Desperate to Achieve : Understanding the Lives, Struggles, and Motivations of Community College Students Assigned to Developmental Classes

Jason VanOra's Desperate to Achieve provides one of the most intimate explorations of the journeys, hardships, and aspirations of "developmental" or "remedial" community college students currently available. Based on an intensive set of interviews concerning students' life histories and academic challenges, Desperate to Achieve is one of the sole texts to defy common representations of these at-risk students and more fully illuminate their commitments to scholarship, unique wisdoms about teaching and learning, and identities that are enhanced by relationships with others. Throughout the book, students speak about what it feels like to be a student in remedial classes and contend with failed exams, difficulties with writing, and a sense of powerlessness in relation to teachers and grades. They also reveal extraordinary life challenges including incarceration, addiction, abuse, and early childhood loss. And yet, despite these myriad adversities, students convey tremendous levels of resiliency, specifically in their capacities to persist with difficult skills-building classes and to reframe failure as one stage in the larger trajectory of a successful college experience. They also illuminate what the author theorizes as "wisdom" in their capacities to creatively reimagine the college classroom as a more relational, cooperative, and inclusive site of both belonging and renewal. Ultimately, the author, a community college professor himself, draws on students' life-challenges, reflections, and insights to propose potentially lasting and long-term interventions for assessing, educating, and meeting the needs of developmental students in community college. Unique to the author's proposal are the notions of capitalizing more explicitly on students' relational commitments in the development of curricula and working collaboratively with developmental students to delineate the sorts of practices (classroom and college-wide) that would foster their success and support their inclusion within the larger college community.