Celebrating & Sharing Your First-generation Story at ATU

As Arkansas Tech University (ATU) prepared to embark on its National First-Generation Celebration Week, these two questions remained at the forefront of my mind. A few years ago, at a previous institution, I was having coffee with an education faculty member colleague who specialized in elementary reading instruction. As we were finding commonalities in our roles, I remember this conversation clearly about how we can empower and engage our first-generation students in experiences that help them tell their stories of being first-generation college students. Thus, as we embarked on what would become National First-Generation Celebration Week at ATU during the unprecedented Fall 2020 semester, I continued to come back to these guiding questions that continued to rattle around in my head from that previous coffee conversation.

National First-Generation Celebration Week at ATU integrated these fundamental concepts in each of our program elements throughout the week’s activities, which included the following:

• A social media toolkit was provided to students, faculty, staff, and offices/units. In addition to ready-to-go images for all social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), the toolkit provided sample messages for campus units to help tell their stories of being and/or supporting first-generation college students.

We can empower and engage our first-generation students in experiences that help them tell their stories of being first-generation college students.

• With the launch of our new First to Shine Learning Community (LC) this fall for first-year, first-generation college students, early in the semester we partnered with the First to Shine LC to provide these students with an opportunity to tell their story through an experiential learning project in their TECH 1001 (first-year experience seminar course). The learning community was given an opportunity, as a cooperative final project for their course, to design and implement an event during First-Generation Celebration Week. The students were mentored in the event design and planning process by their Director of Student Transition, who taught the TECH 1001 course. In September, I attended a session of the course as the students pitched their event idea. The Office of the Dean of Student Engagement budget provided these students with a $1,000 budget to implement their program. The result, which was a socially-distanced outdoor First-Gen Festival, provided these nine students with an amazing opportunity to not only tell their story to their peers but also connect their peers to the campus resources that felt were most important for them to know.

  

• The “Greetings of Gratitude” program provided an opportunity for first-generation students to stop by pop-up tables at various locations to share their first-generation story via postcards. A postcard was designed by an undergraduate student marketing intern in the Department of Residence Life (who is also a first-generation college student herself). These postcards allowed first-generation students to address a postcard to an individual who had positively influenced their educational journey. Students wrote postcards to high school teachers, counselors, coaches, family members, etc., telling their experiences as first-generation students at ATU and thanking them for their support. These postcards were then mailed to the students’ supporters on behalf of the student through the ATU Office of the Dean of Student Engagement.

• At these pop-up tables, students were also able to receive a set of two Starbucks gift cards. These sets of gift cards were provided to students to invite one of their faculty members or a campus staff person to virtually have coffee with them. These “Coffee and Conversations” were designed to provide these students with the opportunity for them to tell their story as a first-generation college student to those individuals who are active supporters of the student in their campus networks.

In an ode to Hamilton, our colleague Dr. LT Rease Miles titled her virtual keynote speech during this week’s celebration festivities for our ATU students, “Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?” ATU celebrated National First-Generation Celebration Week by supporting our first-generation students to tell their stories to their peers, their friends, their current faculty/staff, and those individuals who have previously positively impacted them on their educational journey.