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...