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The Accidental College Student, Phyliss Dubinsky Shey

Masters Theses

This narrative study began as a retrospective of an in-depth interview study with a young woman who navigated the move from a large, suburban school system in the mid-Atlantic region before the fifth grade to a small, isolated rural school in Southern Appalachia in the 1990s. She graduated from the only high school serving the county in which she lived. Over the course of two formal interviews, hundreds of informal conversations for more than ten years, and particularly through writing this analysis (Goodall, 2000), I realized that even though there were vast differences between our ages, cultural backgrounds, and current …