Teaching English in the Two-Year College

This article details five primary steps used to increase student success in corequisite courses. From fall 2019 to fall 2023, Paris Junior College has observed a significant increase in the percentage of students who are successful in our corequisite program. In the fall of 2020, the success rate of corequisite students at PJC was 47 percent. Yet by fall 2023, that number was bolstered to an impressive 67 percent success rate of corequisite students. We contend that there are five components that account for the success of our students: identification of multiple measures, course design, pedagogical consistency, embedded course support, and speed of course delivery.

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.

As we begin a fresh academic year, anticipating new challenges, frustrations, and, we hope, rewards, I find myself thinking of Kenneth Burke’s “unending conversation” (The Philosophy of Literary Form, Berkeley: U of California P, 1941, 110–11). In our classrooms we continue that unending conversation in our discipline, engaging with the knowledge built in the past, beginning to build new knowledge.

Preview this article: REVIEW: The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/31/4/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege3033-1.gif