Rashne Jehangir, assistant professor in Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, has had her book Higher Education and First-Generation Students: Cultivating Community, Voice, and Place for the New Majority published by Palgrave Macmillan Press. The book offers a rich understanding of the experience of students who are first in their family to attend college. It contends that first-generation students are isolated and marginalized on many large college campuses and considers learning communities and critical multicultural pedagogies as vehicles to cultivate community, voice, and place for this new majority of students.
The book is a theoretically informed study of the lived experience of first generation students and draws on their voices to demonstrate how their insights interface with what educators think they know about them. What can they learn from these students? How might students’ insights inform and shape the learning spaces educators create for them?