Teaching English in the Two-Year College

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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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.

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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Creating her own assignments using openly licensed course materials allows this professor and her students to be more creative and to take greater advantage of digital resources.

Editor’s Note: In my continuing effort to introduce our readers to Forum’s editorial board, I have given over the duties of composing this issue’s introduction to Steve Fox of Indiana University—Purdue University, Indianapolis.