By Allison Gross and Jessica Lee. In the Fall of 2022, we set out with a handful of our colleagues in the English department to create an anti-racist writing curriculum. Of particular importance to us was crafting this curriculum for our specific context, not just as a two-year college, but also at Portland Community College (PCC) in particular, the largest higher education institution in Oregon, situated in the “whitest big city in America” (De Leon). Even though Portland itself is predominantly white, our students at PCC are far more diverse, with PCC itself situated on the traditional village site of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, and Clackamas bands of the Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River. Specifically

Abstract Drawing from new and foundational scholarship in the field and from our experiences as teachers at a range of institutions, the authors consider how multimodal learning can support antiracist classrooms. This article emphasizes the value of cross-institutional collaboration, as the authors make a collective case for remixing the essay in first-year composition. This term denotes a method for building on the traditional college essay through activities and assignments that allow students to reevaluate and repurpose this well-established genre. The authors offer four case studies for remixing the essay—“Multimodal Translation: Playing with Post-Its” (Borough of Manhattan Community College /City University of New York), “Remixing Activism: The Essay as Personal and Political Playlist” (St. Francis College), “NYC Graffiti Autoethnography” (Fordham University), and “‘Vernacularity and Translation Activity” (Yale University). All four narratives present practices that support critical agency and linguistic justice by addressing the conventions of college writing assignments. Together, the authors offer a useful practice for composition instructors seeking to implement antiracist and multimodal instruction as well as a generative concept for administrators developing new writing curricula.

• Hispanic women engage more in check-in assignments than men. • Hispanic enrollment (37.71 %) exceeds community college average. • Main themes: course perceptions, personal challenges, faculty-student relations. • Check-in assignments enhance engagement and faculty-student bonds for Hispanic women. • Advanced course students report more personal challenges, greater faculty reliance. While online community college students’ engagement with coursework, class retention, and motivation to participate are critical for academic success, these needs often go unmet for diverse and underrepresented populations, especially in the absence of culturally responsive and inclusive teaching practices. This study contributes to the limited research on culturally responsive pedagogy in online community college settings by exploring the implementation and impact of high-context communication practices in that setting, with a focus on improving engagement and academic outcomes for diverse student populations. Drawing on frameworks of culturally responsive teaching and high-context communication, the research examines the effectiveness of “check-in assignments” as a low-stakes, personalized intervention designed to foster stronger faculty-student relationships, enhance student belonging, and bridge cultural communication gaps in online learning environments. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study analyzes quantitative data on assignment engagement and qualitative themes from student responses. Findings indicate that high-context communication practices promote deeper engagement, especially among Hispanic and non-Hispanic females, while highlighting disparities in engagement among male students. Key themes—course perceptions, personal challenges, and faculty-student relationships—underscore the role of culturally informed interventions in addressing the needs of underrepresented groups and enhancing engagement and academic success. Future research could expand on these findings by exploring longitudinal outcomes and adaptive strategies for diverse learning environments.

The article explores the prevalence of for-profit tutoring services contracted by four-year and two-year colleges and the perceptions writing center professionals have about for-profit tutoring services. Applying a grounded theory approach, the researchers found five main themes that emerged from an open-ended survey sent to writing studies and writing center listservs in fall 2022. The article concludes with suggestions modeled after not-for-profit tutoring initiatives such as the Western eTutoring Consortium.

As part of a study I conducted to investigate the variables that influence our students’ writing center participation, students who had not used the center were asked to submit free-response data to further describe their reasons for nonuse. For this article, the nonusers’ narrative data are interpreted within the context of the quantitative results I obtained to gain a deeper understanding of why some students do not use our writing center. Based on my findings, I offer recommendations for tailoring writing center support to better meet our students’ needs, with the overall aim of increasing their use of our services.

This article examines two-year college peer writing tutors’ preparedness for the emotional labor of writing center work. Through stories, this multivocal piece shares the experiences of nine current and former peer tutors from a writing center at a large midwestern technical college and challenges the narrative of two-year colleges as remedial spaces.

