A well-staged career research paper project can help students develop their voices and better integrate personal experiences with researched sources.

A film that presents a compelling and particularly American moral dilemma provides the scaffolding that helps basic writing students to construct convincing argumentative essays.

The online IPJ (Interactive Portfolio Journal), open to the individual student and the teacher but not to the whole class, allows online discussion to draw from both public and private voices, and productively uses the traditional focus on collective critical exchange in tandem with private reflection

Drawing from the theories of Paulo Freire, Patricia Bizzell, and Ira Shor, this article describes a five-year ongoing classroom research project that examines the use of peer evaluation as a process for teaching academic discourse. The findings of the project suggest a critical and democratic pedagogical antidote to the national “standards” movement.

Case histories of basic writing programs at regional campuses need to incorporate concerns of social class. Attention to class helps scholars identify institutional patterns that distance basic writing from the university’s mainstream business.

Given the war that has been waged for several decades now against working students and their families, as well as against teachers, community college faculty are called upon to invent creative, local, and evolving knowledges of social class with their students.

This essay examines the contradictory role of the community college historically, reflecting its function in preserving the American class system.

ESL students in their first year of college discuss their feelings about the use of literature in composition courses and offer qualified support for its inclusion.

This article describes how students gain the confidence and skill to write personal essays by practicing their natural ability to tell their own stories orally in social situations.

This study follows the progress of 238,032 students who enrolled in either an ESL composition, a developmental composition, or a college composition course at one of nine community colleges for a minimum of three and a maximum of eleven years.

Interclass collaboration in the context of an in-depth interdisciplinary discussion and analysis of global problems yields significant benefits in the development of ESL students’ sense of efficacy, their literacy, and their critical thinking skills.

It could very well be that the unexpected minor occurrences in a classroom are the most precious educational pearls for a teacher to record and preserve.

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Implementing deracination and the D.I.S.—components of a developing critical thinking pedagogy termed decritique—offer a more critically reflective alternative to classroom peer-review activities that mistakenly focus on a “notion of caring"

This article discusses the time needed for limited-English-proficient (LEP) students to acquire proficiency in academic English and offers suggestions for helping instructors elicit the best possible performance from their ESL students until they have had sufficient time to achieve fluency.

While most service-learning courses at the college level establish a hierarchical connection between mentor and student, the service-learning program at Los Angeles City College encourages a reciprocal relationship in which mentor and mentee benefit from each other. First-year composition students are paired with intermediate ESL composition students in a semester-long program.

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.

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Empowering students to develop their own canon can generate excitement in the classroom and a sense of ownership over literature.

Recently I asked students in a tutoring course that I teach to write a literacy narrative which, while beginning to tell the story of their own emerging literacy, had to conclude with the ways that their literacy has had or will have public consequences. As they shared each other’s drafts in class, it became clear that all the students had powerful stories to tell regarding their own struggles to become literate: stories of their coping with learning disabilities and personal loss, and stories of classroom failures that constrained their natural desire to play with language. For these students, the consequence of literacy couldn’t have been more obvious, as they recounted the shift from private powerlessness to personal empowerment.

Helping one to imagine himself or herself a writer is much more complex than nurturing a more stable grasp of sentence clarity or spelling. Rather, it involves the ability to nurture the personal introspection and cultural scrutiny that makes writing a source for reflection and transformation.

As the Faculty-in-Training Program at Guilford Technical Community College continues in its fourth year, the authors examine the program’s implementation and processes. They recognize the aspects of the program that have proved successful and identify changes that have been made based upon what their experience has taught them.

Contract grading promotes quality writing as well as a large quantity of writing. In fact, teachers can use contract grading to support and promote the behaviors, thinking skills, and writing skills they believe will help students create quality writing.

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

The traditional research paper seems to have been part of the English curriculum forever. Where did it come from? Why? How did its "generic" form become so entrenched? The answer to these questions, as well as a glimpse at what teachers in the past have done to alter its teaching and final format, provide a background against which English teachers may want to reevaluate and reinspire their own teaching of the research paper.

Reviews briefly the literature associated with the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s "Students’ Right to Their Own Language" statement. Explores the status of standard English at community colleges in Michigan, as expressed in first–year composition course objectives and descriptions. Considers the history of the standard written English objective at Delta College, a community college in mid–Michigan.

With the help of recent research on teaching with digital technologies, this article critically reflects upon the changes in instruction and identity that occur in computer classrooms, online course supplements, and Internet classes.

A curriculum of technology-enhanced and sustained content study helps ESL students develop literacy skills necessary for college work.

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.

In her 1981 novel Obasan, the Japanese Canadian writer Joy Kogawa recounts the saga of the internment and relocation of Japanese Canadians during and after the Second World War by juxtaposing the "factual" historic telling against the personal, "fictional" telling. This experimental approach opens multiple and diverse pathways to us as instructors of literature.

