Welch Defines Community

Olga Michele Welch delivered the lecture, "Building Community in a Predominantly White Institution as We Enter the New Millenium," yesterday afternoon, concluding the celebration of Black History Month. Chair of the Department of Counseling, Deafness and Human Services at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Welch spoke of her recent study concerning disadvantaged students and pre-college education.

The focus of her and colleague C. R. Hodge's research was Project EXCEL, a nine-year program exploring the development of scholar identity in educationally disadvantaged students. EXCEL, (Encouraging Excellence in Children Extends Learning), was directly targeted at middle-range students, whom she described as having no less than a 2.5 GPA in college prep coursework. She described these students as reading at grade level and intending to move on to college but facing significant barriers in doing so.

EXCEL was conceived from Welch's and Hodge's own experiences of gaining footholds in academia. Welch spoke at length about her own academic background, explaining some of the identity issues such as race and class involved in becoming and considering oneself a scholar. "We used the scholar identity to form an agenda of achievement," she said of herself and Hodges. She added that this led to an academic ethos allowing her to achieve benefits such as studying Tudor history at Oxford in England, despite criticism from her professors that she would fare better from studying African American history in the U.S. "Gradually," she said, "we saw ourselves as scholars and we operated that way."

Welch envisions intensive developments for educationally disadvantaged African-American and European-American youth. EXCEL's underlying question remains whether a "transition program can build an academic ethos in educationally disadvantaged African-American and European-American college-bound students."

The program involvs tagging potential first-years or sophomores, admitting them into the program, then tracking their progress in and out of the program through their first year of college or work. Throughout the program, students gain exposure to intensive reading, writing, and foreign language coursework, so as to develop scholar identities hopefully leading to successful college careers.

Results have varied, with some students going on to successful careers as engineers and military personnel. One woman has been recruited into the FBI. Some students have proceeded to attend college, whereas others have not. Overall, Welch stated that the EXCEL program has demonstrated that "self-construction is important to achievement," meaning that the various lenses through which a disadvantaged student can be perceived matter less and less as the student's own self-confidence grows and matures.

Welch concluded by saying that given its small size (13-15 students per year), the program was not meant to provide material for far-reaching conclusions. Rather, she hoped that it would "shed light on a piece of a complex" puzzle of academic achievement amongst educationally disadvantaged students.