scholarly journals Understanding the experiences of women student veterans during their transition process from the military into higher education : identity, belonging, and voice in writing courses and writing assignments in other disciplines

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Mary Broding
Author(s):  
Mary Christine Broding

Given the lack of published research on women student veterans as a group separate from men student veterans and the unique needs of women student veterans, individual attention needs to be paid to women student veterans. This qualitative study used feminist critical theory to examine the experiences of women student veterans during their transition process from the military to higher education regarding identity, belonging, and voice in connection with writing courses and writing assignments. Real-time in-depth narrative interviews were conducted with seven current or former women student veterans located across the United States. Analysis of the interviews revealed superordinate themes. These three superordinate themes were 1) military influence: lifestyle transition, identity, and writing; 2) peer connections in writing courses; and 3) writing instructor influence. The findings informed by the superordinate themes included women student veterans sometimes have difficulty transitioning from military writing to academic writing, women student veterans need peer connections in the writing classroom, and writing instructors hold much influence over belonging and voice for women student veterans. These findings led to three recommendations for future practice. The first recommendation was that writing workshops focusing on the differences between military writing and academic writing should be held for women student veterans by individual colleges and universities. The second recommendation was colleges and universities can establish and maintain writing groups for women student veterans in which they write and share narratives and poetry reflective of their military and other life experiences. The third recommendation was writing instructors should be trained on providing women student veterans with individualized attention and supportive feedback. Keywords: women student veterans, writing courses, identity, belonging, voice


2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawn W. Ryan ◽  
Aaron H. Carlstrom ◽  
Kenneth F. Hughey ◽  
Brandonn S. Harris

This introduction to the strengths, needs, and challenges of veterans as they transition from the military to higher education is presented within the framework of Schlossberg's transition model (Schlossberg, Waters, & Goodman, 1995). Academic advisors must understand the way that veteran transitions to college are both similar to and different from those of the general student population so they can explore relevant topics and help connect student-veterans to appropriate supports and services that facilitate their personal and academic success. Advisors are given questions to employ in soliciting information about the ways they and their institutions can better serve student-veterans.


Author(s):  
Phillip Olt

There is a lack of research on military veterans in higher education that captures the issues from an insider’s perspective. To that end, I sought to reflect upon my own experiences with higher education as military veteran—from a budding recruit all the way through to now being an administrator and faculty member. I utilized a layered-account autoethnographic approach (Ronai, 1995) to interrogate my multiple perspectives that developed over time on veterans’ issues in higher education. I found that the GI Bill—the modern iteration of the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944—was a powerful motivator both in starting my military career and continuing my studies; my thinking on transfer credits from the Joint Service Transcript evolved from seeing them as an entitlement to lacking rigor. I felt out of place as I left the military and attended a traditional university campus, and then I sought out the faculty members who reminded me of the no-nonsense military from which I had departed. My experiences in the military continually guided my behavior as a student and that of other student veterans I observed, thus, I recommend that institutions glean lessons from these experiences to better serve the unique demographic presented by the growing population of student veterans.


2009 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boubacar N'Diaye

ABSTRACTThe 3 August 2005 military coup was Mauritania's best opportunity to turn the page on decades of the deposed quasi-military regime's destructive politics. This article critically analyses relevant aspects of the transition that ensued in the context of the prevailing models of military withdrawal from politics in Africa. It also examines the challenges that Mauritania's short-lived Third Republic faced. It argues that the transition process did not escape the well-known African military junta leader's proclivity to manipulate transitions to fulfil suddenly awakened self-seeking political ambitions, in violation of solemn promises. While there was no old-fashioned ballot stuffing to decide electoral outcomes, Mauritania's junta leader and his lieutenants spared no effort to keep the military very much involved in politics, and to perpetuate a strong sense of entitlement to political power. Originally designed as an ingenious ‘delayed self-succession’ of sorts, in the end, another coup aborted Mauritania's democratisation process and threw its institutions in a tailspin. This only exacerbated the challenges that have saddled Mauritania's political system and society for decades – unhealthy civil-military relations, a dismal ‘human rights deficit’, terrorism, and a neo-patrimonial, disastrously mismanaged economy.


Author(s):  
Michael C. Jones

Student-veterans are a unique subculture across the nation's college and univeristy campuses, and their enrollment numbers are expected to grow to almost two million in the upcoming years following the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (ACE, 2008). It is vital for higher eduation institutions to critically examine the way they serve this important subgroup and redesign their organizational structures and established cultures to better serve this population. This article examines the perspectives of three student-veterans, provides recommendations on improving their transition into higher education, and recognizes some current best practices that support student-veterans.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Willems ◽  
Liesje Coertjens ◽  
Vincent Donche

To date, little understanding exists of how first-year students in professionally oriented higher-education (HE) programs (i.e., those that provide vocational education to prepare students for a particular occupation) experience their academic transition process. In the present study, we first argued how the constructs of academic adjustment and academic integration can provide complementary perspectives on the academic transition of first-year students in (professional) HE. Next, we examined what first-year students in professional HE contexts perceive to be the most important experiences associated with their academic transition process in the first semester of their first year of higher education (FYHE). To this end, we adopted the fundamentals of the critical incident technique and asked 104 students in a Flemish (Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) university college (which offers professional HE programs, such as nursing) to complete “reflective logs” with open questions at the start of the second semester of their FYHE, wherein they reflected on three critical academic experiences during their first semester. An inductive, cross-case content analysis of the collected narratives showed that students reported on nine themes of academic experiences, which relate to five adjustment themes (dealing with the organization of the study program, organizing study work, committing to the study, following class and taking notes, and processing learning content outside class) and four integration themes (feeling competent, feeling stressed, feeling prepared, and feeling supported). Further analyses showed that although some of the nine themes of academic experiences appear to be more important at different times in the first semester, they all seem to be meaningful throughout the whole semester.


2018 ◽  
Vol 99 (2) ◽  
pp. S58-S64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine A. Elnitsky ◽  
Cara Blevins ◽  
Jan Warren Findlow ◽  
Tabitha Alverio ◽  
Dennis Wiese

Author(s):  
Necati Polat

This chapter provides an outline of the change that took place in Turkey between 2007 and 2011, signalling a historic shift in the use of power in the country, long controlled by a staunch and virtually autonomous bureaucracy, both military and civilian, and known as ‘the state’, in the face of the chronically fragile democratic politics, forming ‘the government’. The time-honoured identity politics of the very bureaucracy, centred on ‘Westernisation’ as a policy incentive, was deftly appropriated by the ruling AKP via newly tightened links with the European Union to transform the settled centre-periphery relations often considered to be pivotal to Turkish politics, and reconfigure access to power. The chapter details the gradual fall of the bureaucracy—that is, the military, the higher education, and the system of high courts—and recounts the basic developments in foreign policy and on the domestic scene during and immediately after the change.


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