In recent years, the college writing center at our community college began an embedded tutoring program in hopes of reaching more developmental English students. A combination of the pandemic and the temporary shift to online-only tutoring, pandemic funding opportunities, and changes in the college’s developmental education program led tutors to rethink how best to help developmental students succeed. Ultimately, this article shows that developing our embedded tutoring program facilitated a partnership between instructors, tutors, and students that resulted in higher academic performance, student and faculty engagement, and faculty buy-in.

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 Instructional Note presents seven semesters of data showing the results of eliminating developmental reading and writing on our campus.

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

This article considers recent trends in developmental education and analyzes disaggregated student data, exploring the extent to which developmental education reform of corequisite instruction affected access of one community college’s students to a first-semester composition course. By examining student access and student success across two distinct semesters, before and after extensive developmental education reform, the article presents an approach to deep assessment that is necessary for English departments at community colleges as they analyze and adjust to specific reforms.

Latinx students are a growing demographic in postsecondary English classes, but the majority of research on them and on the faculty who teach them is based in the US Southwest at Hispanic-Serving Institutions. The purpose of this study is to describe some of the pedagogical and extracurricular considerations of faculty who teach Latinx students in two community colleges in the Midwest in order to support these students, especially in developmental courses. This study draws from qualitative data collected at two community colleges, Mann College and Kinsella College (pseudonyms). This exploratory study provides recommendations for the kind of professional development that faculty may need in order to support Latinx students, the importance of understanding students’ myriad identities, and the ways political forces may shape students’ experiences.

Abstract This article discusses and situates various grading practices — such as labor-based grading and specification grading — and their applications within a community college setting. Through two community college instructor voices with two disparate and continuing grading journeys, this article reflects on how these grading practices affect community college students in unforeseen and unjust ways, and ultimately argues that instructors should offer grading choices in order to serve the complex lives and needs of community college students.

Abstract This article offers a theory of action model for grading in first-year writing classes, as enacted at two public, suburban, Midwestern two-year colleges. First, it analyzes labor-based contract grading and specifications grading through this model, examining how these popular grading methods have manifested in unintended negative consequences for historically and multiply marginalized students. Then, it proposes a sociocognitive grading model designed to maximize course-level success rates for New Majority college students. The sociocognitive model was iteratively built on feminist standpoint theory, intersectional learning sciences, multilingual writing pedagogy, and disability studies. Thus far, student course-level success has improved, along with their learning in four domains of a robust writing construct: intrapersonal, interpersonal, cognitive, and health. While it does not prescribe specific patterns of response, this model nevertheless establishes an overall referential frame that holds the potential to incorporate empirically based best response practices.

This symposium documents an ongoing conversation between five faculty members from Portland Community College. The discussion explores what “equity-based assessment” means, grappling both with the reasons for adopting such approaches as contract grading, labor-based grading, and ungrading and with the challenges of implementing them in two-year colleges.

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 flexibility of labor-based contract grading allowed students in the study to make strategic, intentional, autonomous choices about the types of labor and products they produced. This strategic decision-making helped them to balance the workload requirements of their other classes, employment, and personal issues and laid important groundwork for students’ emerging autonomy.

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.

In the fall of 2018, the First-Year Composition program at North Central Texas College (NCTC) initiated what informally became known as the Textbook Project. Our goal was to provide our community college students with innovative, imaginative, and inspiring classroom experiences that paralleled the high-impact opportunities their peers were afforded at four-year universities. The Textbook Project encompassed five key features: an NCTC-specific textbook, a campus-wide common read, resources for faculty and students in our college’s LMS, a college-wide lecture series, and funding for faculty professional development. Five years later, the project’s emphasis on continuity through collaboration has revitalized the department through faculty engagement and increased student success.

This study examines the effects of a curriculum based on self-regulated strategy instruction in an accelerated developmental education (DE) English course in a community college. Faculty at the college had established a four-week, two-credit compressed course that enabled students to enroll in an eleven-week first-year composition (FYC) course in the same semester, reducing remediation from fifteen weeks to just four weeks. The course focused on writing argumentative essays using sources. The study used a quasi-experimental design with five instructors and sixty-six students to compare the experimental curriculum to a business-as-usual control condition. In the experimental curriculum, students learned strategies for writing using sources, including strategies for critical reading and for planning and revising. In addition to writing and reading strategies, students also learned metacognitive, self-regulation strategies, such as goal setting, task management, and reflection. The study found a large positive effect (ES = .96) of the treatment on quality of an argument essay written using sources. However, no significant effects were found on a summary outline, self-efficacy, or completion of the subsequent FYC course. The study demonstrates the value of strategy instruction in DE English courses; it is the first experimental study of strategy instruction in an accelerated DE course. Further research is needed to evaluate the effects of strategy instruction in corequisite courses and in FYC.

