Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave, by Pegeen Reichert Powell

Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave, by Pegeen Reichert Powell. Boulder: Utah State University Press, 2014. 134 pp.In an era saturated by news about university budget cuts, the dwindling future of tenure, trends of hiring contingent labor, and rising student debt, it seems that economic concerns are inseverable from the work we do within institutions of higher education. Though it would be a mistake to believe that economic issues are hurting all colleges and universities uniformly, several educational institutions have sought to resolve budgetary crises by turning to research on student retention. Common reading experiences, first-year seminars, living learning experiences, and reward-based badge systems for administrators and faculty are just some of the retention strategies recently gaining popularity. All too often, these efforts focus on students' identity as customers whose purchasing power must be retained within a specific educational institution. Pegeen Reichert Powell's Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave offers a coherent response to this set of combined issues: first, she claims that we as teachers needn't feel the need to hold onto every single student, given the reality of students' lives and the challenges they encounter; second, she argues that we resist seeing students as customers whose loyalty to the school brand must be created and continually reinforced; third, she insists that rather than seeing our classes as lock-step parts in a four year plan, we recognize the kairotic moments our courses offer in student lives. Retention and Resistance, then, moves the focus on retention away from capitalist-inspired and market-driven fantasies to a conversation focused on ethically responding to the needs of the students who are currently participating in our classrooms. Importantly, Reichert Powell frames her study of retention on the condition that not all students we teach will succeed in achieving a four-year degree-a condition we too often ignore as educators.As Retention and Resistance reveals, much of the past research on retention has ignored or left out the voices and narratives of individual students. Reichert Powell works to help fill this gap by including the stories of three students she met through a grant-funded program: Helen, Cesar, and Nathan. Throughout the book, Reichert Powell weaves in and out of these students' stories, comparing and contrasting their personal and academic experiences to popular retention discourse. Of the four chapters that make up the book, this strategy of "weaving" students' stories is most notable in chapter 1, "A Story of Retention Research." Chapter 1 is framed by the story of Helen, a bright and engaged student who made the difficult decision to drop out of college after her first semester. After providing a brief history of retention research, Reichert Powell illustrates through Helen's story how the complexity of retention as an issue has been masked in favor of presenting it as a simple problem to be resolved (through a particular strategy or set of strategies). Helen's story-which includes a turbulent high school experience, complicated parental relations, financial problems, and a car accident-debunks conceptions of retention that simplify students' lives into a "problem: solution" model in order to show how truly complicated and unpredictable an individual student's decision to continue higher education can be. Reichert Powell suggests that basing retention efforts on an isolated correlation derived from a study-separate from the personal lives of students who are making the decision to attend or not attend college-is "inadequate, unproductive, and possibly unethical" (p. 36).In chapter 2, "The Seduction and Betrayal of the Discourse of Retention," the book moves focus from analyzing the information (and information gaps) found within retention studies toward examining the discourse of retention research and its relationship to the corporatization of higher education. …