ACADEMIA Letters

Never Really All Grown Up: Identity and the Adult

Learner in the Age of Constant Change
Sonia Feder-Lewis, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota

We ask young people all the time “What do you want to be when you grow up?” An innocuous
question perhaps, but it assumes that with adulthood comes a fixed and certain identity. For
our adult learners, however, much of the work of learning itself lies in identity work, in their
very conscious and often painful progress toward an imagined self. It is this purposeful,
determined choice to move between identities that in part defines the condition of the adult
learner. We still often envision a student as a young adult at a moment of becoming, not yet
fully formed, somewhat malleable and open to the influence of the academic environment.
However, for an increasing number of students, this personal evolution is encumbered with
additional challenges from relationships and firmly established patterns, built not in the two
decades of childhood and adolescence, but also in multiple decades of adulthood. According
to the United States Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, National Center
for Education Statistics, between 2000 and 2011, the number of students aged 25 and over rose
42%. This expanding percentage of adult returning students, many of whom have “stopped
out” of college numerous times, represents a changing understanding of the term student.
In Lives on the Boundary, Mike Rose describes his adult students in a program designed
for returning Vietnam veterans now eligible for the GI bill as “strangers in a strange land” (p
142), as strange to them as being soldiers “in country” had been a few years before. He explains
his perceptions of their needs by highlighting large and personal areas of potential growth:
“My students needed to be immersed in talking, reading, and writing, they needed to further
develop their ability to think critically, and they needed to gain confidence in themselves as
systematic inquirers. They had to be let into the academic club.” (p 141). This idea of joining
a club addresses a profound aspect of identity, a sense of belonging, and belonging within
academia is often elusive for all but the middle class and conventional student. Implicit in this

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Sonia Feder-Lewis, sfeder@smumn.edu

Citation: Feder-Lewis, S. (2021). Never Really All Grown Up: Identity and the Adult Learner in the Age of
Constant Change. Academia Letters, Article 3068.

1
discussion has also been the acceptance that the club is worth entering and that the costs of
entry are reasonable in price. Like Rose’s veterans, our adult students are seeking entrance to
a club, yet they may hesitate to pay the heavy personal entrance dues.
Mary Louise Pratt defined the contact zone for us as the “social spaces where cultures
meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of asymmetrical relations of power”
(34). We have come to understand that composition classrooms function as contact zones,
within which students engage, or “grapple with,” issues of their own and each other’s iden-
tities while honing skills as critical readers and writers. Our image of a college student has
broadened to include shades of color, accent, wealth, and age, although vast inequities still
exist in the distribution of these students within the educational system, and their successes.
While we acknowledge that these students bring rich personal and collective histories to our
classrooms, and continually work to respect their diverse origins, central to our mission as
composition teachers within the academy remains acculturation, the induction of these stu-
dents into the habits of academic discourse, and the both intangible (greater confidence) and
tangible (greater income, better jobs) rewards that accrue to those who join our club.
The cultural mythos of America is largely built on this transaction: a student relinquishes
that part of him or herself that pertains to an old identity, such as the immigrant speaking a
native language, in order to rise both socially and economically, gaining power, status, and
influence. Bill Clinton’s election as president represented perhaps the apotheosis in the mod-
ern era of this fairy tale, more so even than Barak Obama, the son of two highly educated
parents. Richard Rodriguez, in Hunger of Memory, expresses it profoundly: “For the first
time, I realized there were other students like me, and so I was able to frame the meaning of
my academic success, its consequent price—the loss” (46).
As the conception of a “college student” has greatly expanded, a culture of lack has
emerged, specifying the fault or absence. We have also created programs to serve these popu-
lations, meeting identifiable needs yet also ghettoizing these students once more. Laura Gray-
Rosendale, in Rethinking Basic Writing, argues that even recently, we have defined “The Basic
Writer,” a group into which many adult learners are reflexively categorized, as “the site of a
problem,” which “is perceived as somehow necessarily outside of the student’s responsibil-
ity or control (due to larger sociocultural forces in part).” (12). Thus this deficit model also
becomes a form of identity we impose, which marks students, restricting their own sense of
promise, and reinforces their prior sense lack and exclusion, what Gray-Rosendale accurately
identifies as a “victim” status which undermines their agency (13).
Decades ago, we called these students “non-traditional” students, the very label itself im-
plying a lack of something possessed only by traditional students with more direct pathways
for educational attainment. We met in marginal spaces, often workplaces repurposed to serve

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Sonia Feder-Lewis, sfeder@smumn.edu

Citation: Feder-Lewis, S. (2021). Never Really All Grown Up: Identity and the Adult Learner in the Age of
Constant Change. Academia Letters, Article 3068.

