The editors of this special issue of Teaching English in the Two-Year College highlight the lack of scholarship on two-year college writing centers despite their widespread presence. Systemic barriers are in place at most two-year colleges, including heavy workloads, lack of institutional support for research, and limited incentives for two-year-college writing center staff to publish. The issue features new research showcasing the unique challenges and innovations in two-year college writing centers. The editors hope this issue sparks an ongoing conversation around the important and distinctive work happening in two-year college writing centers

This piece begins to contextualize my stance as a community college writing teacher, just over eighteen years in.

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 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.

College reading instruction warrants recognition as a necessary and actionable means of teaching for social justice. Faculty who teach students how to read course texts—and who guide and support them in doing so—advance social justice and equity via three separate mechanisms of action. These processes preferentially benefit marginalized and underserved students while more broadly fostering conceptual and perspective-taking skills essential for social justice.

This essay conducts critical discourse analysis of website landing pages for community college English departments that have explicitly adopted Guided Pathways reforms. The analysis examines how the social practice of teaching English is recontextualized through discourse.

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Preview this article: Review: Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century: by Beth L. Hewett, Tiffany Bourelle, and Scott Warnock; Administering Writing Programs in the Twenty-First Century: by Tiffany Bourelle, Beth L. Hewett, and Scott Warnock., Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/50/4/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege32591-1.gif

This article offers preliminary findings from a research study tracing the transitions of eight instructors in their first year of teaching English at two-year colleges. We report findings related to preparation, position responsibilities, and mentoring.

Contributors to this symposium, current and former two-year college teacher-scholar-activists, reflect upon bell hooks’s legacy share the lessons they have learned from her work, and consider how hooks’s teachings might inform our praxis and move us forward as a profession.

This article offers preliminary findings from a research study tracing the transitions of eight instructors in their first year of teaching English at two-year colleges. We report findings related to preparation, position responsibilities, and mentoring.

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.”

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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.

Serving as the introduction to TETYC’s special issue on disability in two-year college English, this article centers disability as a necessary consideration for two-year colleges’ mission of open access. Drawing on the work of disability justice activists, advocates, and disability scholars, this introduction frames the work of the special issue’s contributors by tracing the ableist obstacles faced by disabled people in two-year college English and how these ableist structures overlap and intersect with other marginalized identities, thus creating a nesting doll of ableism.

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.

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This article is the first of a two-part thematic analysis of interviews reporting on the professional identity enactment of developmental literacy practitioners; we argue for intentional, explicit inclusion of developmental literacy disciplinary perspectives as essential for further expanding the two-year college English community of practice.

This article explores six years of student data to discover why students who appear not to have read a lengthy book are able to execute a successful paper designed around that text.

In fall 2019, the Two-Year College English Association distributed a survey to two-year college English faculty across the United States through professional listservs, regional distribution lists, and social media platforms. This report summarizes the key data derived from 1,062 responses to close-ended questions about workload related to teaching, service, leadership, and professional development. The report discusses the demographic profile, employment status, and contractual obligations in course assignments of the two-year college English faculty who responded. It also summarizes Information about respondents’ overload teaching, their autonomy within their teaching responsibilities, and the kinds of service and professional development activities in which they engaged.

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First-year composition faculty have historically cast a skeptical eye on high-school-based dual enrollment FYC. However, when secondary and post-secondary faculty are allowed to build their program together, trusting each other’s expertise and engaging in mutual professional development, enormous value is generated for both sets of faculty and the DE students. This article presents findings, materials, and recommendations from a long-standing successful DE program built on the assumption that college faculty have just as much to learn from their high school colleagues as high school teachers have to learn about teaching college-level writing.

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.

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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.

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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.

In this essay we explore a variation of teaching for transfer (TFT) curriculum based on Writing across Contexts, published in 2014 by Yancey et al. We explain what the TFT curriculum is, how we modified it to fit our local two-year college contexts, and offer a look ahead to the continued research on this curriculum.

This personal essay addresses the intersections of my experiences as a HOH (Hard of Hearing) person and my teaching.

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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.

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This Instructional Note offers an assignment sequence that invites students and teachers into the rhetorical possibilities of the sentence.

This article reports on a multimodal podcasting unit conducted during a two-week modified summer bridge program for at-risk incoming first-year students. The examples from student work show how teaching a multimodal genre encourages writers to draw from their prior knowledge of standardized genres learned in high school to effectively transition to college composition.

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This report, produced by the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), provides guidelines for preparing future two-year college English faculty. The document, which aligns with the “CCCC Position Statement on Preparing Teachers of College Writing” and TYCA’s “Characteristics of a Highly Effective Two-Year College English Instructor,” presents recommendations for those who train future two-year college English professionals: directors and faculty of English studies graduate programs. These guidelines also provide graduate students who are interested in two-year college teaching careers with recommendations for a combination of relevant coursework and research, professionalization activities, and hands-on experiences that will prepare them to be engaged two-year college teacher-scholars.

TETYC’s Instructional Note genre has evolved and begun to contribute to an ongoing scholarly conversation by contributing new knowledge, not merely passing along teaching lore.

The author draws on analysis of a three-part study to argue that reprofessionalization of writing instructors at two-year colleges requires instructors to become better prepared and positioned to assert their teaching expertise through departmental and institutional interactions beyond the classroom.

All the pieces in this issue ask readers to consider, reflect on, and try new ways of engaged teaching and learning, but in particular a cluster of pieces speak to current national conversations about service-learning and civic engagement.

The case method uses real-life scenarios to motivate students to engage with issues in the narratives and develop greater interest in their writing.

This article examines the social and academic barriers international teachers face in the composition classroom and what they have to offer to the teaching of first-year writing.

This essay and the teaching externship it describes grew out of our attempt to respond to gaps in two-year college English instructor preparation, particularly in basic writing, at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Nebraska.