Transiciones: Pathways of Latinas and Latinos Writing in High School and College - Brossura

Ruecker, Todd

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0874219752 ISBN 13: 9780874219753

Casa editrice: Utah State Univ Pr, 2015

Riassunto

Transiciones is a thorough ethnography of seven Latino students in transition between high school and community college or university. Data gathered over two years of interviews with the students, their high school English teachers, and their writing teachers and administrators at postsecondary institutions reveal a rich picture of the conflicted experience of these students as they attempted to balance the demands of schooling with a variety of personal responsibilities.

Todd Ruecker explores the disconnect between students’ writing experiences in high school and higher education and examines the integral role that writing plays in college. Considering the almost universal requirement that students take a writing class in their critical first year of college, he contends that it is essential for composition researchers and teachers to gain a fuller understanding of the role they play in supporting and hindering Latina and Latino students’ transition to college.

Arguing for situating writing programs in larger discussions of high school/college alignment, student engagement, and retention, Transiciones raises the profile of what writing programs can do while calling composition teachers, administrators, and scholars to engage in more collaboration across the institution, across institutions, and across disciplines to make the transition from high school to college writing more successful for this important group of students.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Todd Ruecker is assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of New Mexico.

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Transiciones

Pathways of Latinas and Latinos Writing in High School and College

By Todd Ruecker

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-87421-975-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
1 Introduction, 
2 College Decisions and Institutional Disparities, 
3 Struggling Transitions, 
4 Difficult but Successful Transitions, 
5 Smooth Transitions, 
6 An Unpredictable Transition, 
7 Contextualizing Transitions to College, 
8 The Role of Composition Researchers, Teachers, and Administrators, 
Epilogue and Final Thoughts, 
Appendix A: Student Surveys and Interview Protocols, 
Appendix B: Teacher and Administrator Interview Protocols, 
References, 
About the Author, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

"I don't know who you blame. I don't know if you blame the school. I don't know if you blame the system. I don't know if you blame the teacher ... it doesn't seem to me that students are coming out with the ability to communicate at all sometimes, you know, either spoken or written."

— A first-year composition instructor on why students were not coming to college prepared

In El Paso, Texas, the largest port of entry from Mexico into the United States, transition is a way of life. Every day, people line up on the arched bridges spanning the Rio Grande, coming by car, bike, or on foot to the United States to shop, study, or work. Looking across the border from the University where part of this study took place, one sees hillsides of dilapidated houses, many home to workers at maquilidoras — factories run by US corporations in Mexico to take advantage of lower production costs. At the time of this study, drug violence rates in Mexico had skyrocketed, with Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, having the highest murder rate in the world. Conversely, El Paso consistently has one of the lowest crime rates among large cities in the United States (KVIA 2013). Crossing the bridge into downtown El Paso, one enters some of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States, where 62 percent of residents live below the poverty line and almost 80 percent lack a high school diploma (Ramirez 2011). Moving away from here, one passes through middle class neighborhoods before coming across communities with large manicured lawns and swimming pools, both luxuries in the desert. In transitioning from the city center to suburbs, one passes from neighborhoods where people only know Spanish to ones where many only know English. On the University campus, hearing conversations in both languages, including the variety of Spanglish spoken in El Paso, is the norm.

The uniqueness of El Paso's setting as the largest port of entry to the United States initially drew me to the region. Soon after arriving, I came across applied linguist Linda Harklau's (2000) "From the Good Kids to the Worst," which focused on an important academic transition: high school to college. As the title implies, the multilingual students in her study grappled with very different identities moving through the two environments, labeled as excellent students by high school teachers but considered slackers in college. A search for work like Harklau's (2000) closer to rhetoric and composition turned up little. Villanueva's (1993) classic autobiographical narrative Bootstraps, gave us some insight into a Latino transitioning through various levels of the US educational system. Beyond that, most studies on transition have focused on writing transfer from first-year composition (FYC) to other university classes or beyond (e.g., Beaufort 2007; Frazier 2010; Leki 2007; Wardle 2007; 2009).

Instructors I talked with over the course of this study made comments like the one quoted in the epigraph above: we know there is a problem but who or what is to blame? I have often witnessed colleagues lamenting the writing abilities of their first- year students along the lines of those seen above. Recent articles in the flagship composition journal have called for our field to pay more attention to what happens before college (Addison and McGee 2010; Williams 2010). There have been similar calls in the flagship journal for second language writing (Harklau 2011). For many college writing instructors, what happens outside FYC classrooms is often a mystery. I rarely studied adolescent writers in my doctoral seminars yet taught students matriculating from the same educational system with varying writing abilities, English proficiencies, and many with seemingly little understanding of the basic conventions of academic writing. Students entered my class struggling to participate in discussions and engage in more complex writing tasks like rhetorical analyses. Their grades suffered or, even worse, they disappeared from class. Maybe they returned to another FYC class next semester. Maybe they delayed it until they were ready to graduate. Maybe they never returned to college.

