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 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.

Modifying inclusive creative workshop models for FYW classrooms empowers student engagement and persistence and allows instructors with creative practices to effectively draw on their expertise to guide students’ writing of persuasive argumentative prose.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 instructional note explores how I used interviews, peer introductions, and video introductions to build confidence and a supportive learning community among composition students on the first day of class.

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.

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.

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 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.

The author finds that letting students see his own struggles with reading encourages them to feel greater confidence and eases the way for productive interventions in the process.

Ethnography is a useful tool for producing the kind of knowledge that a post-process pedagogy argues is necessary for an empowering writing classroom: an awareness of the social situatedness of all acts and the realization that situation drastically affects communication.

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.

Suggests that students can become motivated and engaged to improve their writing through guided interactions that target their affective, social, and cognitive capabilities. Presents fictional case scenarios developed from first- and second-year college students’ comments about their writing to help students assess their perspectives on writing, assess their interaction with writing instructors, and develop self-efficacy of the writing process.

Argues that introducing students to literary criticism while introducing them to literature boosts their confidence and abilities to analyze literature, and increases their interest in discussing it. Describes how the author, in her college-level introductory literature course, used Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree” (a children’s book) to introduce literary criticism, increase enthusiasm for literature, and build confidence in making meaning.

Describes how the author uses reading response journals in her composition classes. Shows how it actively engages students in the reading/writing process, and how students learn careful, active reading and develop confidence generating ideas and formulating opinions via the structure, freedom, enhanced comprehension, critical thinking, and confidence that these reading response journals offer.

Examines how a shift to an online writing course affected underprepared students. Finds the guided writing environment enhanced instruction and improved student retention and pass rates.

Describes computer-software programs that “read” and score college-placement essays. Argues they may impress administrators, but they also (1) marginalize students by disregarding what they have to say; (2) disregard decades of research on the writing process; and (3) ignore faculty’s professional expertise. Argues assessment practices should be guided by theoretical soundness and sensitivity to issues affecting real people.

Contends that developmental writing students’ self confidence improves when they understand their learning styles. Outlines how the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is used to pinpoint students’ learning styles and how to help students work "their way."

Offers suggestions for teaching dyslexic students from a graduate student who teaches composition and is himself dyslexic. Recommends the following strategies: one-on-one help, study skills assignments, individual strategies, step-by-step process, oral discussion, topics of interest to the student, and questions to build confidence.