Content area
Full text
This article shares findings from a CCCC-funded grant that focuses on a dual enrollment program in Washington State called Running Start. This model invites high schoolers to take college courses on a college campus. Instructors are frequently advised to treat Running Start participants "as if they were any other college students," yet as our large-scale survey suggests, these students have complex hybrid identities that warrant greater consideration. Without diluting academic rigor, we call for an enhanced understanding of the "funds of knowledge" (González, Moll, and Amanti) that high schoolers bring to First-Year Composition in the spirit of congruous inclusivity.
Despite the fact that dual enrollment has become part of the American vernacular, such familiarity opens the potential for desensitization of the subject position associated with the dual. In the familiarity of this everyday speech, there is a dormant complexity that demands consideration. As our research reveals, students are hyperaware of inhabiting these multiple identities, what we term hybridity. Denoting a mixture or combination, the concept of hybridity has extensive reach, informing theories of biology, cultural studies, globalization, linguistics, music, postcolonialism, and sociology. But hybridity, particularly as it refers to melded identities, also describes the kind of straddling that dual enrollment students regularly perform. This straddling represents more than a strategic positioning; it manifests as a form of intellectual aerobatics that unravels stable features of identity and thrusts students into unstable terrain-coupled with the aforementioned desensitization of this duality, students are not afforded a roadmap to navigate the high seas of academia. Although we contend that this hybridity is a ramification of all dual enrollment programs, impacting student success writ large, the effects of this amalgamation are especially amplified in the "come to campus" (Reed) model of dual enrollment in which high school students take courses at the college.
Often heralded as the paragon of dual enrollment, the come-to-campus version represents a growing contingent, comprising roughly 23 percent of all precollege programs (qtd. in "CWPA Position Statement" 8). This model enjoys an assumed level of prestige-one that has largely cloistered its existence from the criticisms that have assailed other modes of dual enrollment where classes are offered in the high school. Although taking courses on a college campus does provide students with a beneficial shift...