Composing Meaningful Connections Across High School and College Contexts

ABSTRACT

The question of how students navigate the transition from high school to college writing is of perennial concern to teachers and researchers of adolescent and adult literacy. This study contributes to this conversation through an in‐depth analysis of the composing experiences that a group of eight, first‐generation‐to‐college Latina students found most meaningful during their four years of high school and their first semesters of college. Comparing these compositions' modalities, contexts, topics, and motivations reveals the importance of identity‐affirming composing experiences and the opportunity for expanding the range of composing modalities for students across secondary and postsecondary settings. Artifacts of participants' meaningful composing ranged from self‐portraits and sculptures created in high school to memoirs and research proposals written in college. Their descriptions of why these compositions mattered to them illustrate the necessity of and methods for creating meaningful connections between students' identities, communities, and literacy practices as they connect their writing across high school and college contexts.