2
as classrooms, or professional training spaces within the workspaces these adults inhabited
during the day, which perpetuated the adult learner’s sense of separation from the academic
world, their physical distance mirroring the psychological divide they experienced. Many
students in the bachelor’s completion program in which I taught were suspended in their ca-
reers, having advanced as far as they could without a college degree, another instance of lack
made visible by their inability to advance. Middle aged men and women, shop foremen and
administrative assistants, these students brought their life and work experiences to our dis-
cussions, drawing from these places of comfort, competence, and expertise while confronting
their anxiety and tentativeness in their writing Recently, the population of adult learners has
expanded, and their numbers have burgeoned, yet these physical and psychological distances
often remain. They are welcomed into the club only as lesser members, with only some of the
privileges and their own internalized sense of separation.
As we move to a life-long learner model, more and more adult learners alternate between
student and professional identities through ongoing career and life changes. In today’s world,
including in academia, no one can be certain of the permanence of a position or career, and
anyone may become an adult learner. Similar to the problems of defining a basic writer as
highlighted by Gray-Rosendale, the conception of a collective identity of the adult learner
is a matter of complexity and dissent. Even the label of adult defies easy categorization.
Goldie Blumenstyk argues that the definition should not be one based on age but on their re-
sponsibilities, financial independence, and identity. Drawing on the work of Carol Kasworm,
Blumenstyk suggests that the primary role of an adult learner is not that of student: an adult
identity derives from how one lives rather than simple years.
Even as adult learners progress to levels of higher education, they may feel torn between
identities, and that ongoing sense of lack, a sense they are less prepared than those who pro-
gressed from degree to degree without pause. Here we see what Victor Villanueva expressed
now several decades ago in Boostraps: “There is the foreignness of his fellow academics, a
fellowship he doesn’t feel he belongs in, unpublished, not knowing of procedures and stan-
dards, their not appreciating the distances someone of color must travel” (118). It is in their
writing that this anxiety often manifests, even those who already hold careers within academia.
As higher education continually raises the expectations for preparation and credentials for all
teachers, more master’s-prepared teachers return to graduate school mid-career, pursuing doc-
torates often after decades of hiatus. Their identities, as professors and professionals, are un-
moored and imperiled. For myself, as a professor now in a program that specifically attracts
this population, I am aware of my own multiple identities as both their colleague and their
professor, a dualism that cannot help but be fraught with issues of power and insider/outsider
divisions. My adult students struggle with what to call me: Dr. Feder-Lewis, implying a

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Sonia Feder-Lewis, sfeder@smumn.edu

Citation: Feder-Lewis, S. (2021). Never Really All Grown Up: Identity and the Adult Learner in the Age of
Constant Change. Academia Letters, Article 3068.

3
professional respect but artificial distance, or Sonia, which suggests an equal relationship we
might enjoy as fellow teachers, were they not my current students. Many settle on Dr. Sonia,
expressing the ambivalence of my identity, encompassing both authority figure and potential
friend.
For these transitioning students, many of whom have worked within academia without
participating fully in its community, writing emerges as a primary area of concern and conflict.
Now, driven by the demands of their institutions as well as their own hopes and ambitions,
they look to join another new club. David Boud and Alison Lee, in examining the varying
degrees to which graduate students perceive themselves to be peers or outsiders within the
community of researchers as they pursue their doctorates, describe fluctuating roles, from
“becoming a student” to “being an academic” (507). In a related study, they stress the need
for writing groups to facilitate that internalization of “being an academic,” positing that the
groups become venues for the expression of desire and the development of positive senses of
identity:
Academic writing was a touchstone for the surfacing of many major questions concerning
identity and change. Issues of fear and desire worked together to impact often dramatically on
images of personal competence. Loss of old identities and sets of ‘core’ values as particular
kinds of worker-educators needed to be acknowledged and worked through. Issues of pleasure
and ‘identification’ with the new positions available within the new higher education policy
environment had to be articulated. (Lee and Boud 197).
We bring to adult learners a dual mission: to empower the persons they have become
through their life journeys, and to help transform them into more fluent writers, speakers, and
participants in academic culture. Yet there may no longer be a permanent point of arrival
within a discipline for them, or for us. As a professor with a Ph.D. in English teaching in a
graduate school of education, I too am an adult learner, exploring disciplinary intersections.
Adult learners challenge us with their possibilities of constant remaking. Both our students
and we, their teachers, are always defining new identities, in a process freighted with both
excitement and fear, entailing both gain and concomitant loss. We must find ways to facilitate
these explorations of identity with understanding and support. Ultimately, none of us may
ever really be “all grown up.”

Works Cited
Boud, David and Alison Lee. “’Peer Learning’ as Pedagogic Discourse for Research Educa-
tion.” Studies in Higher Education 30.5 (2005): 501-516.

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Sonia Feder-Lewis, sfeder@smumn.edu

Citation: Feder-Lewis, S. (2021). Never Really All Grown Up: Identity and the Adult Learner in the Age of
Constant Change. Academia Letters, Article 3068.

4
Blumenstyk, Goldie. The Adult Student: The Population Colleges—and the Nation—Can’t
Afford to Ignore. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018.

Gray-Rosendale, Laura. Rethinking Basic Writing: Exploring Identities, Politics, and Com-
munity in Interaction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 2000.

Lee, Alison and David Boud. “Writing Groups, Change and Academic Identity: Research
Development as Local Practice.” Studies in Higher Education 28.2 (2003): 187-200.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33-40.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. Boston:

David R. Godine, 1982.

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Villanueva, Victor, Jr. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana: NCTE,
1993. Print.

United States. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences. National Center

for Education Statistics. “Fast Facts.” National Center for Education Statistics. Dept. of
Education. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Sonia Feder-Lewis, sfeder@smumn.edu

Citation: Feder-Lewis, S. (2021). Never Really All Grown Up: Identity and the Adult Learner in the Age of
Constant Change. Academia Letters, Article 3068.