With limited research guiding these initial phases and limited personal knowledge of what actually goes on in high schools, much less high schools in the borderlands of a state long known for a history of high stakes assessment in K–12 schools, I sought a way to begin exploring this topic. I drafted research questions oriented to exploring the challenges and successes students faced in making transitions as writers from high school to college. As I reflected on the study design, I realized that research on transitions between educational institutions were rare for a few reasons: after working closely with a participant for a semester or more, they may decide not to go to college or go to college out of town. Moreover, high schools are foreign environments to most university researchers outside of education departments. In such spaces, it takes time to build trusting relationships where one is given access to observe classes or is able to form connections with adolescent students.

With these challenges in mind, especially the last one, I started slowly. The school site came fairly naturally as I wanted something unique to the border region. Samson High School (SHS), the focal school in this study is located close to the border, which means some students would cross every day to attend school in the United States, this complex transition a part of their daily life. I initially became involved through a program called Gear Up, which placed volunteers in school to support teachers as they worked to prepare students for college. After a semester working with lower-level ESL classes, I began working with the senior English teacher, Mr. Robertson, because of a desire to find students interested in attending college. By regularly attending classes a couple days a week, my face became familiar to students and teachers. Thanks to informal interactions and observations that took place over the course of this first year, I was able to develop more focused research questions:

• How are the writing demands different at the high school, community college, and university levels and what contributes to these differences?

• What curricular and extracurricular challenges do Latina/o linguistic minority (LM) students face in making the transition between high school and college writing?

• What resources do students draw on to support their college transitions?

Too often ignorance of student experiences in varied contexts leads to an endless cycle of assigning blame without sufficient knowledge, as evident from the teacher quoted at the beginning of this chapter. High school teachers blame students' home lives. FYC instructors blame high school teachers. University faculty blame two-year colleges. College professors in other disciplines blame FYC. This book helps break down these barriers by detailing curricular and extracurricular successes and challenges that seven Mexican/Mexican American students faced as they transitioned from high school to a local community college or university. The stories shared within reveal the complexities shared by some of the teachers above: the impact of social polices like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on writing instruction, divides between the type of writing expected at different institutions, and home lives where students care for dependents, work full time, and speak a different language than is expected of them at school. In sharing these stories, I explore what writing teachers across institutions can do to support the success of increasingly diverse students, especially Latina/o LM students.

Given the integral role that writing plays in college and the almost universal requirement that students will have a writing class in their critical first year of college, it is essential that composition researchers and teachers gain a fuller understanding of the role we play in supporting and hindering students' transitions to college. This study is an attempt to build this understanding. It explores the disconnect between students' writing experiences in high school, community college, and the university while recognizing that our role in the lives of students making this transition may be smaller than we would like to think.

INCREASING LATINA/O STUDENT POPULATIONS

In the past, composition teachers and scholars have held a "myth of linguistic homogeneity" and have largely ignored the diversity present in their classroom, at worst pushing an "English only" agenda that can serve to marginalize students (Canagarajah 2006; Horner, NeCamp, and Donahue 2011; Horner and Trimbur 2002; Matsuda 2006; Schroeder 2011). As Schroeder (2011, 201) noted, adherence to a standard English ideology throughout educational institutions as well as organizations like NCTE have framed "ethnolinguistic differences as educational obstacles to overcome rather than intellectual resources to exploit." It is time for composition researchers to pay attention to the dramatic demographic shifts taking place in the United States and transform the ways we teach writing.

Mexican American immigrants or children of immigrants, like the students profiled in this study, are contributing to a demographic shift in the United States largely precipitated by the growth in the Latina/o population. From 2000 to 2010, the Latina/o population in the United States increased from 35.3 to 50.5 million, accounting for 56 percent of the nation's population growth in this decade (Passel, Cohn, and Hugo Lopez 2011). While most Latinas/os still live in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, and Texas, their numbers are dramatically increasing in states where they have not traditionally been a significant part of the population, such as South Carolina with a 148 percent increase and Alabama with a 145 percent increase over the past decade, meaning that composition researchers and teachers at all institutions need to attend to supporting the success of diverse student populations. Accounting for over 65 percent of Latinas/os as of 2009, Mexicans and Mexican Americans (the focus of this study) play a huge role in this growth story (Passel, Cohn, and Hugo Lopez 2011).

