FIRST GEN FRIDAY: Professor of English, Ben McCorkle
First Gen Friday is a monthly first-person narrative written by other first generation college students who are now fellow faculty, staff, and students at Ohio State Marion. The goal of the stories is to provide advice to other first generation college students and create a sense of belonging among the campus community.
I’m a Professor of English, and my areas of research and scholarship include rhetorical history and media studies, which broadly means that I explore how we use different technologies to communicate with one another, and also how and why those technologies change over time. Most recently, my collaborator Jason Palmeri and I wrote an online book called 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy (Google it) that looks at how English teachers at all grade levels have used different technologies in their classrooms over the years to teach students how to read, write, give speeches, and even produce creative works like short films or radio plays. I teach a pretty wide swath of courses, from lower-level writing classes and digital media production to video games analysis and literary publishing.
I was born and raised in Dearing, Georgia, a small town of a few hundred people about 25 miles outside of Augusta. Dearing is one of those places that was founded along the railroad and lumbering routes of the 19th century, so a lot of its history is obviously rooted in drinking and fighting. As a kid, I remember reading a local historian’s account of the place, and it seemed to include a lot of mentions of people missing eyes, ears, and noses—it’s not as rowdy these days, thankfully.
My childhood was the stereotypical Gen X experience: my brother and I would play outside all day unsupervised, exploring the woods, skateboarding in the road, or riding bikes a few miles down to our friends’ houses. We grew up on a small farm right beside my paternal grandparents, so I sent a good deal of time hanging out with old folks and listening to their stories (the rural South has a really strong oral tradition). I also spent a lot of time by myself as a kid—I was a voracious reader and had wide-ranging tastes, from comics to the Dr. Dolittle book series to the World Book Encyclopedia. I definitely think those experiences helped establish my interest in how people communicate with one another.
I’ve always been a pretty decent student, the kind who didn’t just do the work to get the A, but liked to dive deep into the content. I always found the process of learning really satisfying—the focus, the feeling of discovering new information. But by the time I went to high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do afterwards. Where I grew up, very few people went on to college—I was the first in my family to do that. Instead, most of us went on to get jobs at places like Georgia Iron Works, the big carpet manufacturing plant in Thomson, or making golf carts down at the E-Z-GO factory in Augusta. So it wasn’t until college that I really considered going into academia. Originally, I was a business major because I thought it was more practical, but very quickly realized that I was a lot more comfortable and satisfied in my English classes. It was in those classes that I met plenty of role models who actually worked in academia for a living. They not only helped me see this line of work as a viable possibility, they also helped me figure out the process of doing so, such as applying to graduate school, developing a good writing sample, and so on.
And now, as luck would have it, I’m a professor in the field of rhetoric. At the end of the day, I like to think that what I do is help students become better citizens. That value is a cornerstone of the rhetorical tradition. More than just a path to a job, a college education is a way to learn about the larger world around you, plus it also allows you to see your place in that world and imagine the role you want to play in changing it for the better. That’s why a lot of the work I’m involved with has students engage with their community in some way. For example, I help coordinate a long-standing program called PALS Student Mentoring, where our students serve as mentors to younger kids in the Marion City School system. I also work with my students to engage with the regional creative community to produce the Cornfield Review, the literary journal our campus has produced since the mid-70s. I’ve recently worked with students and fellow faculty members in History and Psychology to research the local impact of literacy advocacy and support in the Marion community since the late 1800s. For me, that sort of larger community engagement is satisfying because it allows us to shake up the tendency to remain isolated, theoretical, and self-focused—we actually get out there and do something, something that’s hopefully making a difference.
My advice to first-get students: this is your space as much as anyone’s. You can play an active role in shaping your experience here into what you want it to be. Be curious. Be engaged. Ask questions. Make things happen. The luxury of being able to live the life of the mind, to meet new people who are perhaps very different than you, to cultivate personal and professional social networks that can last beyond your time here—these are rare occurrences in life, and taking full advantage of them will lead you to become so much more fulfilled down the road.