Every year, thousands of urban minority students enter college academically underprepared to meet the challenges that await them. In this book, Smokey Wilson shares her 30-year-long search for better instructional strategies to help these adult learners (many of them African Americans) develop the basic literacy skills needed to succeed in college. Through detailed portraits of students in an urban community college, Wilson shows us when learning happens, why it happens, and what happens when it fails to appear. The text features ""A Guide to Classroom Research for Teachers"" that outlines the four stages of research and contains exercises to help jump start teachers who are tentative about doing research.