When Bootstraps Break: Re-examining Assumptions about the Symbolic Capital of Immigrant Students� Personal Persistence Narratives

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

a certain academic-or, after Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic-capital, presumptively fitted to instructors' and tutors' independent sense of these students.These attachments are found to impress student identities, and, following Helen Oughton's investment theory, "'impose [certain] cultural arbitraries in deciding what 'counts' as funds of knowledge" (Oughton), or, as Suh et al. add, "how to value students' experiences."Ultimately, one student of the study, Labiba, becomes discouraged about her prospects for college success, wanting to drop out; she feels her narrative now dissociated from earlier affirmations of enduring hardships as a refugee.Another student, Olan, attributes his competence in English to innate talent and diligence, having "studied British language in school. . .I read and work and just practice."Apparently, for a Yazidi who served as a US Army interpreter in Iraq, a narrative of natural language talent is too facile.His instructors and tutors are disposed to prompt the telling and retelling of his persistence through war and relocation instead.In both cases, theories of investment around student language competence help to highlight not only the experiences students bring to their learning, but also how those experiences qua narrative can be used up, skewed, or ignored.Finally, our fourth article, "Encouraging Student Voices: Toward a Voice-Based and Antiracist Culture from the MA Program to Basic Writing," by Elizabeth Baez and Rosanne Carlo, takes voice as both metaphor and statement for wide-ranging change within a large urban English department, at College of Staten Island CUNY, that includes Basic Writing.Baez and Carlo set out the problem of voice in writing programs for undergraduates, where students may receive limited latitude for expression through codeswitching, and in graduate programs as potential sites for redrawing the lines of professional culture and community.They link shortfalls of justice in writing programs to an inability and unwillingness to embrace the range of students' voices, an experience that Baez recounts first-hand as a former undergraduate and graduate student.Baez's thesis project for her MA in English at CSI, guided by Carlo as program director, forms the base of the article and highlights Baez and Carlo's many collaborations.Their renewed vision for their department encompasses a great deal: social justice-oriented professional development led or supported by MA students for all faculty; MA students mentored in composition who serve as instructors of basic writers;and reading and working groups now hosted on a regular basis.Change, says Baez and Carlo, is happening: "Readers might wish for some sort of proclamation, or wide-sweeping evidence, that the CSI Writing Program has changed, that we now have persuaded faculty to value students' voices, their rights to