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Sally Olivas
Rhetoric/Composition Portfolio
Spring 2015
English 588 Paper
Teenagers, College and Social Networks
The very idea of having high-school students young adolescents take college courses
is quite crazy, if one really thinks about it. Sure, there are always exceptional students, those who
are prodigies and/or extraordinarily mature and intelligent. These young outliers would excel in
college courses, no doubt. However, research shows all types of high-school students excel, and
this includes minorities who are at-risk. When one considers such a possibility, the
considerations are enormous and go well beyond the actual coursework the student has to master.
Perhaps the biggest consideration is the social aspect. Given this, James Paul Gee and his work
Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses fits well into my paper High
Schoolers at the Big School, which examines Dual Enrollment Programs.
James Paul Gees work discusses how we humans are social creatures, and he applies this
concept to literacy and language and the world of school. One aspect he discusses is how
members of social communities share the same values, The producers and consumers are,
though engaged in different practices, members of a larger community that has a consensus
around certain values (23). This holds true in Dual Enrollment (DE) programs, as shown on
page 6 of my paper, because the high schoolers who choose to take on the challenge of college
coursework clearly value education, and so do their teachers, professors and college classmates.
If the high school students did not have those same values, the DE programs would not be
effective, and the students would simply fail or never take on the challenge in the first place.

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However, there are instances when not everyone is on the same page, and that is when
instructors dont follow the guidelines that several professional organizations have developed for
DE programs, which is discussed on page 7 of my paper. Gee says meaning is primarily the
result of social interactions, negotiations, contestations, and agreement among people. It is
inherently variable and social (21). Contestations may be part of meaning, but soon enough,
people either need to agree to disagree and still make a decision or they need to agree on said
decision. Evidence of this is when they dont agree or follow guidelines in DE programs; the
outcomes are not effective, and the students dont prosper.
In addition to finding meaning through agreement, Gee spends a lot of time discussing
Discourse and how he views that:
We also have to get ourselves appropriately in sync with various objects, tools,
places, technologies, and other people. Being in a Discourse is being able to
engage in a particular sort of dance with words, deeds, values, feelings, other
people, objects, tools, technologies, places and times so as to get recognized as a
distinctive sort of who doing a distinctive sort of what. (152)
This is shown in DE programs when they are only effective when the courses are taken at the
college site, page 9 of my paper. Students need to be in the college Discourse to make
themselves distinctive, and this has a lot to do with the social considerations of being in the
college environment.
Gee furthers this idea when he discusses the idea of cultural models and how they
sometimes prevent us from seeing the world with an open mind, It is the job of the teacher to
allow students to grow beyond both the cultural models of their home cultures and those of the
mainstream and school culture. So language and literacy classes ought to be about figuring or

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modeling or theorizing the world in new ways, as well (110). Students in DE programs are
unable to do this at their high school, research shows, as discussed on page 10 of my paper.
Students need to be on the college campus to experience other cultural models. Gee would agree
with DE programs on college campuses because it gives students a chance to create new
perspectives in social arenas with new cultural models.
Finally, some DE programs operate within Small Learning Communities. Research
shows these students are more successful than those who are not in Learning Communities, page
11 of my paper. In regards to community, Gee says:
The Scribner and Cole research clearly indicates that what matters is not
literacy as some decontextualized ability to write and read, but the
social practices into which people are apprenticed as part of a social group,
whether as students in school, letter writers in the local community, or
members of a religious group. (75-76)
This certainly holds true in DE programs, especially those in the Learning Communities. The
social aspect of the students knowing they are not alone, having extra support and resources, and
being held accountable as part of a group increase their success.
Dual Enrollment Programs facilitate the college road for students who are ready
intellectually, emotionally, and socially. They work because students join other like-minded
students and create a social system that is different than the one in high school. James Paul Gees
theory of social linguistics and literacies lends itself to this discussion and helps to relate why
these programs work.

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Works Cited
Gee, James Paul. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. New York:
Routledge, 2012. Print.