This collaboratively composed paper recognizes the juxtaposition and resonance between two writing center workers’ experiences, writerly voices, and perspectives on the future of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the two-year writing center. It also takes into account our shared commitment to honesty with ourselves and each other about where we succeed and where we fail in our work as diversity practitioners.

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.

This Instructional Note, grounded in Latin American cultural values, offers “wise practices” for instructors to connect lived experiences to course curriculum, encourage authentic voice and “home language practices,” and treat students as extended family to reduce academic isolation.

Today, the developmental education landscape is as complex, as contentious, and as politically fraught as it has ever been. In this essay, we seek to provide busy two-year college English teachers with a degree of clarity about the present moment in developmental education reform. This essay offers support for individuals seeking to enact corequisite reform on their campuses while also recognizing this work involves a great many variables, including state mandates, local student demographics, and local institutional histories and current circumstances.

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.

Drawing on interviews from faculty at one community college in Texas, this case study focuses on one college and the change process faculty experienced in integrating its developmental reading and writing curriculum. This study centers on the faculty perspective of policy and curriculum implementation, a voice that is often lost or underrepresented in the research literature and offers insight into how colleges can support their faculty who are responding to curricular change and/or policy mandates.

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A veteran writing teacher asks the question—What keeps teaching fresh and new?—and discovers, in the process of writing a teaching narrative, how her teaching voice and writing voice intertwine, both in the classroom and on the page.

This article shows how brief psycholinguistic reading experiments can illustrate the effects of various grammatical features, pique students’ interest, and position them to construct their own understanding of English grammar, separate from the teacher’s dictates.

This article addresses the challenge of teaching voice in the introductory composition classroom, using graphic narrative to make voice visible for students as they identify and rhetorically compose their own voices.

This article describes working with a deaf student in a basic writing course and explores what teaching deaf students can teach us about composition studies.

In this response I offer a counternarrative to Keith’s dystopian vision and challenge some of his assumptions about the state of our profession. My alternate view notwithstanding, I fully agree with Kroll on more than a few points, not the least of which is the need for more faculty voices to join this conversation at the local and national levels.

The guest editors introduce the issue.

In this study, I use think-aloud protocol methods to determine how students respond to their teacher’s conversational and nonconversational written feedback on their writing.

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

The story of one student writer shows how the challenges of writing from sources are tied to issues of voice and authority.

Legos Build the Way to Successful Process Analysis Writing, Michelle Rhodes (New Voice) Native American Elder Stories Make Descriptive Essays Easier, Pamela Tambornino (New Voice) Teaching Writing Style and Revision, Eric Bateman Dialect and Language Analysis Assignment, Amanda Hayes (New Voice) A Scaffolded Essay Assignment on Poetry, Jane Arnold (New Voice)

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 essay chronicles the events that led to the ratification of TYCA.

In the early 1990s, a small group of dedicated two-year college English faculty, led by Helon Raines, began the fight for the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), a professional organization that would give two-year college English faculty across the nation a respected identity and voice within the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Three approaches—engaging first-year writers in naming strengths and weaker areas, determining descriptors that fit their various compositions, and applying a rubric that details all the grade-determinant components—serve to give students the vocabulary they need to wrap their voices around words and to describe their learning.

In an ESL first-year composition classroom, cooperative learning assists English language learners in developing their ideas, voice, organization, and sense of writing conventions, while simultaneously enhancing their production and comprehension of English.

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

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

The application of Edward P. J. Corbett’s prose style chart to three exemplary first–year essays reveals that there is an identifiable, hence teachable, exemplary first-year writing style.

For students to learn to write in a style that expresses their own identity, teachers have to ease up on the “rules”; and show students how good writing sometimes breaks the rules, most of which are only myths and lore that have developed with no linguistic basis.

Four members of a community college English faculty respond to the question of the appropriateness of advanced graduate training for a community college teaching career

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.

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.

Addresses past and current issues concerning teacher response to first-year student writing and suggests that teacher intervention should be viewed as a writing process itself. Describes the author’s own process of responding to student writing, which he hasfound to be very effective. Concludes that individual teachers must decide for themselves what ways of responding best suit their teaching styles.

Presents a Holocaust literature class that brings new voices to the community college literature curriculum. Describes a course that involves reading five survivors' autobiographies, hearing four survivor speakers, one of whom was one of the authors, and hearing a speaker who had researched the murder and victimization of her family during the Holocaust.

Considers how Frank O'Connor's “My Oedipus Complex” provides a good introduction to the subtleties of narrative voice and control. Concludes by considering the notion of control and its relation to the narrative point of view in O'Connor's story and how it bears directly upon the value of reading literature and the reader's role.

Discusses how the author and a colleague made a short videotape of students talking about their writing experiences. Describes first steps, arrangements and questions, the shoot itself, and crafting the video. Discusses uses of this video, noting the impact this infusion of student voices can have in the composition classroom, influencing the way new writing students approach a writing course.

Describes how the author, in his sophomore world literature survey, uses the Homeric epics to introduce students to Valmiki’s Indian epic, the “Ramayana.” Describes how students look for likenesses between the two works, and for differences in cultural assumptions, content, and style. Notes students come to recognize and appreciate the delights of this unfamiliar work.

Outlines three criteria that justify using passive voice. Claims teaching sentence focus--keeping the topic of the sentence in the subject position--will accomplish the end of teaching the appropriate uses of active and passive voice.

Describes a modified method of reader-response used as a core activity in a literature classroom in which students write a short written response at the beginning of every class to the reading due that day. Describes the procedure, its relationship to effective writing, and its benefits, including reading more critically, writing more effectively, and enjoying books more

Considers how allowing developmental students to incorporate some of their language and culture into their writing helps them become more proficient writers. Suggests that the best way to teach basic writers is through both process and a respect for the social discovery that ensues as one composes.

Gives tribute to Bertie Carlyle Edwards Fearing (1943-1995), one of the three senior editors of “Teaching English in the Two-Year College.” Characterizes Bertie as a person with “style,” always focused on the task at hand, and recruiting staff members with Mensa-level intellects and showing them by her example how to work together harmoniously through the editing process.

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.

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.

Describes the Writing Center at Johnson County Community College as an institution that implements democratic ideals in its staffing and teaching; and where all voices are heard, encouraged, and validated. Describes three things necessary to achieve a writing center with a democratic nature: a peer-tutor program including formal tutor training; financial support from the college; and college-wide support.

Argues that, as decision makers, students must sort out their rhetorical contexts to determine whether a sentence needs the active voice or the passive voice. Notes that one source for finding realistic sample sentences for learning about the passive voice is the daily newspaper, and offers examples from the business section, sports page, political reporting, and columns.

Describes a first-year college composition course and the daily preparatory writing assignments, “inquiry response papers,” that form its core. Describes how these assignments, in which students respond to their homework reading, have led to a collaborative, dialogic classroom where students realize and express their own voices, and have fostered a more intrinsic motivation within students.

Describes how the author came to develop an elective community–college course called “AIDS: A Literary Response.” Discusses the course curriculum and course materials, literature and films, class assignments, formal paper assignments, notebooks of materials, and the impact of the life stories shared with the class by visitors.

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."

Diane Allen, in "Tapping the Sources Within: A Three-Step Approach", gives a strategy for helping basic writing students develop better essays with stronger voices.

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