Researchers and educators have called for a connectivity of the gap between the dual enrollment program and the institution’s expectations of those programs. While there’s no mass movement toward a comprehensive alignment framework (Miller, 2010), the opportunities of early instruction in higher education directly correlate to “further successes once they enter college” (Farris, 2010, xxii). To this end, we can use rhetorical media through 21st century technologies to first readdress and operationalize a more robust definition of the supposed digital divide. While examining individual and programmatic attitudes about technologies, we must find new ways to use rhetorical media to combine newer and older media in ways that suggest a connection that extends beyond technology simply for technologies sake. Light (2001) suggests that the context of a technologies use matters as much if not more than the technology itself. Media is a dynamic ever-shifting tool that solitarily is not important. Examining how to use those media within the read write web and generating compelling communicative connections between institutions, instructors and the students themselves are the first steps in webbing our way through the stigma of us versus them.

This connectivity between student and program that integrates cooperative composition curriculum transdisciplinarily and developmentally appropriate must extend from pre-kindergarten through college. Composition is not a bounded set of skills divorced from other learning and acquired in a single serving. The US Department of Education’s New Common Core Standards (CCS) in writing includes a definition of “College and Career Readiness” as students being able to “respond to the varying demands of audience, task, purpose and discipline”, “use technology and digital media strategically and capably”, and “come to understand other perspectives and cultures”. The 11th and 12th grade writing standards (the years of most dual enrollment programs) correlate to a multimodal composition approach that addresses the new digital literacies on the 21st century student. The CCS objectives focus directly on the development of the rhetorical situation not through a traditional paper composition but more through a direct address of the composition student as a student of community rather than a narrowly focused output based on one set of objectives. The increase in depth of knowledge theory within the CCS directly addresses the digitally literate student’s interconnectedness between post-secondary programs and high school dual enrollment programs where both programs assume a joint responsibility based on a set of standards that the CCS begin to address at the lower levels. Hansen and Ferris (2010) call for a financial and governing culpability that those programs must share within a multiple post-secondary access pathway framework, much like our own notion of the open door model.

Blake-Plock (2010) argues that within the next decade the face of schools will change drastically. Education will move further from “schooling” and this new, fluid space will assist students in constructing their identities through communities of practice and use tools and discourses to align themselves with certain community practices where “they will build their identities as proactive inquirers” (Goode, 2010: p. 501; Lave and Wenger 1997). Situating identity with the participatory culture sheds light on the individual’s relationship with technology.

The institution needs to recognize what dual enrollment programs are doing, while the DE instructors need to continue to digitize the curriculum as a pedagogical route  to demonstrate the process of dual enrollment curriculum as part of the open door model. In part, to assuage the contestation of dual enrollment efficacy, these programs should mandate e-portfolios that demonstrate their success with the standardized and connected curriculum between high school and college composition. State testing waxes and wanes and college essays are a quaint 20th century novelty; I argue that the true measure of the student is the e-portfolio. Post-secondary programs should couple the e-portfolio with a strong programmatic assessment model to more effectively measure the successes and challenges of the open door model.

The open door model affords dual enrollment students the opportunities to utilize their tech savvy know-how to enhance their learning at the college level albeit a tension does arise in that relationship between group affiliation (and splitting that affiliation between multiple schools) and the individual agency of the students (Goode, 2010). To mollify some of those concerns, Jolliffe (2010) argues that everyone in literacy education must look critically at the notion that “literacy is literacy, no matter what context; and the idea that once you’ve ‘got’ literacy, then you’ve ‘got’ it for life (x)”, and if colleges and universities do encourage an open door model for their dual enrollment students, then they ought to have a some orientation experience grounding the students in academic literacies and practices of the institution. This orientation program needs to have a strong technology component. Students struggle with disparities in the quality of high school curriculum and their own resources, yet “one’s technology identity has a powerful influence on the attitudes and decisions students make regarding their academic and life plans” (Goode, 2010: p. 509).

Learning Swirl

The notion of entering, exiting, and reentering college at various ages throughout life, or what Mark Milliron (2007) calls the open door model of higher education, is an important conversation that directly addresses the need for a shift in the programmatic framework of community colleges and a reexamination of higher education. This necessity does not fit neatly into the P20 rhetorical box promulgated by non-less than the Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education, Karen Cator (2011). I argue that the true path of learning is from birth to death as learners swirl in and out of educational systems at various stages of their lives. For some, the linear pipeline of educational progress works well, although many of today's students either (re)enter school later in life as reentry students who have lived experiences, raised families, or defended our country. Conversely, the open door model also supports dual enrollment students who are enrolled in both college and high school simultaneously. These students earn both college credits and high school credit for the same course (for the sake of this examination, First Year Composition).

To teach these courses, institutions qualify instructors employed by the high schools with which they have partnerships, although the philosophies surrounding dual enrollment vary from site to site. Some high schools’ administrators shop around the best kick back (e.g. DE at a purely online college with very little overhead versus a brick and mortar institution), while other institutions wine and dine high school instructors who have clout in their schools. Some school districts focus on raising standardized test scores, and others provide rich opportunities to provide solid critical pedagogy for their students. The open door model affords high schools the chance to build college connections where dual enrollment students are provided rich opportunities for learning that better prepares them for higher education.

In the nineteenth century a question emerged within post-secondary schools composition studies in due to literacy deficits perceived by college faculty of high school English instruction (Crowley, 1998). Dual enrollment situates these studies where they originated: high school. Hansen & Farris (2010) argue that First Year Composition has been repackaged as a gate-keeping or acculturation function for colleges that fill the needs for graduate students to experience college instruction before completing their own degrees. High schools across the country call for writing across the curriculum to varying degrees of successes, while Smith (2004) asserts this notion should be accomplished at the university level as composition-infused curriculum in all areas would better develop critical thinking and student successes, much like the argument for the infusion of technology proliferating educational settings at both the high school and post-secondary pathways. The dual argument for technology and composition in all departments only increases the complexity of the notion that our current educational system needs a dire reformation.

While Milliron (2007) mollifies the masses with the reassurance that he's not calling for a complete restructuring of higher education; what he is suggesting is that terminology like "two-year college" is no longer operational as our students swirl in and out of educational services in a very non-linear progression. The open door boundaries between educational territories are becoming more porous and blurred. This model shouldn’t be an accumulation of seat hours but should be a chance to develop further along the learning spectrum through an organic fluidity of the read write web  (Web 2.0 as it is sometimes called) where the student consumer becomes the producer in a multi-directional global, technological engagement. The duality of this shift has continued to fuel the concerns of both the institution and the dual enrollment programs attempting to not only cater to this new breed of student but also look out for its own needs.