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Articles Conference Reviews |
B.29 Generation VetB.29 Generation Vet: Composing with a New Student Population Bob Hazard opened his presentation, “From Combat Zone to Contact Zone: Opening Spaces for Vets in Writing Classes,” by citing some of the statistics that he included in his proposal, including the facts that there “are over 1,500,000 men and women that have served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars” and that “one in five vets has some level of PTSD and/or MTBI, both of which can severely impact a student’s ability to learn.” Having established the “big picture,” Hazard proceeded to profile some of the veteran students he has observed in his composition and literature classes at a two-year college who are making the move from military culture into academic culture. “Ted” was an older student who had been deployed to Iraq and spent most of his time working on vehicles. Having successfully completed a literature survey course taught by Hazard, Ted enrolled in one of Hazard’s first-year composition sections the following semester. Although Hazard saw Ted smiling a lot and heard him say “the right things” in class, Ted found the composition class to be more difficult than the literature class. Ted began making excuses for not having his work done and then started to miss class. Eventually, he just stopped showing up altogether. According to Hazard, Ted “just disappeared,” one of a number of veteran students in Hazard’s experience who has used up his or her G.I. Bill benefits without completing his or her degree. “Stan” was a “tightly wound” Marine Corps sniper who had been deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. Having made several previous attempts to pass first-year composition, Stan enrolled in one of Hazard’s sections. Finding Hazard to be trustworthy and non-judgmental, Stan began to talk to Hazard about his struggles with PTSD and his frustrations listening to some of his 18-year-old classmates gripe about college being hard because there were too many assignments and too many difficult teachers. Despite his early struggles making the transition to college, Stan succeeded in passing composition and moved on to a four-year college. “Sarah” worked as a medic on an evacuation helicopter that flew wounded soldiers to Germany and then went on to co-found a veterans’ group on Hazard’s campus and to serve as the vice-president of the student leadership council. She is now pursuing graduate work. Hazard met “Kyle” in his office on three occasions. Having heard that Hazard was a faculty advisor to the veterans’ club on campus, Kyle came by the first time (smelling of stale whiskey and making no eye contact) just to inquire how he might connect with some other vets. The second time Kyle came by Hazard’s office, he and Hazard had a long conversation about Kyle’s wife leaving him due to his excessive drinking. The third time Kyle appeared, he had been to the Veterans’ Affairs (VA) rehab and was clean and sober. He came to Hazard to seek advice about how to talk to his other professors in order to urge them to give him incompletes, rather than withdrawals, as the provisions of the G.I. Bill would require him to pay for grades of “W.” Hazard has not seen Kyle since. Hazard explained that these four students represent some of the variations across the gamut of veteran students that may be in college writing classes—a cross-section of possibilities to succeed, fail, or cope. He then went on to remind the members of the audience that they may or may not realize that veterans are enrolled in their classes—a veteran might be the disheveled student at the back of the classroom near the door who makes little eye contact or the bright-eyed and diligent student who has done all the required reading and wants to engage in every class discussion. Regardless, veteran students are increasingly likely to be in our classroom, and most will encounter some difficulty adjusting to academic culture. In Hazard’s experience, many veterans have the discipline and intelligence to become successful students, but many others don’t, and Hazard has found the persistence rate of veterans over the course of two semesters to be poor. He speculated that one of the reasons many veterans have such a difficult transition is that the social cohesion in any military unit—the breaking down of the person and the building of the soldier—begins in boot camp. The military spends a great deal of time training young people to engage in combat, but fails then to un-train them. Having spent a number of years in a culture in which every aspect of their daily routine is planned for them in advance, veterans who become college students (some in as few as a couple of weeks after being discharged) suddenly find themselves confronted with a huge culture shock. A veteran might, for instance, go from picking up and sorting through body parts after a bombing to clashing with classmates whose most memorable experiences involve partying on prom night. Hazard admitted that he had not come with an easy, single solution to the difficulties veterans have transitioning to college students. He did ask the audience to think about Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” to consider that veteran students aren’t just learning academic culture through performing the conventions of academic writing. Veteran students are also learning to be students, how to challenge others’ ideas, and how to give peer feedback. He then suggested that writing instructors talk with their colleagues about these issues and work with campus veterans groups and veteran student offices. The next presenter, Lisa Langstraat began her paper, “Vets-Only: Transitional Literacies and Veteran-Designated Composition Courses,” with a personal story about her father, an Iowa farmboy who lied to the recruiter and joined the Army in 1959 at age 17. Later, at her mother’s urging, Langstraat’s father enrolled in an extension course at the base as he worked to earn his GED. Langstraat recalled hearing her father’s stories about his writing teacher, Mrs. Smith, who gave as a first assignment a theme paper with the prompt, “respond to the quote, ‘Man cannot live on bread alone.’” While Mrs. Smith was likely