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

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.

We are now a decade into the call for comprehensive community college “redesign” known as Guided Pathways. This introduction provides an overview of the Guided Pathways model and its advocacy arm and reviews critiques of the model in education research and two-year college literacy studies. These reviews contextualize the contents of the special issue.

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This is a lightly edited version of the TYCA Chair’s Address delivered at the 2023 National TYCA Conference in Chicago, Illinois.

This article presents a video discussion board assignment designed to foster belonging and academic language practice in a remote classroom. We consider how the assignment supported robust discussion and multimodal composition in Critical Reading and Writing, a course run with synchronous and asynchronous components during the COVID-19 pandemic at a technical college.

This essay explores affordances and limitations of the disciplinary labels that two-year college teachers use to frame our work. Ultimately, it argues that the termliteracy studiesbest reflects the transdisciplinary work we do.

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This article explores how we eliminated—without lowering student success rates—our developmental writing and reading courses (three to seven noncredit hours) and shifted to an all-inclusive, no-placement-necessary, integrated reading and writing course for first-year comp.

This article explores the Reading Apprenticeship framework as a support for instructors to orchestrate dynamic, contextualized literacy instruction that supports both student engagement and deeper learning about the discipline of writing studies.

Antiracist education practices have gained increasing attention. Oftentimes, however, descriptions of this work fail to explicate the role of reading skills in students’ critical engagement with diverse texts. I explore the potential of metacognitive reading strategy instruction as a form of foundational literacy skills development for engaging in antiracist reading. Drawing from my experiences as a female of color and a coordinator and instructor of integrated reading and writing, I expand upon the concept of raciolinguistically just reading instruction, describing how students can document their application of multiple foundational reading strategies through the meta-strategy of annotation and other metacognitive practices. In particular, I focus on how students’ annotations can reflect their work in making text-based connections. Such annotation practice enacts a culturally sustaining pedagogy that amplifies student voices and their role as knowledge producers. I conclude by considering the larger role of decentering the instructor to foster students’ antiracist reading.

This article describes the importance of pedagogies of access for equity in literacy classrooms, especially for first-generation students, who are more likely to bring what sociologists call strategies of deference that have been shaped by differences in class culture. A threshold concepts approach can bring transparency to the values of college-level core literacy skills to help interrogate and address those differences.

In these instructional notes, I share practical strategies for using ESL students’ first language as a resource for English language and literacy acquisition. These strategies emerged from a bilingual writing program that linked ESL and Spanish writing instruction at Bronx Community College (CUNY). After discussing how I was able to circumvent the monolingual orientations of my institution and set up this program as a learning community cluster, I illustrate ways in which translanguaging can help ESL students take ownership of English for academic purposes.

In 2019, the TYCA Executive Committee appointed the TYCA Workload Task Force to develop a white paper on workload and two-year college English faculty. This white paper, which is the result of a national survey of more than a thousand two-year college English instructors, establishes workload recommendations for teachers of postsecondary literacy courses in community and technical college settings.

In response to growing neoliberal pressures and austerity measures, two-year English teacher-scholars have embraced Sullivan’s call to activism, but this work is made challenging as aspiring teacher-scholar-activists struggle to balance activism with the other heavy demands of their professional practice. After expanding teacher-scholar-activism as a theoretical framework, we explore activism through cross-case analysis of three developmental literacy professionals’ actions, mindsets, and training. We then provide a pragmatic how-to manual for aspiring teacher-scholar-activists.

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This article describes a research assignment for first-year composition students that combines film and television motif analysis and role-playing, thus creating an opportunity for students to write critiques of contemporary institutions.

This article is the first of a two-part thematic analysis of interviews reporting on the professional identity enactment of developmental literacy practitioners; we argue for intentional, explicit inclusion of developmental literacy disciplinary perspectives as essential for further expanding the two-year college English community of practice.

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In this current era of policy and legislation driving curriculum and instruction in higher education, the field of college reading is grappling with how recent curricular mandates affect learners, particularly mandates that reduce or eliminate college reading instruction by assuming a one-size-fits-all approach. Questioning the ethical implications of this current reality led us to a key question: What are the pedagogical rights of undergraduate students with respect to literacy instruction? We argue here that college readers should have access to individually and culturally relevant literacy pedagogy that is intended to support their coursework and, ultimately, their lives. We therefore propose an initial draft of a bill of rights for college readers.

Creating her own assignments using openly licensed course materials allows this professor and her students to be more creative and to take greater advantage of digital resources.

Drawing on interviews from faculty at one community college in Texas, this case study focuses on one college and the change process faculty experienced in integrating its developmental reading and writing curriculum. This study centers on the faculty perspective of policy and curriculum implementation, a voice that is often lost or underrepresented in the research literature and offers insight into how colleges can support their faculty who are responding to curricular change and/or policy mandates.

