Professors and librarians at academic institutions sometimes describe certain students—or groups of students—as “not ready for college,” or assume that they “don’t know how to study” or are “at risk of dropping out.” These negative labels are most often given to students who are first-generation, low-income, and/or BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color). These views are called “Deficit Thinking”—blaming students for any failure to excel in a new, unfamiliar academic environment, rather than examining how an institution may be failing those students.

Describing it as “pseudoscientific thinking” that over the decades has changed from arguments about genetics to arguments about social factors and cultural events negatively impacting some students, Darren Ilett, teaching and outreach librarian for the University of Northern Colorado, explained that “no matter what the reasoning…what [Deficit Thinking] comes down to is blaming differences in educational outcomes on individuals rather than on the systems and institutions that are causing those different outcomes.”

At his presentation and workshop, “Activities and Strategies for More Inclusive and Equitable Information Literacy Instruction,” held during the in-person portion of the American Library Association’s 2023 LibLearnX conference and expo on January 28 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, Ilett discussed how he focused on creating an asset-based pedagogy. Noting that there are several examples of asset-based pedagogies, Ilett centered the day’s presentation on the “funds of knowledge” (FK) approach, which draws on the cultural knowledge, abilities, and skills that students bring with them to the classroom.

“If we only emphasize one kind of knowledge—like peer reviewed research, for example—and not the kinds of knowledge that students bring from their communities, then it leads to us blaming them” for not excelling within the particular confines of a given academic system, he explained. Ilett said that FK encourages faculty to consider student backgrounds as sources of knowledge rather than impediments to college-level coursework, and noted that teachers can use FK as a foundation for further learning.

As an example, Ilett discussed an assignment in an information literacy class requiring students to map their personal research process while writing a college paper. The assignment is straightforward, but it only demonstrates a student’s skills and prior experience—if any—writing college research papers. In Ilett’s reimagined version of this assignment, students are asked to map personal research processes in everyday life—such as how they decided to vote, how they helped analyze a health issue within their family, or how and where they decided to go to college—and then compare that with the college research process. Mapping these processes grounds the students in something familiar, while still having them consider fundamental research questions, Ilett explained. “How would you start? Where did you find information? How did you decide that information was credible or not? And what was the outcome?” he said.

Similarly, Ilett has students consider sources of expertise within their communities and has them dedicate coursework to people who inspired them or helped them get to college. Citing several authors, Ilett said that researchers have found a link “between intrinsic motivation and research topics related to students’ identities and lived experiences” with the FK approach, and that it fostered “a strong sense of student scholar identity” among first-year, first-gen Latine students. In his own experience, he said the approach has led to “increased motivation, self-efficacy, engagement (with content, each other, and me), and achievement of learning outcomes.”

Ilett shared a personal anecdote about how he first noticed deficit thinking in his own teaching and began taking the FK approach. The University of Northern Colorado is a public university with about 10,000 students, 41 percent of whom are first-generation higher ed students. Twenty-eight percent are low-income students, and 24 percent are Latine and/or Hispanic. During one of his classes, he had given an assignment that required students to watch a video as homework, and then work in groups the next day in class. While the students were working in class, he noticed one group rewatching a portion of the video and approached them and said “you didn’t do the homework.” One student became upset and confronted him, emphasizing that everyone had already watched the video, but they were reviewing part of it together, and said “everyone always thinks we’re bad students.” The student was Hispanic.

“This incident made me stop and rethink everything that I was doing in the classroom,” Ilett said. Although he was focused on time management, covering the day’s content, and “catching” bad behavior and was not thinking about race or class, the students may have faced a history of discrimination in school that was reflected in the response to his comment. “Policing student behavior perpetuates harm by expecting low outcomes and emphasizing punishment,” he said.

During a Q&A portion of the presentation, one attendee asked how to respond to professors or peers who describe a student or cohort of students as not ready for college coursework. Ilett responded, “A question I would ask is: ‘Are you ready for them?’ We have the students we have—and we want to be inclusive—so we have to be ready. We have to offer the support and the type of instruction that they need.”