Understanding and Engaging Under-Resourced College Students

A powerful tool for improving retention and graduation rates-along with the lives of students from poverty. The degree to which your postsecondary school understands and supports students from poverty makes all the difference in meeting your recruitment, retention, and graduation goals. Understanding your students starts with better information about their personal experience of poverty-and about the skills and strengths they bring with them to college. Supporting your students involves creating opportunities to access a variety of resources, remedial education relevant to their lives, and fully engaged relationships inside school and out. Understanding and Engaging Under-Resourced Learners is the first book of its kind to provide postsecondary educators, administrators, and student support services personnel with a comprehensive and focused look at both the needs of under-resourced students and strategies for their success. This book establishes a postsecondary platform for the strategies contained in A Framework for Understanding Poverty, by Ruby K. Payne; Bridges Out of Poverty, by Ruby Payne, Philip DeVol, and Terie Dreussi Smith; and Getting Ahead in a Just-Getting -By World, by Philip DeVol.

Karen A. Becker, Ph.D., has taught developmental courses for more than 20 years and presently serves as coordinator of the Reading and Study Skills Center at Youngstown State University. She taught developmental reading and writing courses, as well as education courses, at a number of Ohio two- and four-year colleges and universities. As a program director and curriculum designer for the Business and Industry Division at Columbus State Community College, she helped start a summer college for elementary and middle school students. Dr. Becker has continued to create similar programs serving under-resourced college students from Ohio and New Mexico, in addition to early college high school students using Getting Ahead. Her research interests include the use of reading and writing as vehicles for learning, which she has been sharing with college faculty and staff through professional development. A certified trainer in A Framework for Understanding Poverty and Bridges Out of Poverty, Dr. Becker is uniquely familiar with the challenges facing under-resourced postsecondary students. Karla M. Krodel, M.B.A., holds an undergraduate nursing degree from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as a master s degree from Kent State University. In her current position as director of the Youngstown State University Metro Credit Education Outreach, she helps create partnerships that bring college programs to under-served populations. YSU trained 300 college and trade school students in the Getting Ahead concepts. Previously Ms. Krodel was a charge nurse on inpatient psychiatric units, a program coordinator in county health department clinics, and director of a regional lead poison program. More recently she joined the YSU staff as a grant writer, workforce development program director, and research associate in the Urban Studies Department. Ms. Krodel is also a certified trainer in the Bridges Out of Poverty program, a key resource in the creation of this book. Bethanie H. Tucker, Ed.D., is a trainer and consultant with a diverse career in education spanning nearly four decades, including teaching positions in elementary classrooms, Title I reading, gifted education, and adjunct faculty at the University of Virginia. Since 1990 she has been a professor of education at Averett University. Author of several books, she is the creator of Tucker Signing Strategies, an approach to teaching letter-sound recognition to struggling readers. This technique has been introduced to teachers in most U.S. states, as well as Australia and China. Dr. Tucker s training and consulting expertise includes reading-related presentations, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, Learning Structures, and Under-Resourced Learners. Formerly a full-need scholarship college student herself, she made it through thanks to caring professors who provided the resources she needed to succeed. Dr. Tucker s experiences, along with the research of Dr. Ruby Payne and other scholars worldwide, constitute the foundation for her contributions to this book.