Everyone is Responsible for Everything: Corequisites and the First-Year Seminar

The University of Houston-Victoria (U of H-V) is a small, public Hispanic Serving Institution in southeast Texas. Originally established as a teaching center for upper division and graduate students in 1974, U of H-V achieved “downward expansion” in 2010, a term used to refer to the expansion of the university s offerings to include freshmen and sophomores at the university. This expansion also reconfigured the student body, making it more urban, young, and diverse. As an example, in the fall of 2018, U of H-V enrolled 3,237 undergraduate students, 42 of whom identified as Hispanic, with 32 representing the first generation in their family to attend college. This student population increasingly re ects the demographics of the local area, where the population is over 50 minority, and approximately 50 Hispanic. In addition to diversifying the student body, downward expansion also resulted in enrolling more students who need extra support in order to succeed in a college environment, particularly in first-year math and English courses. Our institution s most recent efforts to provide this support forms the basis of this article, namely the unique version of corequisite support that emerged at our institution, as an organic outgrowth of our specific history, combined with a statewide mandate to create corequisites. Certainly, as we explain, the passage of state legislation helped provide the impetus for our move toward corequisites. Yet we were also motivated to re-assess our developmental curriculum, even without the new legislation, based on our own frustrations with the previous iteration of developmental classes. We knew (and know) our students need help with ge ng through their gateway courses but also finding an effective form for that assistance has been a challenge. We will brie y describe our previous efforts at providing that support before explicating our rationale for the current program. As we discuss in more detail in the course of this article, our response to the recent mandate to create a corequisite combined the purpose of the corequisite with our institution s first-year seminar; we created a few special sections of the first-year seminar designed especially for students designated as TSI-incomplete in one or more subject areas, each section of which supports a specific gateway course. Our idea was that the mission of the first-year seminar, to orient students to life at the university, could itself be advanced by making it more academic for these students, or more clearly contextualized with explicit links to academic work. In order to achieve this, we believed that corequisite remediation could be meaningfully accomplished in the first-year seminar. To achieve this mashup of the first-year seminar and corequisite, we initiated an otherwise unlooked-for collaboration between academic faculty and student support services staff, and we found that this cross-pollination between divisions of our institution also offered another payoff: it had the potential to extend and strengthen institutional safety-nets meant to support students underprepared for college. We find that remediation for underprepared students happens not only in academic content classes, but as part of a larger pedagogical ecology, or as one researcher describes it, a constellation of people, programs, initiatives, opportunities, constraints, and cultures that emerge and interact within a specific university context (Schoen, 2019, p. 38). Based on preliminary findings ABSTRACT