AWOL -- Absent Without Leave: The Disappearing Student in Community College

In the military, one of the most dangerous and irresponsible choice is to leave base or post without explicit permission by the CO or NCO above. This is called "AWOL" -- absent without leave -- and the punishments are extreme. People "go AWOL" for various reasons, but ultimately, the choices go back to priorities: the personal priorities over the unit's priorities. But this post isn't about military AWOL. I'm concerned about student AWOL -- the tendencies by several community college students who disappear from class and campus without communication with the professor. Briefly, the punishments for military AWOL are completely different than academic AWOL, and perhaps my metaphor is inappropriate, but the acronym is used among faculty discussion and our concern with disappearing students does have immediate and long-lasting effect for the student and the professor.

We have a direct correlation of student attendance and student success: the more absences = lower grades. Significant absence = student failure. The more students repeat a course = less likely to graduate. 

Student Realities

Some of the reasons I've learned about students' disappearing choices:

1. Extended personal health issues; this might related to food insecurity and lack of health resources
2. Extended family member health issues and the student cares for the family
3. Jail
4. Lack of transportation
5. Anxiety, depression, frustration
6. Boredom
7. Migration concerns, including concerns of family safety
8. Work schedule conflict
9. Transportation out of town for family urgencies

Some students immediately communicate with me when they see that they'll be missing class, either in person, by phone, or via e-mail. Those who plan extended absences often return to the class meeting and are just as engaged as they were before, and they complete successfully. Some don't. 

But the majority of disappearing students go AWOL without any communication before or during and I get frustrated with incomplete college records that I could call a student. We also know that most students don't read the college email for various reasons (the software is annoying; the college sends far, far too many not-urgent emails). Of course, in some situations (#1, #2, #3, #4, #7, #8, and #9, above list) don't really address the absences -- community college students have important priorities, while the college has its different priorities. 

One colleague on campus wrote this, regarding the same topic:

I wish there was a procedure or a culture in which a student could approach a faculty member or LSC staffer and say, “I’m about to go AWOL. Help me so that I can avoid that.”
I wonder: could we just say to students directly to do this; that is, give them a script for asking for help or alerting us of trouble?
Can we de-stigmatize the worst causes of student drop out? Would that help with students with lesser stigmatized causes of drop out?

But I also argue elsewhere, that communication with a professor is one of the most important skills learned in college. For example, I've had multiple students who needed to go to Mexico for family funerals. I certainly cannot ask the student to "stay" in town and attend class. But we agreed that she would write while she was driving and summarize her experiences and how this connects to her college. Her writing was not a substitution for the class instruction and socialized engagement, but she did keep the class in her mind and she met with me after she returned. I don't know if her persistence and success are truly proof that her writing impacted her success, but at least I knew that she was committed to the course and she seemed validated by her family experiences. 

Of course, some students don't have the confidence with their professors, and this is a bilateral problem: students have not developed social skills to build confident relationships with professors; some professors are similarly unprepared or committed for working-class student success. Some professors expect community college students to "act like" university students (whatever that means), or the professor thinks "I attended all my classes; my students must attend, too." I find this argument faulty on several levels and we need to address the disconnection of faculty academic experiences (university + graduate studies) vs community college student experiences. That's another blog post.

So, How Can We Address This?

For now, however, we need to understand the AWOL problem and I hope students can help us with this research. Some starting questions:

1. Quantitatively, how many students disappear and at what part of the semester (I'm especially frustrated with students who are destined to pass the class, but disappear in the final two weeks, and then never submit final projects. If they had major crises, we can address these, but without any communication, we cannot help)
2. What are students' understanding of the attendance-success correlation?
3. How can we build stronger student social skills to build the class and campus more friendly?
4. How can we make the student-professor relationship based on trust, not "discipline," "rigor," or "GRIT"?
5. How can professors prepare alternative learning for AWOL students? In other words, if the student returns after two weeks, how can we bring the student back into the fold without significant penalties, to increase success and persistence? Similarly, how effective are professor communication and resources prepared for absent students? 
6. How can professors balance an empathy of students' lives and protect their emotional boundaries to avoid frustration and disappointment?

I'd like to re-read bell hooks for her approach of students' lives (see Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope) or Ira Shor's approach (see When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy) or ... more importantly ... how current students have experience and recommendations. 

Let's start on this, and bring students into the conversation. The college's attrition rates are abysmal and we need to address this on multiple facets. AWOL is just a part of a bigger problem of student engagement in the community's engagement. It's big. It's complicated. But until we address it, students' disappearances are not going to disappear.