A course model featuring scaffolded information literacy instruction and connection with a librarian improves online students’ attitudes about library sources and the value of research in the writing process.

This essay explores how focusing on language and literacy as “ways of doing” in different academic disciplines and professional fields may spark reconsideration of how best to prepare and support students’ language and literacy development, especially among the linguistically diverse New Mainstream in community colleges.

This article explores the potential of a song lyrics-based curriculum to encourage the practice of racial literacy in the first-year composition classroom.

This article shares findings from a semester-long study about the use of literacy narratives to increase ESL students’ understanding of reading and writing relationships within the developmental writing classroom.

Appreciating the details of a famous movie scene helps today’s visually oriented students recognize the importance of reading and writing with careful thought and awareness.

Pulling data from a year-long case study into a Division II men’s basketball team, this article suggests how threshold concepts as currently conceptualized and implemented in first-year composition pedagogy and curriculum could more directly consider unique forms of literacies student-athletes bring into the classroom.

This article describes a statewide integrated developmental and first-year writing program that uses multiple measures placement data about college readiness to inform curriculum and faculty development.

Based on research conducted at Wilbur Wright College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago, this article explores the strategies, methods, and theoretical frameworks used by English instructors to teach reading-writing connections in developmental and credit-level writing courses.

Reviewed are: Chasing Literacy: Reading and Writing in an Age of Acceleration, by Daniel Keller, Reviewed by Kathleen Alves Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave, by Pegeen Reichert Powell, Reviewed by Christine Rudisel

Reviewed are: RAW (Reading and Writing) New Media, edited by Cheryl E. Ball and James Kalmbach; reviewed by Suanna H. Davis Listening to Our Elders: Working and Writing for Change, edited by Samantha Blackmon, Cristina Kirklighter, and Steve Parks; reviewed by Patricia Wilde How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, by Paul Tough; reviewed by Jeffrey Klausman Redesigning Composition for Multilingual Realities, by Jay Jordan; reviewed by Michelle LaFrance

The author presents findings from a research study that examines the use of a racial literacy approach to teaching first-year composition.

This case study of the authors’ process of curricular innovation, assessment, and redesign provides guidance to colleagues seeking to implement 21st century literacies into their own objectives for first-year composition courses.

This article describes the design and implementation of a cross-cultural composition coursewhich was designed to provide opportunities for ESL students and native English-speaking students to learn about cross-cultural literacy practices from each other in a first-year writing context at a community college in the Southwest.

Reviewed are: Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement, by Linda Flower, Reviewed by Tim Taylor Writings from Life, by Tom Tyner, Reviewed by Robert A. Berens

This paper was originally delivered as the College Celebration speech at the 2010 NCTE Convention.

In this article, I report on the experiences of one adult student making the transition from professional to academic literacy and trace implications for writing scholars and teachers.

Reviewed are: Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Researchers, edited by Amy C. Kimme Hea, Reviewed by Joseph Griffin Writing without Formulas, by William H. Thelin, Reviewed by Mary M. Stein Fear, by Pamela Garvey, Reviewed by Guy Thorvaldsen A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies, by James Ray WatkinsJr., Reviewed by Chanon Adsanatham  Dangerous Writing: Understanding the Political Economy of Composition,by Tony Scott, Reviewed by Abigail L. Montgomery

Reviewed are: Against Schooling: For an Education That Matters by Stanley Aronowitz, Reviewed by Keith Kroll Save the World on Your Own Time by Stanley Fish, Reviewed by Dianna Rockwell Shank Teaching the Novel across the Curriculum: A Handbook for Educators, edited by Colin C. Irvine, Reviewed by Jeff Sommers Strange Terrain: A Poetry Handbook for the Reluctant Reader, by Alice B. Fogel The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry, by Rhian Williams, Reviewed by James D. Sullivan Beyond Words: Reading and Writing in the Visual Age, by John Ruszkiewicz, Daniel Anderson, and Christy Friend, Reviewed by Douglas Yates

A happy coincidence exists between the elements needed to analyze, understand, and produce strong arguments and their analog properties entailed in the map metaphor that we use as prototype in our teaching.

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Paul Bodmer works in the Washington, DC office of NCTE, where he represents the Council on higher education issues in English studies and literacy education. Here he shares with TETYC readers the insights he has learned on the job.

Introducing Web-based literary hypertexts in an introductory writing course motivates students to ponder both the changing techniques of writing and reading and their own attitudes toward these two interrelated activities in a wholly new way. Evaluating a novice literature launches novice readers and writers on a journey to becoming “experts” at facing with confidence the many challenges that college and life will bring, including a fundamentally new approach to reading and writing.

This article details a strategy for empowering students in a first-semester composition course through cultural literacy by using Jane Tompkins’s essay “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality,and the Problem of History,” in my first-semester college composition course.

The professional e-mail assignment allows students to gain digital literacies via community, critical engagement, and application.