This essay seeks to add to existing conversations about the role of first-year composition (FYC) in relation to students’ subsequent literacy experiences. Using data from an open-ended survey of former students five years after they completed FYC, in which they describe their current reading and writing practices and reflect on how these practices connect (or fail to connect) to what they recall from FYC, this article positions the findings within the context of scholarship on WAW and TFT and ultimately calls for increased attention to the situated nature of writing as part of the FYC curriculum at two-year colleges.

In minimizing and narrowing students’ opportunities for exploration, discovery, deliberation, and thoughtfulness—the educational gold standard of our nation’s most elite educational institutions—by offering them a rationed education that is designed to facilitate quick completion of a degree or certificate, “redesigning” and Guided Pathways reforms and recommendations have promoted “workforce training” and devalued the humanities.

We are now a decade into the call for comprehensive community college “redesign” known as Guided Pathways. This introduction provides an overview of the Guided Pathways model and its advocacy arm and reviews critiques of the model in education research and two-year college literacy studies. These reviews contextualize the contents of the special issue.

This article critiques the whole-college reform project dubbed Guided Pathways. The article describes how Guided Pathways research has failed to provide data that support the reform project’s claims, disputes the extent to which Guided Pathways can claim to be equity-oriented work, and ultimately identifies Guided Pathways as a reform project that diverges from the interests of the two-year college.

In this symposium, seven community college transfer students present their perspectives on Guided Pathways curricular reforms. Drawing on published scholarship and policy documents as well as their own lived experiences, they identify positive aspects of the Guided Pathways model as well as shortcomings in its conceptualization and local implementation.

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.

This critical phenomenological study sought Native American student perspectives on intention and desired faculty response following self-disclosure of personal challenges in college writing assignments and discusses implications for faculty and for implementing trauma-informed writing pedagogy with students who are historically marginalized.

This article presents a video discussion board assignment designed to foster belonging and academic language practice in a remote classroom. We consider how the assignment supported robust discussion and multimodal composition in Critical Reading and Writing, a course run with synchronous and asynchronous components during the COVID-19 pandemic at a technical college.

This essay explores affordances and limitations of the disciplinary labels that two-year college teachers use to frame our work. Ultimately, it argues that the termliteracy studiesbest reflects the transdisciplinary work we do.

This article traces the complexities of two-year college (TYC) writing program administration and offers suggestions for more research about TYC writing program administration and in collaboration with TYC writing program administrators.

In this symposium, five editors ofTeaching English in the Two-Year College(TETYC) discuss the past, present, and future of the journal and the profession.

Published scholarship on two-year college writing programs began in 1990; has developed through two identifiable stages, from descriptive to prescriptive; and is on the cusp of entering a third stage, the ethical, in which we must know and account for the potentially harmful effects of our writing programs.

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AbstractThis article proposes that the methods and philosophies informing corequisite teaching could be generalized throughout English studies to support students at all levels who are undergoing and recovering from pandemic-related traumas. Corequisite courses, which promote equity among first-year students, are designed with attention to trauma-informed approaches and a focus on process-driven writing. Instructors address noncognitive skills with students, such as time management and note-taking, and consider the cultural relevance of their reading and writing assignments. By describing specific activities and methods used at Hostos Community College, the article considers how strategies that are central to corequisite pedagogy might be widely adopted or adapted in this moment of reorientation for English studies. Additionally, the article suggests that mission-driven practices of community colleges serve as a model for higher education more broadly.

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This article explores how we eliminated—without lowering student success rates—our developmental writing and reading courses (three to seven noncredit hours) and shifted to an all-inclusive, no-placement-necessary, integrated reading and writing course for first-year comp.

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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.

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.

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.

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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