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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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This critical phenomenological study sought Native American student perspectives on intention and desired faculty response following self-disclosure of personal challenges in college writing assignments and discusses implications for faculty and for implementing trauma-informed writing pedagogy with students who are historically marginalized.

Students entering first-year composition often discover self-inquiry for the first time, enabling them to examine their identities when opportunities are created to do so. The experiences of two traditional first-year college students are examined to better understand the power that writing instructors and writing courses hold.

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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 synthesizes the literature on writing transfer and findings from several key studies of reading in two-year colleges to outline a set of pedagogical practices that instructors can use to promote reading transfer through explicit attention to “strategic reading.”

The following is the Opening Address given at the 2022 TYCA National Conference. It explains the exigence for the conference theme, “Recovery and Reinvention in Our Profession: Emerging from a Recent Time of Crisis,” in this current moment—particularly, the conference’s call for a mobilization of previously overlooked narratives in the two-year writing classroom. The talk has been lightly edited for inclusion here.

This article reports on the working conditions of one hundred faculty who teach first-year composition at two-year colleges across the US.

This essay examines the breakthrough one academic had in negotiating her fear of failure with writing and discusses how that breakthrough affected the way she teaches her community college composition courses.

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.

An instructor of undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses creates a mind-mapping activity for syllabus review to engage her students.

This article describes the authors’ experiences incorporating a trauma-informed writing pedagogy during the pandemic that uses a writer mentor and poetry in composition to build confidence, manage stress, and foster community.

This article considers disabled students’ experiences with collaborative writing and offers strategies to improve the accessibility of collaborative writing assignments.

This TETYC symposium centers anti-ableist action across two-year college institutional contexts, including the writing classroom (Olivas), writing centers (Van Dyke and Lovett), a Writing Across the Curriculum Program (Rousculp), and basic writing (Naomi Bernstein). Taken together, these authors offer insights into establishing anti-ableist practices in two-year college English studies with careful attention to multiple marginalized identities.

This article is about the distinct challenges first-generation college students face in envisioning future careers. I discuss how the composition classroom can be a space for reflection that addresses immediate needs while also helping students cultivate agency via career exploration.

This study documents the author’s experience reflecting on eight semesters of informal student evaluations of teaching in the process of updating his teaching methods for second-semester composition. He finds that reflective teaching practices provide a powerful methodology for engaging with the opinions of two-year college students, which can lead to a more productive focus on writing college essays in the composition classroom.

Using weekly Writing Accountability Groups in intro-level writing courses provides benefits for both instructors and students without taking up synchronous class time.

Lexical analysis with concordancing software offers faculty a simple tool for analyzing reflective texts in first-year composition courses.

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This study’s findings suggest that question-based pedagogy has the potential to address a gap in the research on feedback and response while also transforming the labor of feedback, benefiting student writers, and mitigating common feedback concerns for both students and instructors.

This instructional note contains a prompt and a set of step-by-step classroom instructions for introducing first-year writers to the functions and scholarly activities of professional associations.

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.

This article describes an initiative to engage quiet students in classroom discussion through the repeated projection of a digital back-channeling platform and the active encouragement of anonymous student participation.

This article argues that two principles of a trauma-informed writing pedagogy grounded in clinical scholarship—instructor as buffering role model and psychologically safer classroom spaces—can support students affected by trauma and traumatic stress. Moreover, when these principles are embedded in course structures using concepts central to universal design, they can support all community college writing students facing adversity.

This article reports on a longitudinal study of the writing assignments students at our two-year college were given in courses outside of composition. While other studies have looked at writing assigned across the curriculum, this research typically focuses on four-year, rather than two-year, institutions. Our study of a small cohort of students suggests that at our institution there is a significant disconnect between the amount and types of writing students are assigned in composition and non-composition courses. Our findings add to the existing literature on college writing, while also informing our understanding of the goals and purposes of composition within our local context.

