Using visual rhetoric as a mode of instruction in two-year college composition can have a positive and powerful impact on teaching and learning.

Responding to the underrepresentation of two-year college English faculty in disciplinary professional organizations, this article examines faculty’s diverse and largely unmeasured ways of engaging with these associations to access and share disciplinary knowledge.

The authors argue for a critically reflective model of service-learning by detailing the features of a project in which an ESL reading and developmental writing class interviewed Holocaust survivors for the Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center and Archives.

This essay describes the unique advantage community college students have of concentrating their liberal arts studies in the intimate environment of their two-year experience, sharing examples of successful strategies that emphasize and build community in the liberal arts tradition at Kalamazoo Valley Community College.

In an effort to support and retain the increasing number of student veterans in two-year colleges and universities, this article provides strategies for instructors to engage student veterans in composition and literature classrooms.

Beginning with this issue, Holly Hassel joins the editorial staff of TETYC in the role of associate editor. Holly’s essay “Research Gaps in Teaching English in the Two-Year College” [40:4 (May 2013), 343–63] provided an invaluable overview of more than a decade’s research as reported in TETYC. As associate editor, Holly will be contributing short essays under the heading “Inquiry” that focus onvarious aspects of the process of publishing research in the journal, research most commonly known as SoTL (the scholarship of teaching and learning). Our hope is that “Inquiry” will serve as an invitation to readers to join the ongoing SoTL conversation in these pages.

Drawing on findings from three qualitative studies, this article explores the distinct professional identities of two-year college English faculty. We examine full-time faculty patterns of engagement with professional organizations, their assertion of professional authority in institutional decision making, and the role of organizational socialization in the shaping of part-time faculty professional identities.

This essay reports on a systematic assessment of 239 feature articles published in the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College between 2001 and 2012. It notes gaps in the published research on two-year college English teaching and recommends areas offocus for future work in the field.

This article traces the arc of research on two-year college writing programs and looks at implicit patterns of belief that shape discussions of such programs to offer a definition, however tentative, of a model of a two-year college writing program.

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.

Community colleges have been engaged for the last sixty years in providing open access to public higher education to anyone with a high school diploma. Recently, disappointing success rates for developmental students have driven some colleges to reduce or restrict access to college based on standardized test scores. The operative phrase in most of these discussions is “ability to benefit.” This essay examines the complex variety of issues related to ability to benefit. Using a robust archive of data from our institution to explore this question, we argue that standardized placement scores tell only one kind of story about our most underprepared students. Course pass rates and percentages of students who reach critical milestones provide only one rather limited way to assess this complex issue. Our data tell us other stories that may be more important.

By offering an annotated image of a half-dozen two-year college writing “programs,” this essay seeks to raise awareness of the challenges facing those who promote, work in, work toward, or participate in the development of two-year college writing programs and to consider how the “idea” of a writing program plays out in shaping those challenges.

As a result of neoliberalism, the “grand experiment” of the community college, as that of “Democracy’s college,” is coming to an end.

This article describes the design and implementation of a cross-cultural composition coursewhich was designed to provide opportunities for ESL students and native English-speaking students to learn about cross-cultural literacy practices from each other in a first-year writing context at a community college in the Southwest.

Reviewed are: Gateway to Opportunity? A History of the Community College in the United States, by J. M. Beach, reviewed by Keith Kroll Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader (3rd ed.), edited by Victor Villanueva and Kristin L. Arola, Reviewed by Kathleen Tamayo Alves Basic Writing, by George Otte and Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk, Reviewed by Chitralekha Duttagupta The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education by Jane Stanley, Reviewed by Howard Tinberg

In this latest in a series of commentaries from former chairs of the national Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), Sandie McGill Barnhouse, TYCA chair (2008–2010) shares her experiences and observations.

This article reflects on where and how empirical research, focusing particularly on college/adult writing and literate practice, has appeared over the last century in the complete runs of English Journal, College English, College Composition and Communication, Research in the Teaching of English, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Recounting our story of the empirical scholarship published in NCTE’s journals, we first appraise what has been meant by empirical research over the century and clarify how we define it for this article. We then frame that definition by considering how alternative discourse has regularly offered a significant counterpoint to that research. We next turn to the central theme of our reflections, the expanding scene of writing that has developed across the century. Finally, we conclude by considering emergent interests in global scholarship on writing and literate practice.

The Community College Writer: Exceeding Expectations, by Howard Tinberg and Jean-Paul Nadeau, Reviewed by Jeffrey Klausman The Community College Writer: Exceeding Expectations, by Howard Tinberg and Jean-Paul Nadeau, Reviewed by Martine Courant Rife The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century, by Pat J. Gehrke, Reviewed by Brian Ray Traditions of Writing Research, Edited by Charles Bazerman, Robert Krut, Karen Lunsford, Susan McLeod, Suzie Null, Paul Rogers, and Amanda Stansell, Reviewed by Shannon S. Moon

This report is a revised version of the original document, first published in 2004.

This article describes a study on the types of writing tasks that ESL students commonly encounter in introductory academic courses at a two-year college and discusseshow the results of the study may have an impact on instruction.

We offer here a critical assessment of our experiences teaching in Kingsborough Community College's learning communities—in a descriptive, personal mode that echoes the frequent conversations we have together—to illuminate how official data fail to capture both important successes and failures and to model the kind of reflective, subjective assessment from a professorial perspective that we believe is vital for larger institutional decision making.

