Program Considerations
The students whom writing programs serve are as numerous and varied as the writing programs themselves. For as much as we acknowledge and attempt to account for this diversity, writing programs are nonetheless situated within and participate in institutional systems that can and often do privilege certain students over others.
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Among those at greater risk of marginalization are adult learners, students whose life circumstances and corresponding learning needs are often vastly different from their traditionally-aged peers. Not only are they themselves different; the educational context in which they find themselves is often very different from when they were last in school. This dissonance often leaves adult learners at a disadvantage as they navigate their college careers, which, if left unresolved, could and does result in their withdrawal from higher education altogether - as evidenced by poor retention and persistence rates among this population (see Adult Learner Basics).
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The question for writing program administrators, then, is how to identify and mitigate these challenges within writing programs specifically so that adult learners can better participate in and ultimately succeed at postsecondary institutions.
The Broader Context: Institutional Barriers
to Adult Learner Success
Articles & Resources
While any attempt to resolve institutional barriers to adult learner success is, fundamentally, local and situated within specific institutional contexts, many colleges and universities – and by extension, many writing programs – possess the same or similar barriers. What's more, higher education has a history of perpetuating them. Adult education pioneer Malcolm Knowles, for example, lamented in 1978 that adult learners were a “neglected species” in a “progressively regressive” educational system that neither supported nor coincided with the developmental distinctions of adulthood (Knowles 27, 52). Decades later, Bash delivered a similarly bleak appraisal, asserting that “the initial impulse to include adult learners as a portion of the school’s population is likely to be predicated on bottom line considerations” that often fail to address the “philosophical, pedagogical (andragogical), and foundational aspects of adult learning that comprise best practices” (3). Even adult learners themselves have deemed it necessary to affirm this narrative of marginalization (Colvin), and stories from The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. continue to proliferate attesting the lack of institutional support for adult learners (Churchill; Gulley; "Closing Gaps in Tennessee"). What can be gleaned from these accounts, then, is that “higher education has not historically delivered services specific to the needs of adult students” (Mancuso 167), and that tendency persists to this day.
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The good news, however, is that institutional barriers to adult learner success are usually born out of benign negligence rather than actual malice or disdain, which is already more than can be said of the historical marginalization of postsecondary writing programs. Indeed, if the many accounts of insufficient funding, contingent labor, and the subordination of writing to literature (or any other discipline, for that matter) are any indication, the struggle to overcome institutional marginalization is nothing new for WPAs.
