Transitions in College Writing
from NCTE INBOX 5-10-11
This time of the year is one of beginnings, endings, and change. Students are leaving one course, soon to be entering another. Some are making big changes -- from nursery school to kindergarten, elementary school to middle school, and middle school to high school. High school students face enormous change as they enter college. One important change is the transition from the writing they did in high school to the writing expected of them in college. The following resources from NCTE focus on this transition and on how educators in high school and in college can work together to prepare successful student writers.
Framework for Success in Post Secondary Writing, a position statement from NCTE, the Council of Writing Program Administrators, and the National Writing Project, describes the habits of mind that good student writers possess and how teachers might help their students cultivate those habits.
The NCTE article “Writing in High School/Writing in College: Research Trends and Future Directions” synthesizes and extends data from some of the most prominent and promising large-scale research projects in writing studies while also presenting results from the authors’ own research. By juxtaposing these studies, the authors offer a complex understanding of writing practices at the high school and college level.
What can teachers do to prepare high school students to write effectively in college? The editor of Teaching Writing in High School and College: Conversations and Collaborations has compiled an illuminating collection of encouraging narratives and studies suggesting that secondary-postsecondary partnerships and exchanges can significantly improve students’ ability to succeed at college-level writing tasks. Read more in Chapter 9, “Talking about Transitions: Dialogues between High School and University Teachers.”
Edited by Chris Jennings Dixon, Lesson Plans for Teaching Writing provides a collection of lesson plans, grouped around popular categories such as Writing Process, Portfolios, and Writing on Demand, to help prepare high school and college students for college-level writing.
“As we think of elementary, middle, and secondary education as occurring on a continuum, with one grade preparing students for the next, we must begin to think of postsecondary education occurring on the same continuum, with high school learning intended specifically to prepare students for the next level of study.” This is fleshed out in the article “Closing the Gap between High School Writing Instruction and College Writing Expectations."
The first-year college writing course is a requirement in most colleges and universities. Many high school students seek to fulfill this requirement before entering college through a variety of programs. NCTE's College Credit for Writing in High School: The "Taking Care of" Business explores the complexity of related issues, offers best practices and pitfalls of such a system, establishes benchmarks for success, and lays out possible outcomes for a new educational landscape. Read more in the Council Chronicle article “College Credit for Writing in High School: Bypassing First-Year Comp Courses Is a National Trend with Both Critics and Defenders."
In 1982, Nancy Sommers wrote “Responding to Student Writing,” and it was published in the pages of College Composition and Communication. Recently, the author, along with Carol Rutz and Howard Tinberg, wrote commentaries that follow excerpts from Sommers’s 1982 essay in the article “Re-Visions: Rethinking Nancy Sommers’s ‘Responding to Student Writing,’1982." In a reread of the original article, Nancy notes that she “feels the absence of any ‘real’ students who, through voice, expertise, and years of being responded to, could offer their teachers valuable lessons.”
Howard Tinberg’s article “'Under History’s Wheel': The Uses of Literacy” reflects on writing as he focuses on helping our students write well for their own purposes as well as writing well academically or for future employment.
The third edition of Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, edited by Victor Villanueva and Kristin L. Arola, is a collection of texts which provide new and experienced teachers and scholars with indispensable insights into the challenges, controversies, and shifting currents within the rich and ever-evolving field of composition studies.
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