Reviewed are: The Idea of a Writing Laboratory, Neal Lerner Generation 1.5 in College Composition: Teaching Academic Writing to U.S.-Educated Learners of ESL, Mark Roberge, Meryl Siegal, and Linda Harklau, editors The Community College Writer: Exceeding Expectations, Howard Tinberg and Jean-Paul Nadeau College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, Anne Beaufort

This essay recounts the authors’ experiences as community college faculty members in a learning community linking first-year composition with a class in life-career planning and development.

This article describes the evolution of a program for preparing future two-year college faculty in the context of the academy writ large and from the perspectives of the program’sfounder, the department chair who contributed to the program’s success, and a program participant turned full-time tenured faculty member.

A survey of and follow-up interviews with adjunct faculty working with a writing program administrator or a similar person or committee reveal that adjunct faculty working conditions create more than a sense of unfairness; rather, they create a very real energy that works against the movement necessary to build a writing program out of a collection of writing classes, to develop the sense of a “we” moving toward a common goal.

College and high school writing teachers participated in an online assessment activity to build common understanding of standards.

This essay illustrates why compositionists should conceive of multimodal writing assignments as having wide-ranging and forward-thinking parameters, in order to invite the greatest possible range of student responses; it also suggests the directions we should take when evaluating such work.

Reviewed are: Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life Edited by Sean P. Murphy, Reviewed by Lois Birky Genre Theory: Teaching, Writing, and Being by Deborah Dean, Reviewed by Meredith DeCosta Ideas That Work in College Teaching, Edited by Robert L. Badger, Reviewed by Raymond Bergeron Inside the Community College Writing Center: Ten Guiding Principles by Ellen G. Mohr, Reviewed by Deborah Bertsch Essential Literary Terms: A Brief Norton Guide with Exercises by Sharon Hamilton, Reviewed by John Benson

Editor’s introduction: In this latest in a series of commentaries from former chairs of the national Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), Sharon Mitchler, TYCA chair (2004–6) and the 2009 winner of the Nell Ann Pickett Service Award, shares her views on becoming involved in local, regional, and national professional activities.

This analysis of the Writing Across the Curriculum section of the TYCA national survey of writing programs covers Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines programs and initiatives, as well as writing centers and the overall satisfaction with two-year institutions’ integration of Writing Across the Curriculum.

Two-Year College English teachers offer brief descriptions of successful classroom activities.

This article describes the development of collegiality and the positive results of professional synergy within a group of English professors from three community colleges, a state college, a university, and a maritime academy in southeastern Massachusetts.

C. D. Albin is professor of English at Missouri State University–West Plains and has contributed poems to several journals, including Big Muddy, Cape Rock, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College.

This analysis of the Assessment Practices section of the national TYCA survey of writing programs examines recent trends in placement and exit practices at the two-year college.

The author examines surveys indicating that, in general, community college students are significantly less inclined and less able than students at four-year colleges to earn a bachelor’s degree. He argues that it is important for teachers of English to understand the numerous conditions that limit the first group’s chances for such “success.”

This article describes the Student Tutor Education Program (STEP) at Westchester Community College, which identifies and recruits potential future college English teachers at the community college level while they serve as peer writing tutors, with benefits to the entire college community as well as the teaching profession in general.

This final essay in the series evaluates TYCA’s achievements since its inception, in particular its research and scholarship agenda.

This analysis of the technology and pedagogy section of the TYCA national survey of writing programs covers online and onsite uses of technologies, multimodal essays and electronic portfolios, pedagogical training in the uses of technologies, intersections of training and curriculum innovation (i.e., electronic portfolios and multimodal compositions), and two-year college satisfaction levels with the integration of technology.

The article argues for raising class consciousness among community college students and describes how the author employs the writings of Charles Bukowski to reach an ethnically diverse, but predominantly working-class student population.

In this study, we compared self-revised essays to timed writing exams written by students in a developmental English course in a community college. Using a multiple-trait rubric, we found that self-revised essays showed greater elaboration than timed writing exams, and that elaboration and focus correlated only for self-revised essays. We argue, based on these findings and on theoretical grounds, for further exploration of the self-revised essay as an authentic portrait of student writing ability.

By reimagining traditional WPA work in the context of a two-year college, we can begin to identify unique challenges and opportunities for a two-year college WPA.

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).

This essay chronicles the early efforts of two-year college English faculty to forge a professional identity.

Rita Pourteau is an instructor at SOWELA Technical Community College in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

C. D. Albin is professor of English at Missouri State University–West Plains and has contributed poems to several journals, including Big Muddy, Limestone, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College.

The author calls for teacher-scholars in the two-year college to reveal in their scholarship the generation of their triumphs and their failures.

TETYC publishes articles for two-year college teachers and those teaching the first two years of English in four-year institutions. We seek articles in all areas of composition (basic, first-year, and advanced); business, technical, and creative writing; and the teaching of literature in the first two college years. We also publish articles on topics such as staffing, assessment, technology, writing program administration, speech, journalism, reading, ESL, and other areas of interest.

“A Defining Moment: Trying to Pin Down the Meaning of ‘College-Level’ Writing” from Joel B. Henderson, Editor of “TYCA to You”

This article describes two local research projects and provides a rationale for faculty scholarship at small and community colleges.