Notes that teaching composition in a technical college presents a number of challenges. Considers how employers are calling for the hands-on training to be combined with more communication and critical thinking skills so that employees have a broader education that allows them to switch speeds or tasks. Describes activities and course components for technical college writing instruction.

Notes how early junior college compositionists sought to socialize a largely working-class student body into a middle-class sensibility. Argues that educators must make time to create historical narratives of two-year colleges as a valuable precursor to fighting for institutional reforms within institutions. Analyzes the manner that curriculum builders in the 1920s and 1930s constructed first-year writing courses at junior colleges.

Teachers at all levels of college instruction use service learning, a popular pedagogical tool since the mid-eighties, to teach students both social consciousness and pragmatic, real-world writing skills. This article explores the concept of service learning as rhetorical action in the field of technical communication in general, and the question of whether service learning is appropriate in beginning level technical writing courses. Using my experience through two years of service learning instruction in community college classes, I respond to the charge that students in lower-division courses may lack the maturity to successfully enact service learning assignments. I also analyze the appropriateness of the community college as a catalyst for community-based writing projects.

Describes a class discussion in the author’s first-year composition class at a New York City community college, after students read a volume of Sappho’s poetry. Discusses issues of reading comprehension, poetry, gender-preference prejudice, and how they were all set straight by one student from Brooklyn.

Describes an AIDS-centered curriculum for a composition class in a New York City community college. Describes selecting a text, assignments, attending a conference, guest speakers, and the research paper. Notes that the subject of AIDS not only provokes reflective writing and much class discussion but also compels writers to express and sometimes change profound ideas about living and dying.

Examines community college students’ choices of favorite works after a one-year composition and literature course. Finds “Antigone” was the favorite. Claims Greek classical works put students in contact with a distant culture that they find intriguing. Suggests juxtaposing a classical work with one from another time and culture to avoid assuming the classics into a rigid cultural hegemony.

Describes the author’s 35-year career teaching in the California Community College System. Discusses social, political, intellectual, and emotional changes over that time span and into retirement.

Describes an innovative curriculum project at Piedmont Community College in North Carolina called CONCUR, which designed classes specifically for developmental students, applying the principles of contextual learning by creating the context of a publishing company. Discusses motivation, grading, the reading workshop, providing books, pages required and journal entries, class activities, the Writing Workshop, and publication.

Presents interviews of faculty from around the country to review and evaluate the teaching of English in two-year colleges during their careers. Considers personal changes and experiences over the last 25 years and looks at the next 25 years. Discusses change and the need for flexibility in the profession.

Presents Part II of an interview with Ira Shor reflecting on the state of community colleges since the 1960s. Discusses how the most important thing to teach is critical inquiry and critical literacy, to study something in a methodical way and to communicate knowledge gained with articulate depth to a real audience. Outlines 13 goals for schooling and society.

Illustrates some of the changes and trends at “Teaching English in the Two-Year College” (TETYC) during the author’s years on the masthead. Considers specific articles of his first and last issues (Fall 1978 - December 1987). Represents TETYC staff as individuals who do not give up on students, continually challenging them with new thinking, new perspectives, and new techniques.

Offers future researchers many opportunities for research in two-year college English. Considers input about issues, problems, and questions which the research community still needs to engage. Assumes that research clusters around several “fault lines” shared by other groups and institutions not directly tied to education; the fault lines selected are identity, technology, diversity, pedagogy, literacy, and methodology.

Reflects on making “Teaching English in the Two-Year College” a viable journal. Discusses formation of the Two-Year College Organization, and its formal recognition by the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1997.

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Presents a long-time two-year college teacher’s reflections on retirement and the profession. Discusses ways in which to continue writing and working after retirement. Considers the politics of regional, local, and national English organizations in terms of what’s best for the teachers and students. Sums up in seven assertions what he has learned in 47 years of teaching.

Presents discussion on two-year college English by faculty from around the country. Gives a point of view from the Midwest and the Pacific Coast. Compiles different opinions from each region.

Discusses the development of “Teaching English in the Two-Year College,” a journal designed to serve the special needs of community college English faculty. Discusses success and subsequent growth of the journal and considers the different subject matters addressed throughout the first five developmental years of the journal.

Discusses how by accepting the metaphor of education as product and the corporate-bureaucratic definition of “quality,” community colleges fail to help students transform their lives and may foster America’s class system. Considers the humanities’ definition and the corporate definition of quality. Exhibits concerns about the political structures of the educational systems.

Presents an interview with Ira Shor, who reflects on the state of the community college since the 1960s, the open admissions experiment at the City University of New York, and the remediation wars that have recently heated up in New York and elsewhere.

Provides a retrospective update of a 1974 profile of the English department at Hinds Community College, Raymond, Mississippi. Discusses the major changes for the school: (1) it is no longer a “junior college”; and (2) it has expanded its campus. Describes the faculty, activities, curriculum, extracurricular activities, school changes, and future plans in relationship to the 1974 profile.

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.

Provides a retrospective update of a 1974 profile of the English Department at St. Louis’s Forest Park Community College. Describes the campus, English department, internal governance, courses taught, professional activities, and departmental spirit in relationship to its 1974 profile.

