The Spokane Community College English Department received the 2015 Diana Hacker Award for Fostering Student Success. In this report, the authors describe the features of their award-winning program.

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Responding to the Obama administration’s efforts to establish postsecondary performance based funding, the authors critique the neoliberal accountability movement’s misunderstandings of two-year colleges and their students, calling instead for a frame of mutual responsibility.

This article reports findings from a study of thirty-eight academically underprepared first-year students’ transition to college and maps out the challenges and successes they experienced in their transition to college-level reading, writing, and thinking.

Drawing on findings from a national survey of TYCA members about how and why they access published scholarship, this article makes recommendations for fostering local teacher-scholar communities of practice within two-year college English departments.

Applying data from surveys and interviews, the authors examine why many experienced two-year college English faculty give up assigning group projects. They then propose a model of group training developed in the field of business management that aims to prevent many of these difficulties—the self-managed work team.

Based on a qualitative study of students’ experiences, we offer a new typology of student reading behaviors across the disciplines at a community college.

This essay describes a year-long, grant-funded, cross-institutional collaborative project between Boise State University and the College of Western Idaho, a community college. The goal of the project was to institute an Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) model for first-year and basic writing in response to a state mandate to embrace Complete College Idaho, a form of Complete College America. The essay depicts the institutional context of each college and analyzes the challenges and benefits of the new model at each institution. The authors consider the differing roles of full-time and contingent faculty at the two institutions and the challenge of defining reasonable grant work requirements, given the varied teaching, research, and service expectations of instructors. The piece also considers the complex reasons Idaho students may not finish higher education and the extent to which the goals of Complete College Idaho could be met by instituting an accelerated model.

At a community college in the Midwest, an English Department designs and implements a teacher-driven pilot project to experiment with its basic writing program. The article discusses some methods and the value of a local decision-making process that is driven primarily by the concerns of teachers and the experience of students.

Entering college students are profoundly disturbed when placed in courses labeled “basic,” “developmental,” or “remedial.” Discouraged and often faced with pressing life problems, many of these students drop out of college before ever reaching first-year composition. Beginning in 2007, the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) renamed and reframed their basic writing program as ALP (the Accelerated Learning Program). Students enrolled in ALP take regular, credit-bearing composition along with a writing workshop taught by the same teacher and designed to help them succeed in the comp course. Now, ten years later, ALP has enabled thousands of students at CCBC to move into the college mainstream in a timely and cost-effective fashion. Efforts to disseminate the program have been wide-ranging and successful. Currently, the ALP model has been implemented at approximately 240 campuses nationwide. In this essay, I argue that with the widespread implementation of innovative, student-centered programs such as ALP, Stretch, and writing studios, the time has finally come to end remediation as we know it.

Research suggests that many students placed in the lowest level developmental writing courses do not make it to first-year composition and never graduate. The authors explain how they redesigned the lowest level writing course with scaffolded writing assignments to allow students to work at an accelerated pace.  Instructors and tutors work with students individually and in small groups as they complete the assignments. To facilitate real-time feedback, the authors created a Google Drive folder for class use so that students would have access to planning materials and prompt writing feedback. Students have individual folders for their work, and process writing is easily accessible to students, tutors, and instructors. More students from this lowest level course are moving directly into the required first-year English composition course. This new course design effectively supports students at an open-access two-year college.

English professors from Atlantic Cape Community College describe the triad model of their Accelerated Learning Program, an adaptation of Community College of Baltimore County’s program.  In the triad model, ALP students from two different sections of college-level composition meet in a single support class.  Through a discussion of the benefits and challenges of this model, an overview of a typical class, and a presentation of effective practices, the authors explore the process of adapting the ALP program and creating an award-winning model that has improved the success rates for upper-level developmental students at their institution.

This essay provides a comparative analysis of a large number of texts devoted to writing assessment, analyses that help answer questions about writing assessment volumes and that provide a picture of writing assessment scholarship over a twenty-five-year period.

While formidable at both two- and four-year colleges, the obstacles to knowledge transfer from ENG 101 to other courses are especially challenging at community colleges—a point overlooked by transfer scholars in composition, whose gaze so often seems to be on universities and liberal arts colleges.

In this latest of a series of commentaries from former chairs of the national Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt, TYCA Chair (2010—2013), shares her experiences and observations.

