High School to College Writing Bridges: A Partnership between Lincoln High School and University of Denver Writing Programs Aligning High School and College Writing for Equitable Student Transitions

This extended a partnership between DU’s University Writing Program faculty and a local public high school with the goal of enhancing curriculum and pedagogical approaches for high school English teachers and providing insight into successful student transitions from high school to college writing tasks and situations. Higher education promises to enhance students’ upward mobility, but students’ college success is tied closely to their success in first-year writing courses (Rueker 2021). Although high schools aim to prepare students for college, any disconnect between high school and college writing curricula inequitably disadvantages minoritized and first-generation students (Wahleithner 2020), who face higher hurdles in their transition to college (Jackson, et al. 2022; Del Toro and Hughes 2020; Adams and McBrayer 2020), including disparate experiences with writing (Park 2023; Player 2021; 2022; Behizadeh 2019). CCESL funding allowed our team to respond to high school administrators’ request for teacher-professional development by collaboratively designing writing pedagogy workshops with high school teachers.By bringing together multiple perspectives in the design process, we facilitated a 3-day writing pedagogy workshop that offered a transformative co-mentoring experience for all participants. We also co-faciliated a workshop with the entire Writing Program led by students who worked on the project.

High school faculty had the opportunity to practice college-aligned writing and rhetoric activities to then incorporate into their curriculum with feedback from college educators and students. They also got to hear from college students who had taken their classes or classes at their school about what was and wasn’t aligned with college. With the training we had attended and the conversations with administrators we also better-designed the goals and exercises to fit the constraints and affordances of their curricula and contexts. By better-aligning their work to college writing, their hundreds of high school students will be better prepared for college.

In a questionnaire post-PD, the high school faculty reported benefitting from the student voices saying, “I loved how [the DU Students] were not too far removed from high school, so we had recent and relevant experience of their college writing. This can also be alum that are in the workforce that can provide insight about how ALHS teachers can expose students to writing for many disciplines and genres. ”More than anything, they expressed a desire for conversations across K-college instructors to improve their current work while also being respected as experts of their experience. “Space being created for discussions to provide perspective into what we are experiencing as educators and students. Then, being able to apply those learnings into deliverables that pertained to our current curriculum.” And “Being trusted as a learning, adult, and educator gave me the head space to do real work without feeling like someone was looking over my shoulder. I modified lessons, reworked major student assignments, and am walking away with both big picture and bite-sized next steps to grow and shape student writing.”

University faculty had the opportunity to exchange expertise about teaching and learn with high school faculty while DU students inspired revisions to our own pedagogies and approaches to co-authorship. For example, Sarah adapted interactive games about genre and transcript poetry activities for her first-year writing courses. Having moved from DU to Texas State University, an Hispanic-serving institution where 40% of students identify as first-generation college students, Sarah’s innovations extend these workshops’ benefits across state lines. Calley and Angela are better able to talk with her students about the kinds of skills and knowledge they’re transferring from high school into their college writing lives, and work with students explicitly to consider the value their high school writing experiences can lend them in the new, and often intimidating, world of college-level writing. We explicitly discuss the misconceptions and expectations moving from high school to college and then, also, across disciplines. We discuss this at the level of writing assignments, instruction, and feedback and then communicated this information to the entire writing faculty and administration (approximately 33) who teach all first-year students at DU (approximately 1,400 students).

The DU student and now alumn gained professional designing and facilitating the workshop. We mentored them around public speaking, access, and educational materials. They are also named contributors in the subsequent peer- reviewed publication.

Our collaborative approach to professional development also contributes to scholarship on best mentoring practices, which we presented and published on at a national mentoring conference. Traditional mentoring models prioritize top- down, advice-focused relationships, which risk reinforcing traditional hierarchies. A collaborative, co-mentorship approach such as ours resists such hierarchies, creating more equitable and sustainable partnerships that benefit all involved (Gappa, et al. 2007; Mullen 2000).