Teaching Struggling Students

“Within this book, Harrison gives us a unique gift. By looking from the inside outward, and placing herself in a student-researcher-faculty member liminal space, she offers an empathic, self-aware, and smart autoethnographic telling of what it is like to struggle inside the college classroom. I highly recommend this work to anyone in a position to support today's college students.”
—Amanda O. Latz, Associate Professor, Ball State University, USA

“As a college classroom teacher for more than two decades, I found Harrison’s exploration of the complex pedagogical space between professor and student immensely illuminating. Her auto-ethnographic journey both elucidates important barriers to student learning (e.g., expert blind spots; the limits of grit) and provides practical strategies for more empathically teaching struggling students. Reminiscent of Parker Palmer, Harrison also challenges us to reflexively engage our students and to eschew the siren call of instructional training and efficiency-limited technology to employ a deeply human, self-reflective and relational form of pedagogy.”
—Tracy Davis, Professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs, Western Illinois University, USA

This book tackles the phenomenon of limited learning on campuses by approaching it from the point of view of the author, an educator who writes about the experience of being, simultaneously, a college student and a college professor. The author lays out her experience as a student struggling in an introductory linguistics class, framing her struggles as sites ripe for autoethnographic interrogation. Throughout the book, the author melds her personal narratives with the extant research on college student learning, college readiness, and the interconnectedness of affect, intellect, and socio-cultural contexts. This book poses a challenge to the current binary metanarrative that circles the college student learning conundrum, which highlights either thefaculty or student perspective, and unfolds this unnecessary binary into a rich, nuanced, and polyvocal set of perspectives.