This essay contributes to the emerging conversation about two-year college teacher-scholar-activism by revisiting the work of Elisabeth McPherson, the first community college faculty member to chair CCCC. Arguing that McPherson's fade from disciplinary memory reflects the marginalization of two-year college faculty that coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, Christie Toth traces three key themes in McPherson's published work: advocating for two-year colleges and the professionalization of their faculty; subverting institutional labeling of two-year college students; and challenging racism, classism, and sexism through pedagogy and policy. While her published work is not beyond critique, McPherson's career offers historical precedent for a two-year college English professional identity that integrates critical teaching, scholarly and organizational engagement, and activism for social justice at multiple scales.

This essay presents two case studies of assignments that are redesigned into genre-based writing prompts. The authors describe institutional and programmatic changes including the elimination of all non-credit bearing basic writing courses in favor of an ALP model and explain how these changes, coupled with an increasing focus on adult learners at our university, create an exigence for the work detailed in the case studies. They ground their discussion in scholarship focused on Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) and multi-genre assignment design. While the authors ultimately believe that the redesigned assignments presented in case studies are applicable and appealing to many students, they draw from principles of the andragogical model to make an argument for why genre-based assignments are especially relevant to and useful for adult learners who are basic writers.

Without offering explicit, basic instruction in writing to graduate students, we up the risks of maintaining the exclusion of the most underserved of adult learners in graduate education, and, thus, perpetuating social and racial hierarchies in professions requiring advanced degrees and in society writ large. This article highlights the ways in which graduate writing intersects with Basic Writing, especially given the politics of remediation facing adult learners in both contexts. It then analyzes one attempt to administer and teach a graduate writing course for English language learners and concludes with a catalog of administrative concerns Basic Writing teachers and administrators may want to consider when developing and teaching similar courses.

An ALP writing assignment provides a forum for student-faculty dialogue about academic and non-cognitive issues and serves as both a program and student assessment tool. Qualitative and quantitative studies reveal that students often mistakenly believe they are proficient regarding grammar and success strategies alike. Faculty can support students by recognizing that student success is tightly bound to the context in which students learn and striving to create an environment that explicitly addresses grammar and success concepts.

A pilot program of a co-requisite Learning Support writing course (ENGL 0999)  adapts features of Studio and Accelerated Learning programs to a two-semester sequence of First Year Writing. The program was designed to cultivate critical reflection, writing knowledge transfer, and student-led discussion. Narratives from the program director (Mendenhall) and a lead instructor (Brockland-Nease) discuss challenges in developing the pedagogical and programmatic support necessary to engage students and communicate with other writing instructors in the co-requisite format. The authors argue that ongoing, collaborative program design plays a critical role in supporting pedagogy for courses that, by design, serve as adjuncts to core writing classes

Research suggests that many students placed in the lowest level developmental writing courses do not make it to first-year composition and never graduate. The authors explain how they redesigned the lowest level writing course with scaffolded writing assignments to allow students to work at an accelerated pace.  Instructors and tutors work with students individually and in small groups as they complete the assignments. To facilitate real-time feedback, the authors created a Google Drive folder for class use so that students would have access to planning materials and prompt writing feedback. Students have individual folders for their work, and process writing is easily accessible to students, tutors, and instructors. More students from this lowest level course are moving directly into the required first-year English composition course. This new course design effectively supports students at an open-access two-year college.

Interviews with eleven student participants in a two-semester Stretch writing course reveal strong student satisfaction, improved writing performance, and additional benefits in areas such as transitioning to college, connecting with other students, and forming relationships with faculty and online learning. Â

This es say describes a linked, community-engaged writing course, “Field Writing: Food Stories,” which was offered as part of an early college program for rural high school students at a regional public university. While demonstrating many of the benefits commonly attributed to public writing and service learning in composition, the course raised important questions about the politics of access and acceleration, and about the role of community-engaged coursework in continuing to protect room in the curriculum for both high school and college writers.

In this essay, Branstad discusses how he used service-learning informed by the scholarship on transfer to reimagine current-traditional assumptions common in composition and to create rhetorically-oriented pathways for student success. The evidence of student learning demonstrates the value of implementing service-learning techniques informed by the theory on transfer within the basic writing classroom.

Students writing for an authentic audience in service-learning composition courses often face a double-audience dilemma. The texts they compose must suit the demands of the real-world audience of the service-learning project while also meeting the expectations of the academic audience. This article examines the role multimodal composition may play in helping alleviate the tension of the double audience, particularly for basic writers.

Lutkewitte acknowledges that digital natives read and write differently than people whose literacy practices primarily involve printed materials. After describing these differences, the author explores implications for future digital native writing instructors as both teachers and scholars. As they put their digital literacies into practice in academia, digital native writing instructors will challenge 20th century modes of writing instruction and notions of authorship to foster the 21st century literacies developing in and outside of the academy.

Alexander, Powell and Green explore ways in which traditional, nontraditional, and basic writing students view the affordances (potentials and limitations) of multimodal composition. These potentials include layering, implicit persuasion, audience awareness, creativity, and affective appeals, and the limitation of a lack of a clear thesis. In conclusion, the authors offer pedagogical considerations for instructors who assign multimodal composition in their classrooms.

Basic writing students' photo essays demonstrate that the multimodal composition process affords opportunities to participate in engaging conversations about writing. The authors argue that the incorporation of multimodal assignments in the basic writing classroom promotes both digital and print literacies while fostering awareness of students' own writing processes.

Booth and Spina-Caza argue that because video is so widely used as a communication tool, it should be incorporated into the composition classroom. Guidelines for teaching and writing with video are presented along with suggested resources for basic writing instructors.

Lay examines the role of multimodal composition in influencing basic writers’ perspective on writing and fostering their agency in and facility with composing. The author concludes that opportunities for multimodality in the basic writing classroom help students to both challenge traditional forms they may mistrust, articulate an individual understanding of composing as a process and successfully complete assignments in a variety of rhetorical modes.

Shapiro describes challenges instructors confront when designing multimodal basic writing coursework while commenting on benefits afforded to students. Drawing on her teaching experiences in basic writing and Upward Bound classes, she offers sample assignments and provides a framework for creating curricula based on multimodal, academic and home literacies. Book Review: Shimmering Literacies