The article explores the prevalence of for-profit tutoring services contracted by four-year and two-year colleges and the perceptions writing center professionals have about for-profit tutoring services. Applying a grounded theory approach, the researchers found five main themes that emerged from an open-ended survey sent to writing studies and writing center listservs in fall 2022. The article concludes with suggestions modeled after not-for-profit tutoring initiatives such as the Western eTutoring Consortium.

As part of a study I conducted to investigate the variables that influence our students’ writing center participation, students who had not used the center were asked to submit free-response data to further describe their reasons for nonuse. For this article, the nonusers’ narrative data are interpreted within the context of the quantitative results I obtained to gain a deeper understanding of why some students do not use our writing center. Based on my findings, I offer recommendations for tailoring writing center support to better meet our students’ needs, with the overall aim of increasing their use of our services.

Answering recent calls for more scholarship on LGBTQIA+ experiences in the writing center, this article reflects upon the joys and emotional labor involved in queering our center’s programming by offering an LGBTQIA+ literature writing group.

This collaboratively composed paper recognizes the juxtaposition and resonance between two writing center workers’ experiences, writerly voices, and perspectives on the future of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the two-year writing center. It also takes into account our shared commitment to honesty with ourselves and each other about where we succeed and where we fail in our work as diversity practitioners.

This article examines two-year college peer writing tutors’ preparedness for the emotional labor of writing center work. Through stories, this multivocal piece shares the experiences of nine current and former peer tutors from a writing center at a large midwestern technical college and challenges the narrative of two-year colleges as remedial spaces.

In recent years, the college writing center at our community college began an embedded tutoring program in hopes of reaching more developmental English students. A combination of the pandemic and the temporary shift to online-only tutoring, pandemic funding opportunities, and changes in the college’s developmental education program led tutors to rethink how best to help developmental students succeed. Ultimately, this article shows that developing our embedded tutoring program facilitated a partnership between instructors, tutors, and students that resulted in higher academic performance, student and faculty engagement, and faculty buy-in.

The editors of this special issue of Teaching English in the Two-Year College highlight the lack of scholarship on two-year college writing centers despite their widespread presence. Systemic barriers are in place at most two-year colleges, including heavy workloads, lack of institutional support for research, and limited incentives for two-year-college writing center staff to publish. The issue features new research showcasing the unique challenges and innovations in two-year college writing centers. The editors hope this issue sparks an ongoing conversation around the important and distinctive work happening in two-year college writing centers

This Instructional Note presents seven semesters of data showing the results of eliminating developmental reading and writing on our campus.

This piece begins to contextualize my stance as a community college writing teacher, just over eighteen years in.

In this article, I provide a chronological narrative to my ungrading choices in composition classes as a neurodiverse single mother from a working-class background. I discuss my positionality as a White person committed to justice and my experiences as an “assessment killjoy” (West-Puckett et al.) during the ethical turn in writing studies. From this foundation, I reflect on my attempts to grade more equitably. I discuss my pedagogical goals, which are grounded in intersectional feminist theory (hooks; Royster and Kirsch), standpoint theory (Harding), learning sciences (Hammond; Ross), and a robust model of the writing construct (White et al.), and analyze the consequences of exit portfolios, labor-based contract grading (Inoue), and specifications grading (Nilson) via this integrated framework.

This article considers recent trends in developmental education and analyzes disaggregated student data, exploring the extent to which developmental education reform of corequisite instruction affected access of one community college’s students to a first-semester composition course. By examining student access and student success across two distinct semesters, before and after extensive developmental education reform, the article presents an approach to deep assessment that is necessary for English departments at community colleges as they analyze and adjust to specific reforms.

This article shares findings from a research study on writing students’ preferences, needs, and success rates across in-person, hybrid, and asynchronous online modalities and the implications for department scheduling.

When we offer students engagement in the creation of the course, not only do we acknowledge that those in culturally minoritized positions are adept at deploying the same skills we seek to teach, but also we show that their lived experiences are valuable, necessary, and desirable within the classroom. This recognition opens a space in which students not only feel a sense of belonging but also create the terms of belonging. This article shares an evolving five-year and running process and offers an overview of how a community-based assessment practice grew from adapting (with students) labor-based grading coupled with self-directed writing.

This essay explores the pedagogical potential of using labor-based grading and gameful learning design in a first-year writing course at an open-access college in the Southeastern United States.

This symposium documents an ongoing conversation between five faculty members from Portland Community College. The discussion explores what “equity-based assessment” means, grappling both with the reasons for adopting such approaches as contract grading, labor-based grading, and ungrading and with the challenges of implementing them in two-year colleges.

This Instructional Note is for two-year college instructors who have attended conference presentations and read articles about the benefits of ungrading and want to know more about the pragmatics of teaching and how the shift to alternative assessment will affect their work.

In this special issue introduction about alternative grading practices, we argue that stories from two-year colleges and other underrepresented institutions matter. As our title suggests, this special issue is an attempt to recognize the unrecognized and disrupt the dominant alternative assessment narrative. To meet the needs of all students, especially those whose journeys include two-year colleges, the field must find ways to elevate faculty voices from community colleges, technical colleges, and vocational colleges in conversations about pedagogical innovations, including grading.