Composition teachers can obtain a better understanding of the challenges facing ESL students by writing in their own second language and reflecting on the experience.

English Teachers’ the Unofficial Guide: Researching the Philosophies of English Teachers; B. Marshall. Attending to the Margins: Writing, Researching, and Teaching on the Front Lines; M. H. Kells &amp; V. Balester. Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom; D. L. Wallace &amp; H. R. Ewald. Talkin’ That Talk: Language, Culture and Education in African America; G. Smitherman. Writing Simple Poems: Pattern Poetry for Language Acquisition; V. L. Holmes &amp; M. R. Moulton.

Discusses how social identity plays a significant role in defining the nature of classroom interaction. Describes how unresolved conflict emerged when the development of authentic student voice in narrative autobiography was the primary and perhaps only objective. Presents an example of the ways in which asymmetrical power relations influence how discourse works in the expressionist composition classroom.

Presents an assignment in which students look through a handful of poetry collections or anthologies, seeking 20 poems they like and thus understand or want to understand to some extent. Describes the benefits of this assignment, including honing students’ interpretive skills, dispelling their misconceptions about the genre, and continuing their "initiation into art."

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.

Notes that beyond the challenges of technology and time, online teaching also elicits unexpected introspection about the role as instructors, the changing relationships with colleagues, and the evolving perceptions about the students. Outlines five achievements and challenges associated with online first-year composition.

Presents and discusses a study of 129 first-year composition students that identifies both their expectations and frustrations. Focuses on how such results demonstrate students’ ambivalence about classes and educators as well as their ability to function as effective writers.

Shows how an editing assignment emphasizing punctuation can help students in a first-year writing class discover new ideas and perspectives as part of the revision process. Considers a class that experimented with editing punctuation for a dual purpose--as a revision heuristic as well as for correctness. Reconsiders editing and revision assignments to take better advantage of editing’s generative powers.

Peer review requires training and reinforcement to be successful, yet, even then, students often lack the experience and perception to offer good advice to one another. Ransdell, advocates instead for more focused guidance through use of whole-class workshops. Here, she explains the logistics of running a class workshop and addresses both the advantages and disadvantages of the technique, noting that the negatives are far outweighed by the positives.

Research has shown that contemporary popular films are a valuable resource in the ESL classroom. However, the short, silent film has been overlooked. Using D.W. Griffith’s The Painted Lady, Kaspar and Singer demonstrate how to use silent films to facilitate the development of ESL students’ critical thinking and writing skills.

Using Bakhtin’s comparison of the two basic kinds of medieval festivals - official feasts and carnivals - as seen in “Rabelais and His World,” Heilker identifies two ways to teach the ritual of writing. First, students are trained to practice only one kind of writing - the official feast of thesis and support writing. But there is also an opposing and complementary public writing ritual - the carnival - that allows for liberation from accepted conventions and the freedom for students to reinvent themselves and their worlds. Students should be prepared not only to practice the official feast, Heilker says, but also to engage in carnivalesque writing as well.

Offers a critical distinction between scholarship and research. Notes how George Vaughan urges community colleges to support and reward scholarship. Comments that excellence in teaching and therefore excellence in learning happen only when faculty and staff are engaged in their fields and supported in their daily work.

Discusses leveling a charge of anti-intellectualism against compositionists who demand that theory result in classroom practice. Suggests the charge ignores the material conditions and intellectual reasons for that demand. Concludes there is a crucial place for theory in composition, even theory for theory’s sake, but teaching in the composition classroom should be the center of the discipline, its epistemological heart.

Offers reflections and descriptions of three teaching associates on their experiences in the pilot year of the Guilford Technical Community College Faculty-in-Training Program. Discusses beginning the program, the varied student populations, faculty involvement, and program components (including the observation process, writing center, distance learning, conferences, weekly seminars, and camaraderie).

Outlines detrimental effects of word processing in the composition classroom on planning, reading, organizing, revising, error detection, and spelling and vocabulary skill development. Discusses strategies instructors can use to teach students to use the computer at each stage of the writing process in ways that encourage and develop the higher-order thinking essential to good writing.

Reflects on the author's long, demanding, and rewarding career as a teacher and administrator in community colleges. Describes how she found herself an advocate of change in the profession in the 1970s, the differences she sensed and thrived upon in the community college experience, and how flexibility was the key to successfully teaching the wide array of community college students.

Describes an AIDS-centered curriculum for a composition class in a New York City community college. Describes selecting a text, assignments, attending a conference, guest speakers, and the research paper. Notes that the subject of AIDS not only provokes reflective writing and much class discussion but also compels writers to express and sometimes change profound ideas about living and dying.

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.

Provide guidelines for (1) using storytelling to empower students; (2) drawing on students’ “family storyteller”; (3) bridging the gap between today’s students and teachers; (4) using the television show “Seinfeld” to enhance vocabulary development; and (5) using quizzes to teach proofreading skills. Presents a poetic response to students arriving late for class.