seeking an existential answer, in his response, Langstraat’s father instead affirmed that man, indeed, cannot live on bread alone, because he also needs meat, milk, apples, eggs, and something sweet—like peach pie! This story served to illustrate Langsraat’s point that, like many of Hazard’s veteran students, her father had to “invent the university” and accustom himself to the expectations of academics and academic discourse. Her father’s experiences have thus influenced Langstraat’s own work with veterans in college writing courses. After listing some of the initiatives undertaken by her university to earn a “veteran-friendly” designation (such as forming an honor society for veteran students, hiring counselors and advisors with prior military experience, and offering orientation programs for faculty and students), Langstraat made the point that the focus has mostly been on student services. While Langstraat agreed that veterans are likely to need assistance navigating the worlds of academic advising, disability services, and financial aid, a study by NASPA found that veterans also face challenges negotiating family relationships, dealing with financial pressures, battling isolation, finding a sense of community, negotiating political perspectives in what they may perceive to be a liberal college culture, and finding a mentor. In addition, Langstraat has found that many veterans will need to relearn study skills and will be challenged with learning new forms of critical thinking—the kind of thinking, says Langstraat, that was likely to get them killed on the battlefield. For example, when Langstraat asked her veteran students to consider their audience, they responded that they would prefer to have her tell them to whom they should write. Having had a number of such experiences, Langstraat worked with academic services to create a first-year composition course just for veterans—a course for post-9/11 vets who, as Langstraat came to realize, have different needs than veterans of her father’s generation. Langstraat concluded her presentation with a discussion of the veterans’ only class—a course she admitted she is “still making sense of.” One unique aspect of the course was Langstraat’s TA; her TA was a Marine vet who served not in an evaluative role, but he was also available to speak to the students about issues such as the VA, financial aid, which professors would make good advisors, etc. Having made all the necessary preparations for the course, Langstraat was initially discouraged by the fact just before the start of the semester only 4 students had enrolled for the vet-designated course. However, by the time the class began, it was fully enrolled—24 students, all men. According to Langstraat, these students did not voluntarily choose to enroll in the vet-designated course—instead, they were likely enrolled in the course by the registrar, since all the other composition sections were full. Despite the fact that all the students were veterans, there was wide diversity among them: 18 had been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, 7 to both. Their jobs in the service ranged from machinists to medics. Many were first generation college students. Thirteen had returned within 4 months of starting their college classes. In teaching the class, Langstraat made an effort both to meet the veteran students’ needs and the goals of first-year composition. In attempting to do so, Langstraat offered her students the option of writing materials for a veterans’ handbook—a vet-to-vet survival guide, as it were. To her surprise, however, only 4 of the students chose that option. Langstraat postulated that most of the veterans in her class were more interested in assimilation than segregation, which is likely why few of them voluntarily enrolled in the course. To conclude her presentation, Langstraat offered some thoughts on the benefits of a vet-designated composition class: primarily the sense of community that is established when a group of veterans, who think and speak differently than traditional college students, are able to engage with each other in discussions about the course materials and to offer each other feedback on their writing. The final speaker on this panel was Sandra Jang, from the United States Military Academy Preparatory School (USMAPS). Jang began her presentation, “Songs of Experience: The Prior-Service Soldier at USMAPS,” with some background about USMAPS, the preparatory school for West Point. Of the approximately 250 students admitted to USMAPS each year, 15-20% are prior-service soldiers, who are referred to as “cadet candidates” (CC). The remaining students who are recent graduates from high school are designated as “invitational reservists” (IR). Teaching English classes at USMAPS, Jang has found that the prior-service soldiers exhibit maturity, competence, and leadership and thus represent “experience” in the courses when compared to the “innocence” of the invitational reservists. In particular, Jang finds the prior-service soldiers to be more outspoken in class discussions and more forthright in their writing. Like Hazard and Langstraat, Jang noted sharp distinctions between the life experiences of the more traditional IR students and the CC students, distinctions that often appeared in the topics about which they chose to write. According to Jang, the topics most frequently written about by IRs include: first kiss, winning or losing a big game, parents/grandparents, and family vacations. By contrast, the topics most frequently written about by CCs include: basic training, deployment, death of a comrade, military duties, and a military mentor. While Jang has found some of the CCs to be somewhat apathetic about what they regard as the IRs “trivial problems,” she has also found that the CCs recognize and value the ways in which they are influencing their IR peers by sharing their “real Army” experiences. Likewise, the CCs respect the fact that the IRs are more attuned to the academic culture than they are, and thus they seek guidance in that area from their younger peers. Jang concluded with the remark that “experience give prior-service soldiers the opportunity to enlighten, teach, and shine at USMAPS” and to engage in reciprocal learning with their IR peers. |