This article describes the experience of three professors teaching dual enrollment BTECH Early College High School students at Queensborough Community College, and our incorporation of departmental and campus-wide collaborative learning experiences as an intervention for student success and engagement. We present our collaborative approach to course design, culminating in the Upstanders Project, a multimodal research-based writing assignment incorporating on-campus cultural and learning resources. We argue that this approach led to an immersive learning experience for dual enrollment students that strengthened their ties to the college community.

Over 1.4 million high school students enroll in college-credit-bearing courses yearly, and 80% of that instruction occurs on secondary campuses under the tutelage of high school teachers (US Dept. of Education). Since First-Year Writing remains a common choice among enrollees, Concurrent Enrollment (CE) classrooms present a unique space for inquiry and collaboration into the quality and rigor of CE writing instruction. This study investigates CE writing instructors’ definitions of “rigor” in the college writing classroom and explores the training and support provided to CE writing instructors representing two- and four-year higher education institutions in Ohio. Findings suggest that on-going discipline-specific professional development can lead to definitions of rigor in high school writing spaces that align to postsecondary standards. This study also demonstrates that disparity exists in instructor preparation and support, especially in regard to discipline-specific training that could help close gaps in writing instruction.

In our analysis of seventy-five FYC writing assignment prompts, we identify common elements and offer pedagogical suggestions so faculty can use assignment sheets as rhetorical tools to introduce students to writing studies’ threshold concepts.

This instructional note describes the potential of an analytical essay assignment to encourage writerly self-reflection and meaningful revision in the two-year college writing classroom.

This essay shows how one English department used open educational resources and threshold theory to engage locally responsive writing instruction and increase access at a community college.

While Robert Brooke’s discussion of underlife focused on the autonomy of students, in this article I apply his conclusions to the behaviors performed and desires expressed by faculty members, specifically six tenured, two-year college English faculty members who conceptualize their work teaching writing in relation to both individual writing courses and one or more aspects of a writing program.

This article presents the results of a study that examines differences in the academic writing of community college students across four levels of composition courses.

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.

Four instructors describe why, how, and to what ends they have incorporated place-based and decolonizing approaches in entry-level writing courses.

This article explores the value of including creative assignments in the composition classroom. Specifically, it demonstrates how a multimodal assignment can help struggling students develop the confidence to succeed on creative assignments and on subsequent more traditional academic assignments.

This paper argues that instructors should prioritize the teaching of peer review. The authors have encouraged collaborative peer review by making it the most important work of their first-year writing course.

As a means to facilitating the “rhetorical sovereignty” of her composition students at the Institute of American Indian Arts, the author describes the theory and practice of her efforts to develop a successful Native American writing pedagogy. Incorporating visits to local museums and galleries as a means to scaffold students’ research projects, the pedagogy she implements relies on visual American Indian rhetorics.

This study explores two community college developmental writing courses that made use of mobile devices and apps, specifically iPads and iPhones, iTunes U, and Apple Books as primary learning materials and devices.

This article demonstrates the important role that student researchers play in developing two-year college writing center assessment. As part of a tutoring practicum assignment, students from Bristol Community College co-designed a survey that assessed the perceptions of students who do and do not utilize a writing center at their mid-sized community college. Students collected 865 responses between 2014 and 2015. This article provides a road map to developing student-led RAD research through a two-year college writing center and its attendant course; it also shares positive pedagogical and programmatic outcomes from the project.

Despite national efforts to accelerate students through precollegiate writing course sequences to transfer-level composition, questions persist regarding appropriate placement and the support needed for students to succeed. An analytical text-based writing assessment was administered to students across four levels of composition courses at a California community college. Differences in student writing scores between course levels and the relationship between writing score, course level, and high school GPA were examined. Key findings include (1) significant differences in average scores between the first precollegiate course and other courses in the sequence and (2) weak relationships between course level and high school GPA and assessment scores and high school GPA.

Despite community college teachers teaching nearly 50 percent of all first-year composition, our experiences and hands-on knowledge are not viewed as scholarly contributions to writing studies. The scholarship of writing studies needs to be expanded through redefining what constitutes scholarly work as well as providing mentoring to two-year faculty who possess critical knowledge on composition and pedagogy.