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Privilege as a Blind Spot to Understanding Struggle

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Abstract

In this chapter, I analyze privilege as the defining context for my experience as a struggling student. As a critical higher education scholar, I had a good understanding of educational inequality prior to my experience as a struggling student. Being a student, however, gave me deeper insight into how privilege mitigates academic struggle. I came to understand the largely invisible ways phenomena like slack, the time wealth that allows some students the time and space to slow down and concentrate, account for discrepancies in students’ capacity to overcome academic challenges. I identify how privilege manifested in my educational journey prior to and including my experience in the TEFL program as well as the autoethnographic process that allowed me to discover this finding.

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Correspondence to Laura M. Harrison .

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Harrison, L.M. (2019). Privilege as a Blind Spot to Understanding Struggle. In: Teaching Struggling Students. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13012-1_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13012-1_2

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-13011-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-13012-1

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