with Low Test Scores/Developmental Education

My academic area is Developmental Education, which has also been known as remedial, pre-collegiate, college-prep, and probably other less flattering names (ie "dummy English").  The name of the discipline itself suffers from destabilization as people want new words to describe it once others realize what we're talking about and the word acquires stigma.  I am talking about students who arrive at college with low test scores in reading, writing, and/or math.  There can be many causes for these low test scores: high schools that didn't adequately prepare the students perhaps, but also being away from the subject(s) for any amount of time due to serving in the military or caring for family members or being in a career. We also have students who are English Language Learners, whose facility with English is the main barrier to understanding the directions on the tests and/or the content, many of whom are graduates of US high schools and therefore are not required to take the TOEFL for admission to college (Test of English as a Foreign Language).  We also have students with diagnosed and undiagnosed disabilities including learning disabilities like dyslexia and acalculia as well as physical, mental and cognitive disabilities.

In additional to the destabilizing forces of low preparation, changing careers/activities, struggles with the language of instruction/assessment, and/or diagnosed or undiagnosed disabilities, there may be additional destabilizing forces such as low socio-economic status, health challenges, transportation challenges, childcare challenges, off-campus jobs, family obligations, substance addiction challenges, motivational deficits, and even institutionalized discrimination related to ethnicity-race/class/gender/identity.  Perhaps you can start to see that developmental education is messy: high-need students who tend to have low course success rates, low GPAs, low graduation rates.  They also tend to have dramatic attendance challenges, to "drop off the face of the earth," and sometimes return several semesters later with amazing stories of incarceration, car accidents, family obligations, taking care of things they had to do, which were more important than completing the semester.  They want to succeed, and earnestly hope that they'll get the alfalfa harvest in by next weekend so they can come back and take those exams they missed, for example.

I feel fortunate that I graduated from high school in the same district that I started kindergarten.  I benefited from a coherent math curriculum, for example, that was planned to teach students math facts in third grade that laid a foundation for math concepts to be taught in fourth grade.  For students who experience moving from district to district, or who are out of school for long periods of time due to health problems or whatnot, they may have gaps in key concepts. Many find a good way of coping, but they are set up to struggle with math or other subjects for the rest of their education.

To compound their challenges, developmental students are often taught by the least prepared and least-supported faculty: adjunct, contingent, part-time, untenurable faculty.  90% of developmental courses in Colorado are taught by contingent faculty.  Both students and faculty are marginalized, and administrators are reluctant to dedicate resources and time to solving the big complicated challenges that have less return on investment than the college's other responsibilities.  Messy.

I must also mention the social justice impact of supporting developmental education.  Students in my classes tend to represent ethnic minority groups (70.2% in dev ed courses; the campus-wide rate is closer to 40%), tend to be first generation students whose parents haven't graduated from college (63.4%), and tend to be Pell grant eligible, indicating from low SES family/support (74%) more than non-developmental students.  There were 287 graduates in May of 2011, and 88 (30%) of them took one or more developmental courses at ASC.  If we didn't have developmental coursework as a "gentle pathway" into or back into higher education, we would have dramatically fewer college graduates.

Faculty Professional Development and Stability

The Colorado Association for Developmental Education (CoADE) is in a position to offer scholarships to faculty to attend conferences and/or the Kellogg Institute.  I was developing an application process for these scholarships last week, and recognized my bias toward "stable" faculty: one criteria for scholarship eligibility points is "Are you presenting at the conference you'll be attending?"  I'm grateful that I've worked for the same college for several years in the same discipline.  I've learned the seasons of the call for proposals for the major conferences in dev ed, and have been able to plan ahead to submit proposals several months in advance of the conference.  New faculty, faculty who are "Road Scholars" teaching at multiple schools in a region, faculty trained in other disciplines who are making ends meet by teaching dev ed courses... they sometimes receive little to no faculty orientation or resources, and not surprisingly teach for one semester and are out the next.  There are some colleges that have 100% turnover of developmental faculty from semester to semester.  There are even colleges with MORE than 100% turnover since low paid, low supported faculty sometimes have no problem leaving in the middle of a semester for a better job.  These are extreme examples, and I'm very grateful that we've had a fairly stable group of faculty at Adams State.  However, my point is that it is a blessing, a privilege, to be able to be in one place long enough to get business cards printed, a phone number that doesn't change from year to year, a mailing and email address to receive those calls for proposals for conferences that tie us into our academic communities.  It's a blessing to be in a place long enough to work on bigger projects, to develop one's vision, identity and reputation.

Stability and choices

I used to be in a destabilizing relationship.  Eventually I made the decision to leave that situation, and I've been mindful of choosing relationships that promote stability, recognizing that a lot of relationships create at worst abuse and chaos and at best "opportunities for compromise." One need not look further than the the domestic abuse shelter to see people experiencing extreme destabilization related to families and/or partnerships. Relationships can be destabilizing, but so can ending them.  Divorce is a destabilizing force.  In addition to relationship destabilization, sleep patterns, time management, balance of activities, stress, substance use/abuse and diet/exercise choices can lead to more or less stability in one's life.  This semester I've been talking with my students about "using the present to plan the future" and want to draw their attention to the types of behaviors that can lead to stable jobs, stable relationships, stable health and quality of life.

Stability and choices I don't control

There are also destabilizing forces I cannot control.  Health, for example. A friend posted on facebook about his challenges with not being able to afford health insurance.  A barrage of cruel posts from "friends" indicated they thought he was a failure for not buying health insurance, that he was a parasite on society, that he deserved any calamities he might experience. While I like to think of myself as the "master of my fate," I have to recognize destabilizing forces outside of my control.  Health insurance tied to one's employment is a dumb system.  More than half of medical bankruptcies involve people who WERE insured before they were injured or became sick, who later lost work-related insurance and racked up their astronomical bills.  Even when we make healthy lifestyle and diet choices, environmental toxins or just plain "bad luck" could lead to cancers or accidents caused by other people. 

Stability and sacrifice

If you've enjoyed the privilege of stability throughout your childhood, it probably involved the sacrifice of others.  The traditional nuclear family--mom, dad, and kids--generally required sacrifices from both parents in order to provide stability for the kids.  Generally, moms did more sacrificing behaviors to preserve the stability of marriage as well as to provide the most stable home life and schooling for the kiddos. Their career choices and types of responsibilities women are willing to take on at work are still often second priority after her family and as a consequence have real economic impact on the salaries that married women earn.  Women today face a big challenge regarding stability and sacrifice: having children, even wearing an engagement ring to a job interview, has consequences for her employability.  When a woman marries and/or has children, she's generally setting herself up to sacrifice her own ambitions for the benefit of creating stability for others.  Somebody's got to be willing to miss opportunities at work to instead take care of a sick child, or relocate to a different city for a spouse's promotion.  I'm using women in these examples, but certainly many men are also finding themselves taking care of children as stay-at-home dads or single parents or the spouse of a professional.

Yoga and Bees

Yoga promotes at least two kinds of stability: stability of muscles/balance, and discipline of mind. 

Bees... I'm so grateful to have a relationship with the owners of the organic farm which allows my bees to have a non-destabilizing diet of unpesticided nectar.  Having healthy bees in our environment promotes overall food stability.

In closing, I'm bringing before your eyes examples of privilege. I feel privileged to have a stable job, stable relationships and to some degree stable health care.  I see students and colleagues who are experiencing less stability than I have, and I'm humbled by how I could easily be in similarly destabilizing situations (a car accident, a layoff) and feel I should use my privilege to expand the privilege of stability to all.