Imaginary Students

Dear Friends,

In a 1986 essay, Carol Guardo noted that “the majority of our existing curricula are designed for imaginary students.” Arguing that an essential part of effective teaching is taking into account who the students are, Guardo acknowledges both the necessity of having an imaginary student in mind when designing courses and the likelihood that those imaginary students bear little resemblance to the actual students who walk into the classroom on the first day of the semester. “Simply put, when most faculty put together course syllabi, majors, or general curricula, they are designing all of these educational experiences for a particular kind of student. My thesis is that this student rarely conforms to the reality that professors encounter in their classrooms, laboratories, and studios on a daily basis.”

Who is the imaginary student that you design your courses for?

I’d argue that, for too many of us, our imaginary students tend to be a lot like the students who have long populated our elite institutions: white, male, financially comfortable, able-bodied, and well-educated by the K-12 system. This student can devote himself full-time to his studies, because he doesn’t have to keep a job to help pay his tuition. He has plenty of time and space to do the work you assign, because he lives alone or with another college student and doesn’t have to look after a sibling or an ailing parent. It is fair to expect that he will almost always come to class and be ready to participate, because he doesn’t suffer from a disabling ailment, either mental or physical. The imaginary student is comfortable within the classroom, having had nothing but positive experiences in classrooms for much of his life. His level of preparation corresponds roughly with that of most his professors when they entered college: a good high school has given him the knowledge and skills necessary to hit the ground running in college. Outside the classroom, the imaginary student feels that he belongs; he’s already met many wonderful, like-minded people with backgrounds just like his. The prospect of competition with other students, for grades or for a place in the workforce, doesn’t daunt him, experienced as he is in the winning of competitions. When he struggles with a class or, perhaps, with fitting in his many extracurricular activities, he can call his parents (who themselves graduated from college) or some other members of his network of friends and family. He can study at the library until late at night, safe in the knowledge that he can walk home after dark without fear of assault. Of course, he doesn’t really need the library for a study space (he’s got plenty of space at home) or to have the required books (he can just buy them). Most of those required books were written by people who look a lot like him, with similar backgrounds, and make use of examples pulled from a culture he shares.

You can see, I’m sure, how dangerous these assumptions can be. You’re probably already thinking of many examples of students you’ve had who lack most or even all of the above privileges. But our pedagogy—from our syllabi to our assignments to our lectures—keeps this imaginary student in mind and exacts real penalties from the student who lacks any of these qualities. We make those students work that much harder to overcome barriers that our practices often completely overlook. When students speak up and ask that those barriers be removed (or even be acknowledged), it can feel to us like they’re asking for special treatment.

Imaginary students may be necessary. It is impossible to wait until we meet our students—or to wait even longer until we get to know our students—before coming up with a syllabus for each of our courses. It’s also true, given the size and diversity of most college classrooms, that some generalization is required to design a course; we can’t individually tailor a syllabus to fit every single student’s myriad needs. But it’s worth looking closely at these imaginary students, at our implicit ideas of who a college student is and who they should be. Our curricula and syllabi and lesson plans are necessarily shaped by our assumptions about the kinds of college students we expect to walk into our classrooms. And our assumptions, in turn, are shaped by our experiences in the world around us, with all the implicit biases and enduring ideas that we know haunt everyone who lives within cultures plagued by white supremacy, patriarchy, and other systems of oppression. If we want to shift the balance of who succeeds and who doesn’t, we need to examine those assumptions closely.

We cling to an outdated idea of who an average college student is, even as the evidence around us suggests otherwise. Most college classrooms today are full of strikingly diverse groups of students. Our students are diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, and gender identity and expression. They are diverse in terms of age and life experience, geographical origin and socioeconomic status. They come to college with widely varying degrees of preparation and prior knowledge. Some are able to devote themselves full-time to being a college student; some work upward of thirty hours a week to pay for their tuition, leaving late nights and lunch breaks for studying and homework. Some of our students have been lucky enough to consider themselves able-bodied, able to forget about the health of their bodies for long stretches of time; some struggle with disabilities in a society that continues to make life for such sufferers extra difficult. If our institutions are failing many of these students—and the evidence suggests they are—one reason may be that our teaching is built upon an outmoded idea of a college student, one who faces far fewer barriers to success than our actual students do.

