By Norm Miller, Louisiana College News
PINEVILLE (LCNews) – The societal ills poverty brings are indisputable. From health risks to increased crime rates, and from a sense of helplessness to illiteracy, poverty claims many victims.
A Princeton University study states that children living below the poverty threshold “are 1.3 times as likely as non-poor children to experience learning disabilities and developmental delays.”
Best-selling author Linda Karges-Bone addressed the challenges poverty levies on college students at Louisiana College’s annual faculty workshop in a presentation titled “Three Strikes and You’re In: The Truth about Meeting the Needs of First-Generation College Students Who Live in Poverty.”
Bone’s research reiterated the long-standing poverty rates in Louisiana, with CenLa graphically noted among the most impoverished regions in the state.
Drawing from her best-selling book, “Rich Brain, Poor Brain: Bridging Social and Synaptic Gaps in Schools,” Karges-Bone used the August 14 session to both motivate and inform faculty and staff on brain-friendly strategies to increase retention and success of all students, particularly those from low-income backgrounds.
“Retention, retention, retention,” she said is an issue facing colleges and universities across the nation. Reaching and retaining students from low-income backgrounds presents significant challenges.
“Those students may have the resources to enroll in college,” she said, but lack the social and academic skills to stay.
Many students from poverty backgrounds suffer from “learned helplessness,” which Karges-Bone said is considered “the greatest learning disability of our time, and it’s a function of social change.”
“We see these students with God’s eyes and not with the tarnishes and scars of the world. The world says these students are ‘at-risk.’ We say they are a gift. And we are tasked with unwrapping these ‘gifts’ without tearing the paper or ruining the bow,” she said.
Karges-Bone said these represent a new kind of student because they are from the demographical nexus of being Millennials, first-generation college students, and from generational poverty.
“This is a paradigm shift for which we are under-prepared and under-supported,” she noted.
Kargest-Bone advised faculty to acknowledge this shift and avoid some all-too common responses that say “everyone has to pay their dues” or that students from poverty somehow deserve the impediments that inhibit their learning abilities.
The latter is especially important because this generation of college students places a significant emphasis on destiny and luck, she said. Many such students believe they don’t belong in college, and that it was a fluke they were admitted.
Karges-Bone noted the hormone cortisol, which hampers learning by shutting down the pre-frontal cortex, impairing memory and slowing neuro-genesis. Living in poverty triggers cortisol, and the rigors of college can too.
Additionally, the adolescent brain is not fully formed until around age 25, so faculty play an integral and multi-functional role in the brain’s completion. “We signed on to teach a very specific discipline,” Bone said, “but did not realize we would be called upon to be therapists, tutors, and spiritual advisors.”
Yet, applying the skills and compassion of such professions can help students from generational poverty succeed in college.
Karges-Bone unpacked several strategies to retain students, including thoughtful advising, experiential learning, reasonable expectations, praise, service learning, and teaching students to ask for direction, not help. Taking roll and emphasizing accountability are keys, too.
Teaching the value and habit of “persistence in an atmosphere of creativity” is an overarching strategy according to Dr. Bone. The goal is to teach an attitude of perseverance and completion to counter the proclivity to fail. But make students aware that success comes at the cost of hard work and not luck.
Underlying it all is a “distinct biblical mandate guiding this work,” Karges-Bone said, noting Jeremiah 29:11, which states: “For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”
“With cutting-edge content and the thoughtful strategies to educate some of the most culturally unique students ever, my friend of almost three decades, Linda Bone, has earned the right to be heard. And for us, her third visit to LC was as rich as the first two,” said LC President Rick Brewer.
“Linda reminded us that we will always have the poor among us, just as the Bible says,” Brewer added. “And she helped us see students from generational poverty as capable and deserving as any other student while simultaneously sharing the strategies to reach them and the personal investment we must make in them.”
Regarding all students, Brewer said LC has “a moral and ethical obligation to educate each of them to the fullest of our abilities if we are also willing to enroll them.”
“I think our faculty would agree with me that while we marvel and consider the 90-minute presentation Bone offered, we also anticipate with deep interest her next visit to LC.”