Discusses negative stereotyping of the public or others in the profession of two-year college educators. Defines the open-admissions student and the emphasis on the “introductory” elements as a mission of transformation. Encourages working together towards a common goal of achievement in the profession of English Studies by crossing the border between higher education and two-year college faculty.

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.

Shares freshman-composition students’ stories about portfolio assessment (interviewing students at length three times during the semester), to examine ways students understand portfolios, how portfolios work, and why sometimes they do not. Suggests concerns relevant to implementing department-wide competency portfolios. Argues that community colleges may be better situated than large universities to reap the benefits of portfolios.

Reports results of a study of adult students over the age of 24 at one community college in New York State. Explores (1) the reasons the mature person takes a life-step once confined to the young; (2) the difficulties and satisfactions they experience; and (3) what colleges can do to respond to their needs.

Discusses the experience of the author (a college teacher) as a student in another teacher’s Native-American literature course. Looks at the classroom from both sides of the desk, assessing the course, evaluating her own learning experience, and gaining new perspectives on today’s two-year college students.

Describes how English faculty at a community college surveyed the needs of faculty in other disciplines regarding their writing requirements. Relates patterns that emerged and describes changes made in the English 101 course, including a summary/reaction assignment based on a bibliographic resource. Notes positive comments from students and faculty about the benefits of this assignment.

Ponders F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essays about his "crack-up" and relates them to the many complex aspects of the struggles of a teacher using post-structural literary theory and teaching two-year college students.

Describes how instructors at two different colleges in Montana (a tribal college and a distant community college) collaboratively teach composition courses (using the same reading and assignments, and doing peer revision for each other). Describes how this approach breaks through cultural, ideological, intellectual "containments;" engages in academic discourse; and enters into new discourse communities.

Argues that a process-oriented nonjudgmental instructional approach can help English-as-a-Second-Language community college students become better writers. Discusses the principle of nonjudgmental awareness and its rationale, and describes five pedagogical techniques used in a nonjudgmental writing class.

Finds that the writing of the typical student enrolled in the community college composition class is qualitatively different from the writing of their four-year counterparts but that two-year college transfer students achieve the same level of writing competence as their nontransfer peers. Presents reactions of a two-year college instructor regarding implications of these results.

Argues that connecting classroom practice to writing center tutorials prepares students to generate dialogic and democratic tutorials. Describes a liberatory writing center (rather than a skill-and-drill site of remediation). Describes classroom practices that help students develop critical approaches to the power arrangements they encounter both inside and outside the academy. Notes implications for two-year colleges.

I salute the 1300 two-year colleges-colleges that bring hope, opportunity, fulfillment of dreams to a large segment of our population for whom otherwise higher education would be very difficult, if not impossible. Community colleges are open door, they are accessible, they are affordable, they are cost efficient, they offer a broad array of programs and services, and they open the way for transferring to four-year institutions or entering/reentering the workforce. Familiar words from the Declaration of Independence remind us of the basis of our democracy: "We hold these truths to be self-evident…"-you know the rest of the sentence. The abstractions "created equal," "certain unalienable rights," "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" become realities for many because of their community college experiences. Community colleges are indeed democracy in action. (Pickett 98).

Sees a tendency, in the field of composition, to privilege either theory or classroom practice. Discusses theory as liberatory narrative. Draws on Michael Dorris, bell hooks, and Paulo Freire to show how the act of theorizing becomes an act of compassion and of healing. Describes how literacy narratives from the two-year college classroom demonstrate this point.

Contends that service learning--community service linked to academic courses--adds a valuable experiential dimension to composition classes. Describes service learning at Raritan Valley Community College where in composition it fits as an optional alternative for the research paper assignment that is the culminating course project. Discusses how projects are developed and implemented.

Uses role-playing, dramatic monologues, and "tableaux vivant" to interpret Robert Browning’s poem "My Last Duchess" in an introductory literature class at Westchester Community College. Notes that performative strategies illustrate connections in the poem that often remain unnoticed on a first reading.

Describes how a cooperative program between a community college (Spokane Falls) and a university (Eastern Washington) produced a successful teaching internship. Finds that, besides the ways in which interns learn from the experience, working with interns can benefit community college educators and offer them an opportunity for self-assessment and for introspection concerning their own planning and teaching.

What Is Composition and Why Do We Teach It? A Review Essay; Teachers, Discourses, and Authority in the Postmodern Composition Classroom; When Writing Teachers Teach Literature: Bringing Writing to Reading; Science and Technology Today: Readings for Writers; Writing Off Center: An American Issues Reader for Composition; The Shape of Ideas; Border Talk: Writing and Knowing in the Two-Year College.

A review of one two-year college English department’s procedures reveals the complexities of dealing with part-time faculty.

Collective research projects allow students to theorize about the connections between their lives and their writing and the power they have to remake knowledge and society.

This article considers on-line documentation's place in a two-year college's technical communication program. Such a course can be successful if instructors (1) emphasize design principles rather than a particular software package; (2) build on rhetorical skills students already possess, while developing the new skills necessary for authoring documents for the computer screen; and (3) acknowledge the need for their own professional development.

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Stories of how two-year colleges transform lives must be told more widely.

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