Breaking away and the role of culture in student departure by Ezekiel Kimball

In February 1989, the American Journal of Education (AJE) published Howard London’s “Breaking Away: A Study of First-Generation College Students and Their Families.” According to AJE’s homepage on JSTOR, London’s piece has gone on to be the most frequently cited AJE article focused on higher education with almost 1100 unique users accessing the piece over the past three years. It has also been cited by government reports (Nunez, Cucarro-Alamin, & Carroll, 1998), policy briefings (Engle, 2007), and key higher education textbooks (Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005). In this essay, we revisit the contributions of “Breaking Away” as well as explore its impact on other scholars who have cited the work in the intervening two decades.

London’s (1989) work is a qualitative case study of several first-generation college students. He interviewed students about their family histories, often going several generations back to discover how grandparents or even great-grandparents’ influences were still being felt. London focused specifically on family role assignment and on how these roles influenced students’ educational mobility and membership in their own families. He argues, based on evidence from the interviews, that many first generation students feel conflicted about their participation in higher education, as they must balance what are often constructed as opposing forces – loyalty to family versus autonomy. He refers to this conflict as “the underside of upward mobility” (p. 145) and suggests that first generation students must “break away” from their families in order to achieve this mobility, a process that is often emotional and tumultuous.

Using Stierlin’s (1974) psychoanalytic framework, London analyzes students’ perceptions of their role in the family and develops typologies of three different types of family roles. The first is binding, where children remain tied to their dependent parents; the second is delegating, where children undertake missions on behalf of their parents; and the third is expelling, where children are rejected and pushed out of the family. As they relate to participation in higher education, each causes children to question their family roles and often reconcile conflicting messages from parents. One example from the article is particularly telling: Laura, felt deeply conflicted due to the contradictory messages her father sent regarding higher education. As she was growing up, her father told his friends that his daughter would attend an elite school and repeatedly urged her to achieve greater success than he had. When the time came for Laura to attend college, he asked her to remain close and attend a local, less competitive, college (thus, demonstrating both delegating and binding relationships). London concludes that these “separation struggles” illuminate not simply micro-level family dynamics but also a larger structural transition from traditional to modern society where identities are less tied to the past and are thus more insecure (Giddens, 1991). London argues that for first generation college students, upward mobility includes loss, not just gains, especially “the loss of a familiar past, including a past-self” (p. 168).

Although London’s study is now over two decades old, it remains important to today’s scholars because it has formed the basis of contemporary theories of transitions to higher education and because the issue of first-generation college attendance remains salient. As efforts to increase the number of first generation, low-income, and minority youth who attend college have increased, researchers have also investigated what makes these students more likely to matriculate and remain in higher education. The prevailing scholarship suggests that in order to succeed in higher education settings, students, especially first-generation students, must adopt their college culture, sometimes at the expense of their home culture (Tinto, 1987) and that the success of this cultural transition is eased by the sort of anticipatory socialization experiences that prepare students for college (Braxton, 2000; Tinto, 2006). Much of this work has interrogated the critical role of culture(s) in the processes of both socialization and departure.

Although London’s study is now over two decades old, it remains important to today’s scholars because it has formed the basis of contemporary theories of transitions to higher education and because the issue of first-generation college attendance remains salient.

The most frequently discussed and debated socialization and departure model was put forth by Tinto (1987). It holds that just as a student’s home community has a culture so too does a college or university. Relying on Van Gennep’s concept of rites of passage and Durkheim’s thinking on suicide, Tinto’s (1987) work suggests that one must depart the home culture—according to Tierney (1992), a form of cultural suicide—in order to engage fully the institutional culture, which Tinto (1987) suggests is a key determinant of persistence. In contrast to this model, Tierney (1992; 2000) and others (e.g. Bean & Eaton, 1985; Kuh & Love, 2000; Gloria, Castellanos, Lopez, & Rosales, 2005) have argued for a conception of socialization and departure that allows for the recognition of the ongoing role that students’ home communities play in the students’ success (Desmond & Turley, 2009; Museus & Quaye, 2009).

This debate regarding the centrality of a demarcated transition between home culture and institutional culture is the crux of Braxton’s (2000) volume on student departure. Interestingly, a piece from this volume (Kuh & Love, 2000) that attempts to fuse the disparate thinking on this issue relies on London’s (1989) work to derive a critical theoretical insight—noting that: “London (1989) found that first-generation students needed to break away from certain family and neighborhood norms to make the transition to college” (p. 204). Kuh & Love (2000) use this finding to support their contention that acclimation to dominant cultures or the presence of a cultural enclave in which a student feels at home are key determinants of persistence. Notably, however, this conceptualization stops short of requiring the sort of cultural suicide that Tierney (1992) identifies as incumbent in Tinto’s (1987) model. In this regard, London’s (1989) work also serves to soften Tinto’s (1993) thinking on this issue in the second edition of Leaving College. Tinto (1993) notes:

As a result, the process leading to the adoption of behaviors and norms appropriate to the life of the college necessarily requires some degree of transformation and perhaps rejection of the norms of past communities. In this regard, London’s (1989) study of first-generation college students reveals a sense of “breaking away” that many students experience in making the transition to college. (pp. 95-96)

Looking at both London’s (1989) work and also the role that it has filled for recent scholars, it becomes clear that the process of “breaking away” is never as clean as Tinto (1987) originally suggested. Instead, students retain long-term and critically-important ties to families and home cultures that are difficult (if not impossible) to break. Instead, as Tierney (1992) argues, a critical part of the transition to higher education involves the acquisition of multiple lenses of cultural fluency. As recent research (Crissman Ishler & Schreiber, 2002; Paul & Brier, 2001) has suggested, family ties remain particularly salient during the initial stages of a college transition and vary in strength over time depending on their importance to the individual student. Thus, the key considerations for those working to support college transition are the same as for those working to produce culturally relevant pedagogy: a commitment to student success, a recognition of multiple cultural lenses, and a connection to larger societal issues at stake (Ladson-Billings, 1995).

References

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