One reason our implicit ideas about students lag behind reality is that our contemporary circumstances—in which diversity is the norm among American college students—are still pretty new. For much of the last century, college was still an opportunity for a small slice of the American public. In 1947 (the first year for which the National Center for Education Statistics has reliable data), even amid the great surge in college enrollments that followed the war, college students made up just under 2 percent of the total American population. Today that population is almost three times as large. As access to higher education in this country has expanded, so too has the diversity of our student body. What was once a primarily white and primarily middle- to upper-class student body is now a much broader subsection of our population. What was once the near-exclusive province of society’s winners is now a system that serves a far greater proportion of those on the losing side of societal inequality.

In 1947, the earliest year we have comprehensive data for fall enrollments at American colleges and universities, the student population was so overwhelmingly white that survey makers didn’t bother to ask about race or ethnicity. In 1950, the total enrollment of Black college students—nearly all of whom were enrolled at Black colleges—hovered around 85,000, or under 4 percent of all college students. Things began to change after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forced predominantly white colleges to integrate, but in 1976, when Congress passed a law requiring the National Center for Educational Statistics to begin tracking race and ethnicity, white students still made up nearly 85 percent of all college students. As late as 1990, eight out of ten college students were white. Today, the proportion of white students hovers around 55 percent, falling year after year, but the image of the classroom as a sea of white faces lingers in the minds of many professors and students alike.

College now serves a much broader socioeconomic subset of the population as well. The history of American higher education is, in large part, the history of those people who could afford to go to college—who could afford to put off entering the workforce. That population only extended to the middle class in a real way in the beginning of the twentieth century. Significant numbers of poorer students are a much newer part of many of our institutions. In 1975, less than a third of low-income high school graduates enrolled in college by the time they turned twenty-four. In 2016, that number had more than doubled, rising to 65 percent. Of course, the great majority of low-income college students are concentrated in community colleges and open- and broad-access institutions. Many of our most elite institutions have more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent. However uneven and insufficient the opening of college admissions to poorer people has been, it is still the case that college classrooms today include more poor students than ever before in the history of American higher education.

It’s not just race and class, either. There are more women, as a proportion of the total population, attending college than at any other time in this nation’s history. There are more college students with disabilities than ever before. There are more out LGBTQ+ students than ever before. But although college students are more diverse now than they’ve ever been, our teaching practices seem mired in the past.

Take, for example, our expectations for how much work students will devote to our courses. At the University of Iowa, as at almost every college in the country, students and faculty are informed that “for each semester hour of class time around two hours per week of outside homework and class preparation should be completed by the average student.” This is no randomly selected figure: federal regulations that define a credit hour specify that students should be expected to work two hours at home for every one hour in the classroom. Most likely this expectation grew out of the introduction, in the first decades of the twentieth century, of the “Carnegie Unit” for standardizing secondary education and the student credit hour for postsecondary institutions. More than a century later, it’s still our baseline assumption of how much students should do outside class, even though the average student looks almost nothing like the average student of a hundred years ago.

Our students, even those classified as full-time students, are less and less likely to be able to devote all their time to their studies. Among full-time college students, more than 40 percent are employed during the school year—at Iowa, that number is 69 percent—and 64 percent of those who work do so for more than the twenty hours. The average full-time student who works does so for about twenty-five hours per week. Twenty-five hours per week working, fifteen hours in class, plus thirty hours of outside-class studying and homework adds up to seventy hours a week, or ten solid hours per day, every day, on either coursework or a job. Is it any wonder that the National Survey of Student Engagement finds that the average student only spends one hour per credit hour studying each week?

Now, I’m not necessarily saying that we need to get rid of the two-hours-per-credit-hour rule of thumb. But we need to acknowledge that there is a mismatch between our expectations and what many students in our classroom can do. And we need to think about which students benefit from a system that assumes that they have a lot of free time to devote to their studies—and which students suffer.

Don’t get me wrong—I also get frustrated by students who don’t do the reading or those who write their essay in the hour before class. But many of our students clearly have obligations that keep them from devoting as much time to our assignments as we would want. We won’t be able to help those students by ignoring the issue nor by obstinately teaching the way we always have, assuming they have time that they clearly don’t have. One of the biggest questions One Classroom at a Time takes up is how to help the students we have, who face countless barriers to their learning that previous generations of students didn’t face, without lowering our standards. We can’t tackle this challenge until we acknowledge the differences between how our pedagogy imagines students and how they actually are. Teaching imaginary students means neglecting real ones.

I got back home this week, after nearly six weeks away visiting family, to find a box with my complimentary copies of the new book. It’s wonderful to actually get to hold in my hand this thing that took so long to make.

I’ll be back in this space soon with another preview of the book (which, I’m duty bound to remind you, comes out on August 12!). You can pre-order it by clicking right here. You can tell your friends and colleagues about it any way you want.