Insiders, Outliers

Centering Adult Student Writers at an HBCU

By Collie Fulford

SERIES: The American Campus

Rutgers University Press

Insiders, Outliers invites readers into the lives of adult HBCU students for whom college is one meaningful activity among many. Although adults over the age of twenty-four comprise a quarter of all undergraduates, they are institutionally segregated and only partially served by a US higher education system that remains organized around traditional-aged learners. Even as such students are regarded as a market for postsecondary institutions, they are routinely marginalized by institutional barriers. Students’ stories of their personal, professional, community, and academic writing experiences illuminate a critical need for more age-inclusive practices across academia. Their cases also offer new conceptual models of writing as an ethical and emotional practice that fuels changes for individuals and the people and institutions that they care about—including higher education. What adult students reveal about writing across their life domains has powerful implications for conceptualizing writing as a complex form of agency and for teaching writing across the curriculum.

Reviews

I don't know of any other project that explores the writing and rhetorical lives of adult nontraditional students in such depth. Nontraditional students are an asset to the classroom, and universities need to think about how they can retain and support this population. The fact that this research takes place at an HBCU makes this book a must-read for educators who are committed to equity. Mark Blaauw-Hara, author of From Military to Academy: The Writing and Learning Transitions of Student-Veterans

Fulford not only offers a focus on adult students—a group of writers largely missing from studies and narratives about writing in college despite making up a significant percentage of the student population—but she does so with meticulous research and with grace and power. Her case studies of students at an HBCU show readers that understanding students' learning is the essential starting point to best fulfill the promise of making higher education truly inclusive. Neal Lerner, author of The Idea of a Writing Laboratory

Insiders/Outliers is a methodologically rigorous and incisive study of adult student writers. Fulford's research with students offers important insights for writing studies teacher-scholars and higher education leaders. Holly Hassel, coauthor of Reaching All Writers: A Pedagogical Guide for Evolving Writing Classrooms