Playing College: Twice the Credit, Half the Respect

The November 2013 Council Chronicle arrived today. I'm always interested to see what's new. The cover lists that there's a "New NCTE Policy Research Brief" related to "First-Year Writing." At Joliet West High School, Sean and I teach a dual credit Rhetoric course: students take a placement test, and once admitted they can earn credit from Joliet Junior College for English 101-102: Rhetoric by getting a C or higher. The link above explains in more detail how it works.

To teach the course, JJC requires a Master's in English, and after I earned a degree in English Studies from Elmhurst College, I picked up two sections of Rhetoric and have taught it since 2008. As the class grew, Sean picked up 1 section, and he even picked up a night class of Rhetoric at the college itself.

I bring this up because the Policy Research Brief from NCTE suggests that the class we teach at the high school "cannot fully replicate the experiences of First-Year Writing because high school students' social and cognitive development is at a different level" (14). Further, the Policy adds, "Allowing college credit for writing courses completed while in high school will not help students to fully develop capacities for engagement, persistence, collaboration, reflection, metacognition, flexibility, and ownership that will help them to grow as writers and learners" (15). Well...where to begin.

Sean has shared with me the skill level he has encountered over the 3 years he's been teaching the night class at JJC, and often he says that the students we have at the high school have an equal--if not a stronger--foundation as writers. Granted, some of our students are ones who opted for Rhetoric over AP Literature and Composition, so they were high achieving already; however, these students make up roughly half of our dual credit students.

We have never altered the syllabus to make assignments easier for dual credit students. In fact, we often add even more writing in the formative sense since we see the students for nearly 5 hours each week  vs. the 3 hours at JJC. This additional time may be used for conferencing, scaffolding, or any number of practices that we feel will make our students more successful writers, readers, and thinkers. This isn't a knock on JJC; rather, it's a defense of our course at the high school.

Let's consider, then, the "deficiencies" in our dual credit class for a moment.

• lack of engagement: we make a concerted effort to allow students some say in their topic selection. For instance, for their compare-contrast essay we had them go to Rotten Tomatoes and choose two reviews by reputable critics of the same film, and students found similarities and differences in style, focal points, organization, tone, or anything else worthy of study between the reviews. In the 102 course,the evaluation "paper" becomes a blog entry where students must establish a set of criteria for a particular food or drink product, and then in groups of 3-5 they compare brands of toaster pastries, orange soda, or mint gum. This was pretty high interest.
• reduced capacity for persistence: I'm not sure how a student would be less persistent in a high school class vs. a college class. We have more face time for conferencing about drafts, so we can be more persistent.
• less collaboration: our students actually see each other more frequently due to the nature of high school, and we include collaborative projects regularly, whether it's with our blog evaluation groups or with the collaboration we require for that food evaluation project described earlier.
• less reflection and metacognition: Our students submit all their essays via an electronic dropbox. Essentially, we have a digital portfolio. To support metacognition, our students use www.scribd.com and embed their essays on their blogs. The post around this embedded essay is actually a metacognitive exploration of the choices they made as writers. Here's a student example (see the September 26th post).  
• less flexibility: Again, I'm not sure about this part either. We have a 1:1 environment at the high school, so rather than fighting for lab time like at the college, we know we'll have access to computers. The syllabus allows us flexibility for how we develop their writing ability, and we take full advantage of that.
• less ownership: Their writing is their writing. Their blog posts are their digital way of "entering the conversation," as Gerald Graff suggests. By chosing their topics, occasionally choosing their medium, and drafting essays in a workshop-type environment, I would contend that they do have a sense of ownership. Now, if by ownership the contention is that high school students take the class for free and aren't as invested--literally--in the course, I have no argument there; they are merely taking advantage of a great opportunity to free up their courseload when they arrive at college to take even more courses, thus preparing them even more for their intended careers.

The Policy Brief has an extensive Works Cited page, and I have no doubt that there may very well be some "social and cognitive" differences between seniors in high school and freshmen in college, but I would argue that some of the variations between the high school and college course are related to the personality and style of the teachers and their expectations.

While I don't require my students to call me "Professor Newman," and they can't exercise their autonomy by leaving the building if I'm 10 minutes late to class, I think the opportunity we're providing students could equate fairly to what they'd get at "real college."