Introducing an alternative grading framework to students can be a challenge. Instructors might encounter student resistance, confusion, and frustration. To better help students understand both why moving away from traditional grading practices is important and how the classroom’s alternative assessment system functions, this Instructional Note suggests centering dialogue, students’ histories with grades, and an overview of the classroom’s alternative grading practice during the first couple of weeks of class.

This article explores the connections between creating an equitable classroom and antiracist assessment. The article attempts to explain the impact of the equitable classroom on student apathy. Additionally, rigid concepts of “failing” under this equitable classroom model are interrogated. Finally, the article provides some insights into the limitations and pitfalls of the equitable classroom design.

The flexibility of labor-based contract grading allowed students in the study to make strategic, intentional, autonomous choices about the types of labor and products they produced. This strategic decision-making helped them to balance the workload requirements of their other classes, employment, and personal issues and laid important groundwork for students’ emerging autonomy.

The majority of first-year writing “is taught by teachers whose educational backgrounds are more likely to be in literature, cultural studies, or creative writing than in rhetoric and composition” (Abraham 78). This disciplinary knowledge gap poses a challenge for FYW faculty to adjust to new shifts in FYW pedagogy. We would expect inhouse faculty development opportunities to help fill these gaps; however, the results of our year-long qualitative study indicate that the lack of shared disciplinary knowledge and the constraints on adjunct faculty make it challenging for faculty without backgrounds in writing studies to adapt their pedagogies. We add to the body of scholarship on professionalization in two-year college writing studies (e.g., Andelora; Griffiths; Jensen et al.; Sullivan; Toth et al., “Distinct”) and argue that addressing this problem will require investing resources in adjunct support; changing hiring practices to prioritize expertise in writing studies; and designing faculty development that focuses on both theory and pedagogy.

This Instructional Note is designed to assist students with using the rhetorical skills they already have as a bridge to writing rhetorical analysis essays.

College reading instruction warrants recognition as a necessary and actionable means of teaching for social justice. Faculty who teach students how to read course texts—and who guide and support them in doing so—advance social justice and equity via three separate mechanisms of action. These processes preferentially benefit marginalized and underserved students while more broadly fostering conceptual and perspective-taking skills essential for social justice.

This Instructional Note, grounded in Latin American cultural values, offers “wise practices” for instructors to connect lived experiences to course curriculum, encourage authentic voice and “home language practices,” and treat students as extended family to reduce academic isolation.

In the fall of 2018, the First-Year Composition program at North Central Texas College (NCTC) initiated what informally became known as the Textbook Project. Our goal was to provide our community college students with innovative, imaginative, and inspiring classroom experiences that paralleled the high-impact opportunities their peers were afforded at four-year universities. The Textbook Project encompassed five key features: an NCTC-specific textbook, a campus-wide common read, resources for faculty and students in our college’s LMS, a college-wide lecture series, and funding for faculty professional development. Five years later, the project’s emphasis on continuity through collaboration has revitalized the department through faculty engagement and increased student success.

This study examines the effects of a curriculum based on self-regulated strategy instruction in an accelerated developmental education (DE) English course in a community college. Faculty at the college had established a four-week, two-credit compressed course that enabled students to enroll in an eleven-week first-year composition (FYC) course in the same semester, reducing remediation from fifteen weeks to just four weeks. The course focused on writing argumentative essays using sources. The study used a quasi-experimental design with five instructors and sixty-six students to compare the experimental curriculum to a business-as-usual control condition. In the experimental curriculum, students learned strategies for writing using sources, including strategies for critical reading and for planning and revising. In addition to writing and reading strategies, students also learned metacognitive, self-regulation strategies, such as goal setting, task management, and reflection. The study found a large positive effect (ES = .96) of the treatment on quality of an argument essay written using sources. However, no significant effects were found on a summary outline, self-efficacy, or completion of the subsequent FYC course. The study demonstrates the value of strategy instruction in DE English courses; it is the first experimental study of strategy instruction in an accelerated DE course. Further research is needed to evaluate the effects of strategy instruction in corequisite courses and in FYC.

This Instructional Note provides information on having students create research posters to support oral presentations in their first-year writing classes. Creating digital posters connects to multimodal assignments and provides transferable skills.

Modifying inclusive creative workshop models for FYW classrooms empowers student engagement and persistence and allows instructors with creative practices to effectively draw on their expertise to guide students’ writing of persuasive argumentative prose.

This Instructional Note elaborates on how weekly anonymous wellness check-in surveys can be designed and implemented in English courses to support students’ purposeful awareness of their well-being and to create a sense of supportive community in the composition classroom.

This essay seeks to add to existing conversations about the role of first-year composition (FYC) in relation to students’ subsequent literacy experiences. Using data from an open-ended survey of former students five years after they completed FYC, in which they describe their current reading and writing practices and reflect on how these practices connect (or fail to connect) to what they recall from FYC, this article positions the findings within the context of scholarship on WAW and TFT and ultimately calls for increased attention to the situated nature of writing as part of the FYC curriculum at two-year colleges.