Higher Education and First-Generation Students: Cultivating Community, Voice, and Place for the New Majority

Higher Education and First-Generation Students offers readers a rich understanding of the experience of students who are first in their family to attend college. This book 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. This book is a theoretically informed study of the lived experience of FG students and draws on their voices to demonstrate how their insights interface with what we, as educators, think we know about them. What can we learn from these students? How might their insights inform and shape the learning spaces we create for them?

Rashne Rustom Jehangir is Assistant Professor in the Department of Post Secondary Teaching and Learning (PsTL) in the College of Education & Human Development at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She earned her Ph.D. in Higher Education from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Previously, Jehangir worked as an academic adviser in the TRiO program for approximately 10 years. During this time, she advised, taught, and mentored primarily first-generation students and other historically underserved students. Additionally, she served as a learning community coordinator for the college where she developed and implemented curriculum for the learning communities. Her research interests include student development, access, retention, and graduation of low-income, first-generation students and the transformation of teaching and learning to address intellectual, social, emotional, and student development. Specifically, she has focused on the ways in which learning communities along with multicultural curriculum can serve as a pedagogical vehicle to challenge the isolation and marginalization of first-generation, low-income college students in college. She has also worked closely with local TRiO programs to develop social and academic supports for the students they serve. In addition to her research, Jehangir teaches primarily first-year students, including a team-taught inquiry course that focuses on promoting student engagement, multidisciplinary critical thinking, and success in the first-year. Jehangir has been a consultant for community colleges in the state of Minnesota and has been an invited speaker at Council for Opportunity in Education National Conference. Additionally, she has presented at local and national conferences, including ASHE and the First-Year Experience program.