Teaching English in the Two-Year College

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 Instructional Note provides information on having students create research posters to support oral presentations in their first-year writing classes. Creating digital posters connects to multimodal assignments and provides transferable skills.

Modifying inclusive creative workshop models for FYW classrooms empowers student engagement and persistence and allows instructors with creative practices to effectively draw on their expertise to guide students’ writing of persuasive argumentative prose.

This Instructional Note elaborates on how weekly anonymous wellness check-in surveys can be designed and implemented in English courses to support students’ purposeful awareness of their well-being and to create a sense of supportive community in the composition classroom.

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.

Preview this article: Review: Engaging Faculty in Guided Pathways: A Practical Resource for College Leaders, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/51/2/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege512180-1.gif

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.

Preview this article: Editor’s Introduction: One Does Not Simply Teach in Mordor: Literacy Studies and the Triumph of Neoliberal Ideology, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/51/1/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege32712-1.gif

This is a lightly edited version of the TYCA Chair’s Address delivered at the 2023 National TYCA Conference in Chicago, Illinois.

Preview this article: Review: Materiality and Writing Studies: Aligning Labor, Scholarship, and Teaching by Holly Hassel and Cassandra Phillips, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/51/1/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege32720-1.gif

In this article, we share strategies and data from a study constructed in a faculty learning community using course analytics to design, deliver, and track instructor-student communication—in the form of “nudges”—to improve student success. Although we do not feel comfortable making generalized conclusions from such a small sample, we think our data suggests that many students positively benefited from grade-based nudging. We also think it was extremely important that our nudging interventions focused on all students within the class, not only those who were not doing well. However, we acknowledge that the majority of the instructors said this type of work takes time.

This is a lightly edited version of the Conference Chair’s Address delivered at the 2023 TYCA National Conference, held on February 15 in Chicago, Illinois.

Preview this article: Review: Critical Rural Pedagogy: Connecting College Students with American Literature by Sharon Mitchler, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/51/1/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege32719-1.gif

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.

Students entering first-year composition often discover self-inquiry for the first time, enabling them to examine their identities when opportunities are created to do so. The experiences of two traditional first-year college students are examined to better understand the power that writing instructors and writing courses hold.

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.

Preview this article: Review: Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century: by Beth L. Hewett, Tiffany Bourelle, and Scott Warnock; Administering Writing Programs in the Twenty-First Century: by Tiffany Bourelle, Beth L. Hewett, and Scott Warnock., Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/50/4/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege32591-1.gif

This roundtable discussion addresses issues of professionalism and disciplinarity at TYCs and constructs a vision of the TYC as the future hub of writing studies.

Preview this article: Review: Working with and against Shared Curricula: Perspectives from College Writing Teachers and Administrators Edited by Connie Kendall Theado and Samantha NeCamp., Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/50/4/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege32590-1.gif

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.

Preview this article: From the Archive: The Genesis and Early Development of TETYC: A Silver Anniversary Reminiscence, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/50/4/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege32585-1.gif

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.

Preview this article: Editor’s Introduction: Refusing Pessimism: Imagining a Future for Two-Year College Literacy Studies as a Discipline and a Profession, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/50/4/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege32583-1.gif

Preview this article: Editor's Intoduction: The Community College as an Institution of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration and Literacy Studies, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/50/3/teachingenglishinthetwoyearcollege32507-1.gif

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.

Preview this article: Reviews: Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges:The Pursuit of Equity in Postsecondary Education, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/50/3/teachingenglishinthetwoyearcollege32514-1.gif

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.

Preview this article: Review: The Hidden Inequities in Labor-BasedContract Grading, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/50/3/teachingenglishinthetwoyearcollege32515-1.gif

This Instructional Note elaborates on a definition of a decolonized classroom as one that champions Indigenous epistemologies, connects students to community events and organizations beyond the college, and unsettles dominant perceptions of a college education as strictly for capitalistic advancement.