English and Nagle describe a collaborative, qualitative study of reading practices that grew out of their participation in a seminar on "Looking Both Ways," a project that brings together faculty from City University of New York universities and colleges and public school teachers in New York to share and reflect on their literacy education practices. As part of their work the authors visited each other's classrooms at Queens College-CUNY (English) and Flushing High School (Nagle). Borrowing from Shirley Brice Heath's "What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School," English and Nagle were interested in learning about students' expectations about reading practices in each other's classrooms. They found fewer differences between students' reading practices in high school and college than they expected. In both places, similarities between students' reasons and purposes for reading when compared to the motivations ascribed to reading by high school and college instructors.
For successful collaborations between high school instructors and basic writing professionals, McNenny argues, power relations must be acknowledged, and roles reconsidered. In response to mandated state standards and in an effort to cut costs, the California State University system issued a call for proposals for aligning students' writing competence at high school graduation with college entry-level requirements. This alignment would preempt the need for remediation in college. The CSU initiative tied the success of the collaboration directly to the English Placement Text, a timed exam that includes writing. Under these conditions, McNenny's university team and high school partners designed and proposed a partnership that reflected Freirean principles of learning. The resulting project emphasized high school teachers' roles in identifying site-specific issues and solutions, stressed basic writing professionals' roles as facilitators to help bridge the gap between experience and scholarship, and used teacher-researcher projects and reflective writing to help high school writing instructors create real-world rhetorical situations that engage students.
Otte outlines the growing pressure on high schools to prepare an increasing number of college-bound students, noting that some 50 percent of beginning college students require remedial classes. While high schools are blamed for these students' need for remedial attention, Otte notes that about one-third of underprepared students did not take requisite classes and that nearly 50 percent of them are at least twenty-two years old—long out of high school. These pressures—often in the form of state-mandated tests—are turning high schools into "crucibles of college prep," rendering high schools and colleges into the "most essential learning communities we have" (112–113). Otte suggests that creating high school, and college collaborative partnerships (he is involved with "Looking Both Ways," a collaborative effort to resolve mutual problematic issues) is a better solution than state mandates and quick fixes.
See: Hugh English and Lydia Nagle, "Ways of Taking Meaning from Texts: Reading in High School and College" [315].