As their population has increased, Latinas/os have become an increasing presence in the school system, comprising 23.3 percent of K–12 students as of 2010, up from 16.7 percent in 2000 (Fry and Lopez 2012). In Texas, the state in which my study was conducted, Latinas/os comprised 50.3 percent of the students in the K–12 system in 2010, accounting for over 90 percent of the enrollment growth in Texas schools over the decade (TEA 2011a). Latina/o enrollment at the college level has similarly surged, from 10 percent of total college enrollment in 2000 to 15 percent in 2010 (Fry 2011; Llagas and Snyder 2003). Although Latinas/os are entering the education system and graduating from college in greater numbers (Fry and Lopez 2012), there is a continued problem of retention and Latinas/os are still the "least educated major racial or ethnic group in terms of completion of a bachelor's degree" (Fry 2011).

A commonly referenced Lumina Foundation (2007) statistic notes that for every one hundred Latina/o elementary school students, fifty-two graduate from high school, twenty go to a community college, eleven go to a four-year institution, ten graduate from college, four of them earn a graduate degree, and one earns a doctorate. Unfortunately, Latina/o and other LM students often lack the resources to succeed. They often attend segregated, underfunded, and underperforming schools, are denied access to advanced coursework, have parents who do not possess the language skills and knowledge to help them with homework or navigate unfamiliar educational systems, and are viewed through a lens that sees their multilingualism as a deficit (Callahan and Shifrer 2012; Enright and Gilliland 2011; Harklau 2011; Llagas and Snyder 2003; Mosqueda 2012; Nuñez and Sparks 2012; Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2001; Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco and Todorova 2008; Villanueva 1993; Wolfe 1999). As a result, many students, despite coming from families with high aspirations for their education, never make it to college. Of those who do, many never graduate.

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT AND THE FIRST-YEAR EXPERIENCE

The first year of college is generally regarded as the most critical point of determining a student's likelihood to graduate from college, with the 2001 first-year retention rate at 73.9 percent at four-year institutions and only 54.1 percent at two-year colleges (Ishler and Upcraft 2005, 29). For instance, of the seven students in the study presented in this book, three dropped out and restarted classes their first year, with a few of these transferring to private technical colleges looking for a quicker path to completion. Looking further out, the commonly cited four-year graduation rate is a goal consistently achieved by a minority of students nationwide (Chronicle of Higher Education 2013).

The last few decades have brought more first-year initiatives, more scholarship, and more collaborations between college departments to promote first-year success and student retention (Evenbeck, Smith, and Ward 2010; Upcraft, Gardner, and Barefoot 2005). However, while writing teachers have engaged in some of the best practices validated by this research, composition studies has been largely absent from these discussions. A notable exception has been relatively recent work by scholars in basic writing focused on examining the positive impacts of basic writing programs on student retention (Baker and Jolly 1999; Glau 2007; McCurrie 2009; Peele 2010; Webb-Sunderhaus 2010). This research has largely arisen out of the need to defend programs increasingly at risk in an era of shrinking funding for higher education, a challenge that all those involved in postsecondary education will face moving forward.

Tinto (1975; 1988; 1993; 1997) was one of the earliest researchers focusing on students' first-year experience and causes behind student dropout. In 1975, he proposed a dropout theory based on Durkheim's model of suicide, in which he divided the college into two components, the academic and the social: "This theoretical model of dropout ... argues that the process of dropout from college can be viewed as a longitudinal process of interactions between the individual and the academic and social systems of the college during which a person's experiences in those systems ... continually modify his goal and institutional commitments in ways which lead to persistence and/or to varying forms of dropout" (Tinto 1975, 94).

Under Tinto's (1975) proposed model, a student's likelihood to persist is based in part on how well they integrate into both the social and academic spheres of the campus. Starting with work by Elbow (1968) and Murray (1969), composition studies has a long history of connecting students socially and academically to the university through pedagogies involving group work and conferencing individually with students. At one of the focal institutions in my study as well as elsewhere (Barnhouse and Smith 2006), FYC classes have increasingly been part of learning communities, which promote student involvement in various academic and social activities (Tinto 1993, 1997). Composition teachers and researchers have long recognized tacitly that "choices of curriculum structure and pedagogy invariably shape both learning and persistence on campus, because they serve to alter both the degree to which and manner in which students become involved in the academic and social life of the institution" (Tinto 1997, 620).

Despite the popularity of Tinto's work, especially his retention model, he has not been without critics. Some have noted that his work might not be applicable for minority and non-traditional student populations. For instance, one study found that social integration does not predict the success of Latina/o students (Torres and Solberg 2001). Other researchers (Cabrera, Stampen, and Hansen 1990; Cabrera, Nora, and Castaneda 1993) noted that Tinto's model did not sufficiently account for external factors such as the ability to pay and that an integrated model combining Tinto's model with a greater consideration of external factors resulted in a "a more comprehensive understanding of the complex interplay among individual, environmental, and institutional factors" (Cabrera, Nora, and Castaneda 1993, 135).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Transiciones by Todd Ruecker. Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Utah State Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0874219752
• ISBN 13: 9780874219753
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 219
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile