Elitism Encoded within University Settings
Like many students, I started to search for the courses with the clearest, most rigid grading criteria. “Writing” became a euphemism in my experience for “cultural awareness” in a white- upper-middle class sense. There were two versions of this, one that required you understand the self-assured confidence white-collar parents teach their children and the other was the over-coming marginalization narrative, composed in the language of that managerial class . Writing scared me because it then meant a good grade was linked to words and phrases I would never had heard as a child and had not mastered. Writing meant knowing the norms of a culture to which I did not belong. Writing was part of this: https://www.vox.com/2017/9/11/16270316/college-mobility-culture University of Cincinnati psychologist Shane Gibbons, who has researched this topic and counsels first-generation students, said these students are often raised by parents who have working class jobs — and in those wor...
