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 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.

After reviewing the past ten years of TETYC’s “What Works for Me,” I claim these pieces offer writing instructors much more than mere teaching tips; rather, they evidence a genre in a fraught relationship to academic discourse, a genre that asks readers to consider how the ways we write the classroom affect composition as a field, our teacherly selves, and the students in our classrooms.

Based on interviews with students who had recently returned to school, this essay demonstrates the need for, challenges of, and ways to respond to the writing anxiety many adults bring with them back to school.

This article examines the social influences that affect how women perform in a composition course focused on first-year students. We know that society encourages young women to be good girls, but does being a good girl lead to being a good student? Can first-year composition assignments illuminate gender gaps at play in higher education?

This article presents a consideration of how students’ existing information-seeking behaviors affect traditional methods of teaching library research in first-year writing courses and offers an alternative method that uses both library and popular Internet search tools.

This article describes a pilot study that suggests writing-faculty workload may affect the pedagogical focus and rhetorical effectiveness of written response to students’ essays.

Reviews four books: Listening Up: Reinventing Ourselves as Teachers and Students, by Rachel Martin; Disturbing the Peace, by Nancy Newman; Let Them Eat Data: How Computers Affect Education, Cultural Diversity, and the Prospects of Ecological Sustainability, by C. A. Bowers; Assessing the Portfolio: Principles for Practice, Theory, and Research, by Liz Hamp-Lyons and William Condon.

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