Sponsoring literacy

TL;DRAbstract

While much has been written about the efficacy of academic support programs for increasing the retention rates of university students deemed academically underprepared, few studies examine how students engage the support classroom with an emphasis on expressions of literacy. This qualitative study responds to recent calls in student development literature for more studies into particular practices of university support programs. Focused on an exemplar support program at a larger, public university in the American Midwest, the study gathered perspectives about the support of academically underprepared students, teasing out the differences in administrators’, instructors’, and students’ voices. Insights from the perspectives revealed that explicit metaphors of support in the programmatic discourse emphasized a skills model for academic development and a utopian model of student safe houses. In the classroom, however, five focal students suggested that literacy learning was far more compl

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