Principles of universal design are applied to hybrid course materials to increase student understanding and, ultimately, success.

This essay chronicles an English department overhauling its rubric design, curriculum, and portfolio in order to emphasize a wider range of “real-world” writing.

The use of Self-Designed Points as part of a point-by-point grading system can encourage students to exercise more initiative about their own learning in a first-year composition course.

We offer here a critical assessment of our experiences teaching in Kingsborough Community College's learning communities—in a descriptive, personal mode that echoes the frequent conversations we have together—to illuminate how official data fail to capture both important successes and failures and to model the kind of reflective, subjective assessment from a professorial perspective that we believe is vital for larger institutional decision making.

This study assesses the benefits and drawbacks of assigning a collaboratively written midterm paper in nontraditional and traditional introductory college composition courses. Students’ responses suggest a radically different model to be tested in the future.

This essay recounts the authors’ experiences as community college faculty members in a learning community linking first-year composition with a class in life-career planning and development.

This essay describes a pedagogy designed to re-place literature in research-based writing courses without sabotaging the primary purpose of such courses, teaching studentsto find personally and culturally important questions and to report their answers in documented academic writing.

This article provides a pedagogical model for students in introductory literature classes to participate in the undergraduate research international curricular movement.

This essay illustrates why compositionists should conceive of multimodal writing assignments as having wide-ranging and forward-thinking parameters, in order to invite the greatest possible range of student responses; it also suggests the directions we should take when evaluating such work.

First-year composition students engage with visual rhetoric via interpretation and analysis through a trip to a local art museum for the first essay assignment and through an exploration of photography for the second essay assignment.

Peer-response remains a central process in first-year composition; faculty can make it effective and efficient by “spotlighting”—designing the process as digital, emergent, and distributive.

This essay argues that only by sharing our mistakes and uncertainty can we fully reflect on our own process as teachers, only by understanding our process can we begin to identify the many factors that contribute to classroom messes in the first place, and only by acknowledging the perpetual messiness of our practice can we fully engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Reviewed are: A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity, by Byron Hawk, Reviewed by Brian Ray Community; College Faculty: At Work in the New Economy, by John S. Levine, Susan Kalter, and Richard L. Wagoner, Reviewed by Keith Kroll; Designing Writing Assignments, by Traci Gardner; Teaching English by Design: How to Create and Carry Out Instructional Units, by Peter Smagorinsky, Reviewed by Nancy Lawson Remler; Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching, by Laura R. Micciche, Reviewed by Tim N. Taylor

The author offers her experience of modeling mistakes—lots of them—and writing spontaneously in the computer classroom to get students’ attention and elicit their editorial response.

Students completing the text preview assignment use multimodal design, introducing classmates to texts in ways that motivate and inform their reading.

Rhetorically challenging literature can be made to serve the purposes of first-year composition in new ways. Excerpts from the novels of Marcel Proust that focus on the author’s characteristic scrutinizing, reflexive attention to style work successfully as models for assisting writers in acquiring the habits of reading and re-reading, and of writing, revisiting, and revising, which are essential to well-written prose.

This analysis of the technology and pedagogy section of the TYCA national survey of writing programs covers online and onsite uses of technologies, multimodal essays and electronic portfolios, pedagogical training in the uses of technologies, intersections of training and curriculum innovation (i.e., electronic portfolios and multimodal compositions), and two-year college satisfaction levels with the integration of technology.

An effective assignment design for writing classes unfolds at the crossroads of theory and practice; instruction and reflection; and experience and serendipity.

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.

This article explores the ways that a literature course with a focus on survival stories can provide students with models for their own survival and healing.

This essay traces two teachers’ experiences crossing spaces in a combined literature and history seminar where students explore American culture and diversity and engage in service learning. The model has evolved from paired classes with collaborative activities to a student-centered environment promoting active learning. This article offers practical advice for establishing cross-curricular pairings and suggests course content that promotes learning across curricula.

Reviews of three books: The Profession of English in the Two-Year College reviewed by Edwina Jordan; Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise reviewed by Cathy Buckingham; Designing Writing: A Practical Guide reviewed by Jill Wright.

To fairly evaluate the writing of deaf and hard-of-hearing students, instructors should focus on the meaning, not the developmental errors, in the text.

An exercise modeled on traffic rules encourages effective and considerate class discussions.

This article describes the initiatives of one community college district and its individual colleges to engage faculty in the scholarship of teaching and learning.

A new textbook designed for first- or second-year courses in mythology as an introduction to literature shows that a community college faculty member who writes a textbook adds teaching experience to scholarship.

Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary can be used as a model to help students understand the structure of a definition and write creative, witty definitions of their own.

This article presents a systematic method for examining and evaluating written commentary. When used by writing instructors in authentic responding contexts, these reflective models can help instructors better understand their commenting practices in light of current response theories, establish clearer goals for making written commentary, and develop new commenting strategies that provide increased revision options for students.

Various strategies can be employed to design a student-centered conference environment that helps developmental students find a place in the academic community.

