Transiciones: Pathways of Latinas and Latinos Writing in High School and College by Todd Ruecker (review)

At first glance, Todd Ruecker’s Transiciones: Pathways of Latinas and Latinos Writing in High School and College might seem a strange fit for a review in Community Literacy Journal. It is, after all, a study of high school to college transitions with a primary focus on classroom writing experiences. However, readers of CLJ will appreciate Ruecker’s capacious approach to this important literacy transition, as he works to construct the networks of relationships and sponsors that support or hinder the transition for each student. In doing so, he calls for a more complex understanding of literacy transitions that can help shift the popular discourse from a focus on deficits, in which Latina/o students fail, to one of how institutions can better serve these traditionally underserved students. Following others in literacy studies, Ruecker believes institutions can and must change, and he seeks to “imagine the ways high schools and universities can facilitate Latina/o student transitions into a more economically successful life” (147). Because of an action research approach that extends beyond only what takes place within classrooms, his findings offer possibilities for ways universities can better engage communities as well as how community organizations can support students as they engage the challenges of the college writing transition. Ruecker’s work holds great value for all readers interested in supporting the success of college-going students.

As Ruecker explains in Chapter 1, a re-examination of mainstream instructional practices at the college level is necessary because the demographics of incoming college students no longer represent the “typical” white, middle-class, English-speaking student living on campus. Brief descriptions of the student participants in this ethnographic study help to support the statistical assertions offered. While all seven student participants attended the same high school in the border town of El Paso, Texas, they each brought different resources, abilities, and histories. Only one, for example, self-reported English as his first language. While some were educated in U.S. schools from K–12, one student reported starting as late as 8th grade. One of the participants traveled across the border from Mexico every day for his education. These brief histories will be familiar to readers with experience working in border regions.

To engage the complexity of the literacy transition across institutions for these students from ethnically and linguistically minoritized backgrounds, Ruecker draws from Tara Yosso’s theory of community cultural wealth, which reinterprets Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and capital through a Critical Race Theory (CRT) lens. As Ruecker explains, Yosso’s work challenges the deficit perspective that students lack the proper capital or habitus for success, as she begins with the assumption that minority communities possess cultural wealth, and identifies six types of community cultural wealth: aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant capital (20). By adapting Yosso’s model in his own analysis, Ruecker shifts from what could be a deficit-based analysis to an exploration of the ways in which students utilize their varied resources when they encounter challenges in the high school to college transition.

In Chapter 2, we are offered an overview of the differing writing experiences offered across institutional contexts. The impact of standardized testing heavily influences writing instruction at Samson High School (SHS), a school serving predominantly low-income Latina/o students, leading to a “culture of testing” that causes an ESL teacher to devote the majority of class time to test preparation materials (31). The value placed on student test achievement leads to limited writing opportunities for students in mainstream (non-AP) classes until senior English. Outside factors also influence writing instruction at the local community college. With five course schedules and teaching loads with multiple preparations, instructors have little time to innovate or bring an outdated curriculum based on the rhetorical modes in line with current disciplinary thinking. In contrast, Borderlands University (BU), a land-grant institution with a new writing program director and an influx of funding, hosts...