This essay focuses on how young women students in a first-year, first-quarter basic reading and writing course wrote about their connections to the process of identity development as portrayed in the graphic novel "Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return" by Marjane Satrapi. While the circumstances of becoming a student in a required…

This discussion paper focuses on nontraditional female students in a developmental writing class at a small two-year college in Georgia. Through interviews, focus groups, and observation, the study discovered that women are entering college in greater numbers than ever, and the colleges, at times, have difficulty in building support systems and…

Personal narrative embeds the expertise of subordinated groups in stories that seldom translate into public debate. The authors describe a community writing project in which welfare recipients used personal narratives to enter into the public record their tacit and frequently discounted knowledge. The research illustrates the difficulties and…

This is a qualitative study of four women receiving assistance through the Trade Readjustment Act (TRA) and who were enrolled in a developmental writing course. The TRA provides money to displaced workers for the purposes of retraining them to reenter the workforce. The four women in the study were nontraditional students and displaced garment…

Presents the case study of an African-American woman returning to a basic skills program in an inner-city community college, examining in particular a writing conference with the task of transforming telling of an experience into writing about it. (SLD)

In fall 1992, a study was conducted at Evergreen Valley College (EVC) and San Jose City College (SJCC), in California, to measure the persistence rate of fall 1988 developmental English students (ENGL 330 at EVC; ENGL 335 at SJCC) through transfer level English (1A) over 4 academic years. Results of the study included the following: (1) of the 152…

In fall 1992, a study was conducted at Evergreen Valley College (EVC) and San Jose City College (SJCC), in California, to measure the persistence rate over 4 academic years of students with no previous college experience who entered into a fundamentals of reading course (English 321) and an introduction to college reading course (English 322) in…