Teaching English in the Two-Year College

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 explores the Reading Apprenticeship framework as a support for instructors to orchestrate dynamic, contextualized literacy instruction that supports both student engagement and deeper learning about the discipline of writing studies.

Antiracist education practices have gained increasing attention. Oftentimes, however, descriptions of this work fail to explicate the role of reading skills in students’ critical engagement with diverse texts. I explore the potential of metacognitive reading strategy instruction as a form of foundational literacy skills development for engaging in antiracist reading. Drawing from my experiences as a female of color and a coordinator and instructor of integrated reading and writing, I expand upon the concept of raciolinguistically just reading instruction, describing how students can document their application of multiple foundational reading strategies through the meta-strategy of annotation and other metacognitive practices. In particular, I focus on how students’ annotations can reflect their work in making text-based connections. Such annotation practice enacts a culturally sustaining pedagogy that amplifies student voices and their role as knowledge producers. I conclude by considering the larger role of decentering the instructor to foster students’ antiracist reading.

Although a good deal of writing has been done about reading, many articles, both in professional journals and in public media, bemoan a lack of reading skills. There is often a discourse around what students can’t do. In this article, we argue that adapting an assetbased, experiential framework around reading could be one of the most foundational and crucial steps in transforming our structures to respect, and therefore retain and engage, returning students.

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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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The following is the Opening Address given at the 2022 TYCA National Conference. It explains the exigence for the conference theme, “Recovery and Reinvention in Our Profession: Emerging from a Recent Time of Crisis,” in this current moment—particularly, the conference’s call for a mobilization of previously overlooked narratives in the two-year writing classroom. The talk has been lightly edited for inclusion here.

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This article describes the importance of pedagogies of access for equity in literacy classrooms, especially for first-generation students, who are more likely to bring what sociologists call strategies of deference that have been shaped by differences in class culture. A threshold concepts approach can bring transparency to the values of college-level core literacy skills to help interrogate and address those differences.

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This article reports on the working conditions of one hundred faculty who teach first-year composition at two-year colleges across the US.

This essay examines the breakthrough one academic had in negotiating her fear of failure with writing and discusses how that breakthrough affected the way she teaches her community college composition courses.

The Instructional Note provides a multistage drawing-to-read activity that is intended to support students’ development of process-oriented, active, engaged, and mindful reading habits.

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In these instructional notes, I share practical strategies for using ESL students’ first language as a resource for English language and literacy acquisition. These strategies emerged from a bilingual writing program that linked ESL and Spanish writing instruction at Bronx Community College (CUNY). After discussing how I was able to circumvent the monolingual orientations of my institution and set up this program as a learning community cluster, I illustrate ways in which translanguaging can help ESL students take ownership of English for academic purposes.

In 2019, the TYCA Executive Committee appointed the TYCA Workload Task Force to develop a white paper on workload and two-year college English faculty. This white paper, which is the result of a national survey of more than a thousand two-year college English instructors, establishes workload recommendations for teachers of postsecondary literacy courses in community and technical college settings.

An instructor of undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses creates a mind-mapping activity for syllabus review to engage her students.

This article describes the authors’ experiences incorporating a trauma-informed writing pedagogy during the pandemic that uses a writer mentor and poetry in composition to build confidence, manage stress, and foster community.

In response to growing neoliberal pressures and austerity measures, two-year English teacher-scholars have embraced Sullivan’s call to activism, but this work is made challenging as aspiring teacher-scholar-activists struggle to balance activism with the other heavy demands of their professional practice. After expanding teacher-scholar-activism as a theoretical framework, we explore activism through cross-case analysis of three developmental literacy professionals’ actions, mindsets, and training. We then provide a pragmatic how-to manual for aspiring teacher-scholar-activists.

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This article considers disabled students’ experiences with collaborative writing and offers strategies to improve the accessibility of collaborative writing assignments.

This TETYC symposium centers anti-ableist action across two-year college institutional contexts, including the writing classroom (Olivas), writing centers (Van Dyke and Lovett), a Writing Across the Curriculum Program (Rousculp), and basic writing (Naomi Bernstein). Taken together, these authors offer insights into establishing anti-ableist practices in two-year college English studies with careful attention to multiple marginalized identities.

Serving as the introduction to TETYC’s special issue on disability in two-year college English, this article centers disability as a necessary consideration for two-year colleges’ mission of open access. Drawing on the work of disability justice activists, advocates, and disability scholars, this introduction frames the work of the special issue’s contributors by tracing the ableist obstacles faced by disabled people in two-year college English and how these ableist structures overlap and intersect with other marginalized identities, thus creating a nesting doll of ableism.

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In this article, I examine how the language circulated by two-year college writing center websites impacts discursive understandings of disability and offer recommendations for more accessible documentation practices grounded in critical disability studies and technical and professional communication theory.

Examining the interaction of neurodivergence with course policies and assignment specifics can help instructors avoid common discriminatory practices that cause otherwise successful students to fail.

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This article is about the distinct challenges first-generation college students face in envisioning future careers. I discuss how the composition classroom can be a space for reflection that addresses immediate needs while also helping students cultivate agency via career exploration.

This study documents the author’s experience reflecting on eight semesters of informal student evaluations of teaching in the process of updating his teaching methods for second-semester composition. He finds that reflective teaching practices provide a powerful methodology for engaging with the opinions of two-year college students, which can lead to a more productive focus on writing college essays in the composition classroom.

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This article uses the figured worlds theoretical framework to study the influence past writing education has on present and future writing education.

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This article describes a research assignment for first-year composition students that combines film and television motif analysis and role-playing, thus creating an opportunity for students to write critiques of contemporary institutions.

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Using weekly Writing Accountability Groups in intro-level writing courses provides benefits for both instructors and students without taking up synchronous class time.