Opening the gate

When beginning this project, I had one goal in mind: Showcase ways where college teaching fails and offer a path forward. When teaching college students, professors are not in control of their students’ prior education; some come from high-quality schools while others do not. Yet, often it seems that students are taught the same, which fails some foundational goals of education. Students, to no fault of their own, find themselves locked out of complex material which, ironically, they are most in need of. My proposition is simple: Modify the language of some of our most complex texts in the field of English Studies so that students off all educational backgrounds can benefit from them. In this project, I have included two items. The first, a podcast. This medium not only shapes my argument but is meant to demonstrate one way of modifying texts for easier consumption. Within this portion, we trace why students enter college classrooms underprepared, the problems they will face, and confront the difficulty of college professors acting as gatekeepers instead of guides. The second, a short companion paper explaining process and background research that comprised the project to give others insight into why/how the podcast was created. This project has been created under the same guise it means to propose, meaning, it is meant to be relatively simple to consume. Demonstrating the practice of complex and important arguments and research through simplified composition was employed to keep this project truthful; practicing what it preaches. By the end of this project, the reader/listener should have a more complete understanding of the practice of gatekeeping, the problems it causes for our society, and an outlook for how to help improve higher education.M.A.Includes bibliographical reference