Introduction

Abstract

Jon, a first-generation, low-income college student, described the connections he found between his lived experience and the material he was reading for a course in a first-year college learning community. He said, “The birdcage metaphor is what affected me the most; it was an epiphany. As I was reading it, I recalled a conversation I had with a female friend of mine. We spent hours talking about a problem she had. I really just wanted her to get past it and feel happy. ‘You just don’t know how it is to be girl,’ she said. When I asked her to tell me about what it is like to be a girl, she couldn’t properly explain it to me, but now I know that there were many factors affecting who she was.”

Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look closely at just one wire in the cage you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire anytime it wanted to go somewhere…. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of that whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment.

—Marilyn Frye, “Oppression”