This article describes the development and implementation of an online writing course for advanced ESL students.

Oral interpretation courses, designed to be about communication, can serve as a site for thinking about what meanings writers communicate, as well as how interpreters become communicators in larger social discourses through interactions with written texts.

Pedagogical triangulation is a threefold method for teaching that involves a holistic approach to classroom collaboration. The specific elements of pedagogical triangulation are described, along with the results of applying this approach in a first-semester college English class.

Considers how screening Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in a sophomore film class shows modern community-college students that millennial anxiety existed well before late 1999, the time of “Y2K” fears. Presents an assignment that examines “2001: A Space Odyssey” in the context of its time and in 2001.

Suggests that educators need to let students know that sometimes messages are sent in the hopes of confusing or misleading readers or listeners. Notes that people sending such messages include politicians, marketers, educators, parents, entertainers, medical personnel, and in fact, anybody and everybody. Considers how modern media makes it easier for people to manipulate others.

Considers how reading Jane Tompkins’ “Sensational Designs” helps foster a new appreciation of the ways in which students contribute to the creation of a literary work. Discusses how students responded to their semester-long study of various “neglected” 19th-century women writers.

Discusses how current scholarship argues against one-shot, high-stakes writing tasks. Presents work from students that were part of a team-taught curriculum that coordinated writing and reading classes. Designs activities that would provide a core of material for students to draw on in their final testing situations.

Notes that student writers gain greater insight into the importance of audience by analyzing business documents. Discusses how business writing teachers can help students understand the rhetorical refinements of writing to an audience. Presents an assignment designed to lead writers systematically through an analysis of two advertisements.

Considers how teaching John Updike’s short story “A&P” to treat issues of class and gender provides practice in reading for multiple meanings. Discusses students’ responses to the character “Sammy” and considers issues from personal response to reading the text. Notes multiple perspectives and ways of teaching “A&P.”

Discusses how certain strategies can enable successful chat rooms in academic courses. Examines some of the author’s own pedagogical trials, errors, and successes with chat rooms. Offers some strategies for conducting effective participation among students in such settings. Discusses several models of teacher-student interaction for developing the instructor’s role in academic chat rooms.

Describes three reading/writing lessons on the topics of linguistics, environmental science, and anthropology used in a discipline-based college-level English as a second language course to illustrate how to use film to teach academic writing skills. Discusses how students analyze a film to help articulate the content of an essay or a book.

Describes the design of a standard first-year composition class in which the author used online discussion forums. Discusses how these design choices helped create a dynamic community of readers, writers, and learners in a writing classroom. Discusses pedagogical goals, and course design. Discusses several reasons why this approach works so well, and offers some cautionary notes.

Claims personal narrative essays, although controversial, touch a unique chord in listeners and in readers. Suggest incorporating critical thinking and modeling by the instructor into personal narrative essay assignments.

Offers 4 brief descriptions from college writing teachers of activities they use successfully. Describes using a “round robin” process for group writing and revision; addressing stylistic and grammatical issues by using anonymous student writing; “showing” versus “telling” words; and using film to model “larger” meaning in personal narrative.

Describes an innovative curriculum project at Piedmont Community College in North Carolina called CONCUR, which designed classes specifically for developmental students, applying the principles of contextual learning by creating the context of a publishing company. Discusses motivation, grading, the reading workshop, providing books, pages required and journal entries, class activities, the Writing Workshop, and publication.

Discusses the development of “Teaching English in the Two-Year College,” a journal designed to serve the special needs of community college English faculty. Discusses success and subsequent growth of the journal and considers the different subject matters addressed throughout the first five developmental years of the journal.

Argues that literature by Caribbean women writers of the 20th century offers two-year college students models for surmounting obstacles, resisting oppression, and holding life in fragile equilibrium. Discusses various Caribbean women authors and the influences upon them. Describes numerous ways that specific Caribbean works could be used in the two-year-college curriculum.

Argues that a carefully designed and skillfully moderated asynchronous Internet classroom environment can help minimize problems related to gender in traditional classrooms. Discusses class “climate” and class discussion in the traditional classroom and in the online classroom. Notes research related to gender and the online classroom. Outlines course design and teaching strategies. Offers a policy for online class conduct.

Describes an instructional model that develops English-as-a-Second-Language students’ linguistic and academic skills through extended study of discipline-based content presented through multimedia. Illustrates the approach via a sample lesson from a unit on environmental science. Discusses the use of focus-discipline groups that research class topics. Notes positive student achievement and feedback.

Argues that postmodern language theory offers useful insights into long-standing writing problems encountered by writing instructors. Discusses a postmodern view of language, how language shapes reality, the contributions of Jacques Derrida, and deconstruction and composition. Applies these ideas to two pedagogical ideologies, and suggests some innovative classroom practices.

Describes a project for composition classes in which groups of five to six students conceive, write, design, print, and bind a book of their writings. Discusses methodology, defining form and content of the books, offering guidance, use of in-class time, evaluation, grading, and the results. Notes that the quality of student writing dramatically improved.