I suggest that we deliberately frame our professional identity, in part, as activists—accepting and embracing the revolutionary and inescapably political nature of our work.

This article addresses the current nationwide emphasis on job-readiness programs by (1) pointing to the “utility” of studying creative writing and (2) outlining a plan for including engagement strategies in the construction of a two-year creative writing degree.

Reviewed are: Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters by Robert Pinsky; reviewed by Rob Wallace Basic Skills Education in Community Colleges: Inside and Outside of Classrooms by W. Norton Grubb with Robert Gabriner; reviewed by Keith Kroll Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions in Literary Studies: Teaching and Writing in the Disciplines by Laura Wilder; reviewed by Abigail Montgomery

Brandt an Bigalk respond to each other's articles.

By growing creative writing courses and programs, community colleges can improve retention while also fostering supportive communities of student and faculty writers.

Brandt an Bigalk respond to each other's articles.

In an interview conducted at his office at Lorain County Community College, 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry finalist Bruce Weigl discusses writing pedagogy, veterans’ issues, and his experiences as a two-year college student and as a professor and poet.

Peer editing is a method used by English teachers to actively involve students in the writing process and to facilitate the development of the final draft of an essay. Controversy regarding the effectiveness of peer editing is prevalent for both instructors and students. The purpose of this paper is to share results of a classroom study that focuses on the effectiveness of peer editing practices in 2-year college composition classes. This review reveals the outcomes of several methods of peer editing, addresses both the difficulties and benefits of this process, and examines how to adapt the experience to meet the individual needs of each classroom environment. Peer Editing: A Single Review Peer Editing Worksheet Peer Editing Workshop: Groups of Three

Reporting on a year-and-a-half-long study of Latina/Latino multilingual students transitioning from high school to a community college or university on the US-Mexico border, this article explores how writing instruction was shaped across the three institutional locations by a variety of internal and external forces such as standardized testing pressures, resource disparities, and individual instructors. In concluding comments, the author suggests ways for composition teachers, researchers, and administrators to build connections between different locations of writing and facilitate student transitions between institutions.

While research in L2 language and literacy in academic contexts has shed light on learning language per se (e.g., students’ development of syntactic complexity), classroom situations, in which ESL students engage in English and make it meaningful to them, have received far less attention. With a sociocultural perspective, this qualitative case study examined the discursive practices of a face-to-face community college ESL classroom and of its online discussion forums. We found that the discourse in the face-to-face classroom tended to prioritize shaping students’ academic knowledge and identity, pushing aside knowledge and identities that were peer- or life-worldbased. In contrast, the online forums afforded discourses through which students displayed peer-based, life-world, and academic knowledge and identities, while negotiating responses to academic assignments. The study suggests that classroom-based online forums can provide a space for the legitimate display of students’ nonacademic discourses in the service of academic work.

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.

Buell describes a basic writing graduate curriculum and analyzes a simulation activity for which students adopt stakeholder perspectives on a college-wide debate about mainstreaming basic writing students or moving basic writing to community college.

This essay argues the benefits of a critical service-learning project in which English Language Learners and developmental writing students documented the stories of Holocaust survivors for a campus-based resource center at a two-year college. The authors demonstrate the importance of designing service-learning projects that promote reciprocity and sustained collaboration among participants and stress the need to structure such projects to meet the needs of community college students.

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.

In a photo taken at the community college where my father Julian Medina taught, he’s wearing a tie and a middle-management, short-sleeved buttonup shirt, shaking hands with farm worker advocate César Chávez. As in my father’s proud image, I too work hard to project a professional appearance, often wearing a tie the first few weeks of the semester. I do so because of the often mistaken assumptions students make about my knowledge and the wisdom of assigning readings by writers of color. Unfortunately, this feeling of insecurity comes from lived experience. When my Anglo mother married my Mexican American father, her father disowned her. Even though my father had earned his bachelor’s degree and his master’s degree and taught English at a community college in central California, his accomplishments did little to diminish my grandfather’s racial prejudice. Before my father died in 2006 at the age of fifty-six, he often told me that I was supposed to surpass his success in the same way as he did with his accomplishment as the first in his family to graduate from college. He did this by changing the family trade of mowing lawns to instead teaching English at the college level.

The life of an adjunct is never slow. This essay looks into the professional and personal life of a community college teacher working at multiple colleges who wonders, like many others, how she will hold it all together and provide the quality of teaching that her students deserve.

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