Including a step-by-step guide to classroom research

“If a child can’t read by fifth grade, it is well known [that] the educational consequences will likely be dire….But ‘what about Rose?’ we hear Smokey Wilson ask….What about those adult students who decide to make a fresh start, to invent a second chance, and who appear in community college classrooms, doubtful of their abilities?”
—Foreword by Glynda A. Hull, University of California, Berkeley

Every year, thousands of urban minority students enter college academically underprepared to meet the challenges that await them. In this book, Smokey Wilson shares her 30-year-long search for better instructional strategies to help these adult learners (many of them African Americans) develop the basic literacy skills needed to succeed in college. Through detailed portraits of students in an urban community college, Wilson shows us when learning happens, why it happens, and what happens when it fails to appear. The text features “A Guide to Classroom Research for Teachers” that outlines the four stages of research and contains exercises to help jumpstart teachers who are tentative about doing research.

Praise for “What About Rose?”

“An inspiring, insightful story by a master teacher-researcher. With its stunning portraits of students speaking in their own voices, documented accounts of students’ transformations over the decades of Smokey's lived classroom experience, and practical guides and visions of student possibilities, this book is destined to be a classic.”
—Geneva Smitherman, University Distinguished Professor of English, Michigan State University

“This is a book of big heart and generous mind. In telling the story of her life in and around the classroom and her resolute attempts to study that classroom, Smokey Wilson also tells the stories of literacy studies, of teacher research, of memorable people, and of the way committed teaching creates a meaningful life.”
—Mike Rose, author of Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America

“A rare gem of a book. Wilson is one of the best teacher-researchers in the country, and every page of this book shows why. Readers are in for a major treat.”
—Andrea Lunsford, Stanford University

“Smokey Wilson ranks among the foremost classroom researchers at work today. This record of her work in literacy education over a lifetime of teaching will inform, encourage, and inspire all who read it.”
—Mark Reynolds, editor of Teaching English in the Two Year College (TETYC)(1994–2001)

Smokey Wilson has been working with academically inexperienced adult learners throughout her career as instructor at Laney College, an inner-city community college in Oakland, California; as director of the Tutorial Center for the campus; as co-founder and co-coordinator of the basic skills learning community known as Project Bridge; and as founder and coordinator of an ASL/English bilingual/bicultural program called Deaf College Access Network (DeafCAN).