Most empirical work on dual enrollment has been quantitative and concerned with issues of demographic participation (minority, first-generation, etc.) and college persistence (Carey, 2015; Cowan, & Goldhaber, 2015; D'Amico, Morgan, Robertson, & Rivers, 2013; Habersham, 2013; McCormick, 2010). Less research, however, has focused on the perspective of the students and how they perceive both their experience in dual enrollment programs and in their schooling and lives leading to the decision to participate. Fewer studies have concentrated on discovering student motivations for participating and to better understand their experiences (Hudson, 2016; Kanny, 2015; Wallace, 2015; Smith, 2015). As a group, rural students from economically depressed regions have not had the same academic opportunities as their urban and even suburban counterparts (Wallace, 2015; Koricich, 2013; Berg, 2010). By offering early college options, a particular type of dual enrollment program, to these students, school districts and their postsecondary partners can increase the college-going of their communities’ children, and perhaps positively impact the trajectories of lives. However, success of these early college programs is influenced by many things including the foundational development–academic, personal, and social–of the students that attend. To situate my work in this space, using the portraiture method, I sought to expand the limited use of work images and extend it by intersecting the idea with secondary students’ postsecondary choices, specifically as they apply to early college program enrollment. To accomplish this, I employed Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) theory on human agency and Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) social ecology as a framework to guide questions to students about their decisions to participate in an early college program. I made use of Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis’ (1997) approach to producing a portrait, which is the product of the aesthetic whole. They believe, In developing the aesthetic whole we come face to face with the tensions inherent in blending art and science, analysis and narrative, description and interpretation, structure and texture. We are reminded of the dual motivations guiding portraiture: to inform and inspire, to document and transform, to speak to the head and to the heart (p. 243). In this work, I offer the portraits of four early college students from a rural, economically disadvantaged area who made the decision to attend college while still in high school and why that decision is valuable for them and the institution they attend.
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