Research Gaps in Teaching English
in the Two-Year College
> Holly Hassel
This essay reports on a systematic assessment of 239 feature articles published in the journal
Teaching English in the Two-Year College between 2001 and 2012. It notes gaps in the
published research on two-year college English teaching and recommends areas of
focus for future work in the field.
I
n the midst of disciplinary and public debates about education at open-access
institutions, it’s more important than ever that we set a clear path for inquiry
and scholarship that will meet the needs of our professional community.This essay
provides an assessment of the research achievements in two-year college English,
particularly those reported in the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College,
which, in my estimation, is the most important published, accessible resource for
two-year college English instructors.1 In doing this assessment, I have used Kip
Strasma and Paul Resnick’s 1999 essay “Future Research in Two-Year College
English” as a framework for thinking about our progress in the last decade and a
half. Using Strasma and Resnick’s six identified areas of needed research as a benchmark (diversity, technology, identity, literacy, methodology, and pedagogy), I assess
how effectively this journal has responded to that call, and I identify what research
remains to be done in order to respond to the needs of TYCA’s constituencies and
the changing higher education landscape.
We all hear and read (in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in our campus
hallways) both excitement and pessimism expressed about these changes—in our
student demographics, in our workloads, and in the nature of our teaching and
service responsibilities, for example.2 In other ways, our institutions are changing:
contingent faculty now make up the majority (in two-year colleges, the vast majority) of position types. As the MLA report “Demography of the Faculty” notes,
“only 32% of faculty members in English, across all institutions, hold tenured or
tenure-track positions”; it further observes that “60% of instructors at four-year
institutions work off the tenure track, while the percentage of contingent faculty at
two-year campuses is closer to 80%” (Laurence 2).The economic downturn of the
last several years has put increasing fiscal pressure on state-funded institutions that
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face deep budget cuts in the general purpose revenues on which they have relied
in the past to support their institutions, and pressure from administrators, legislators,
parents, and students to produce documented results—college completion, degree
attainment, job placement—is increasing.
As a result, it is more important than ever before that faculty at two-year
colleges both learn from and engage in critical inquiry: to document our working conditions, the learning needs of our students, met and unmet needs in our
institutions, and the challenges and successes in our classrooms. We must both
use and contribute to the body of knowledge on teaching college writing and to
the national conversation about a twenty-first-century definition of literacy. This
review of the research published in the last decade or so in TETYC is intended
to highlight some of the most important achievements of our discipline and the
critical areas of need—the questions we need to ask and answer if we are to meet
the charges and changes we face.
Methods and Approach
In “Future Research in Two-Year College English,” Kip Strasma and Paul Resnick
outlined a trajectory for research in two-year college English in which they lay
out what, in their view, are the most important areas of inquiry that the field of
two-year college English should explore. They identify six areas for future study:
identity, technology, diversity, pedagogy, literacy, and methodology. Their article
provides a useful benchmark and the basis for my analysis in this essay; halfway
through their quarter-century benchmark, my assessment shows that some of these
research aspirations have been realized, while others have not; still others did not
appear in Strasma and Resnick’s original vision but have subsequently emerged as
an important priority for two-year college English instructors since the time of
the essay’s publication.
In order to get a sense of the trends in two-year college research, I reviewed
45 issues of Teaching English in the Two-Year College, starting with March 2001 and
ending with March 2012. I focused on the “Feature” articles, which are distinct
from other types of articles such as “Instructional Notes” and which are most likely
to engage in longer, sustained arguments and to draw from systematic research.
They are also most likely to be positioned within other conversations in the field.
I grouped the articles broadly into two categories by methodology (those using a
systematic research design and those relying on narrative, existing published research,
or source-based syntheses), with subcategories by theme, as shown in Table 1.
Though certainly there is some subjectivity in how I have categorized the
articles (as well as some difficult judgments I made in assigning articles to one category or the other), I’ve aimed to group and distinguish them, first, by method or
approach: in simple terms, essays that primarily draw from personal experience or
from previously published work versus essays that pose an original research question,
design a method for answering that question, and undertake a systematic execution
of that method to arrive at a conclusion (a research report). So, for example, articles
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Ta b l e 1 .
Assessment of Feature Articles by Category and Theme
Articles Emphasizing Strategy, Best Practice,
Synthesizing Sources, or Making
Source-Based Arguments
Articles Using a Formal Research Design,
a Systematic Analysis, or Situated
Case Studies
• Training future faculty
• Experience of teaching at a two-year college (including personal and professional
development, and reflections)
• Reports on strategies, techniques, or ideas
for teaching
• Course design
• Theoretical approach to classroom practice (more than a single course)
• History, theory, or reflection on the
disciplinarity of writing studies or on the
profession of teaching English in the TYC
• Program or curriculum development
• Writing centers in the TYC
• Professional documents (usually under the
auspices of TYCA)
• Assessment of a teaching technique or
approach, assessment of student learning
(on the program or classroom level)
• Program development
• Meta-studies
• Working conditions/faculty development
such as the May 2011 collaboratively authored essay “An Outcomes Assessment
Project: Basic Writing and Essay Structure,” describing a departmentally constructed
assessment project, I categorized under “systematic analysis,” because the project
followed a systematic research design and answered a research question. I contrasted
this with the many articles that describe a writer’s individual classroom experience,
reflect on teaching in the two-year college, propose the use of a particular text,
assignment, or film, or focus on “best practices.” And even though documents like
Jody Millward’s “Analysis of the National TYCA Research Initiative Survey” on
“Technology and Pedagogy in Two-Year College English Programs,” Patrick Sullivan’s research initiative report on Assessment Practices, and Leslie Roberts’s report
on the TYCA’s survey on “Writing across the Curriculum and Writing Centers
in Two-Year College English Programs” do follow a systematic design, I put them
in the first category because they are reports emerging from the organization and
published under the auspices of the national organization, and they reflect the
research agendas already embraced by the profession and not necessarily research
emerging from the TETYC readership at large. This methodological distinction is
important primarily to a point I make later in this essay about scholarly research.
In looking at themes, trends, or patterns about topics of research, I drew conclusions
based on both types of essays (for example, I did not distinguish between essays
focused on diversity or technology that used a “best practice” approach versus those
that used a systematic research design).
Further, though I argue ultimately that two-year college English needs
more of our professional voices participating in the scholarly conversation, I did
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not track article authors by their institutional affiliation, because the editorial mission of the journal is rightfully focused on teaching and learning in English in
the first two years of college, and many writers from a wide range of institutional
types and employment statuses can meaningfully contribute to that conversation;
as the “Information for TETYC Authors” page on the NCTE website explains,
“TETYC publishes articles for two-year college teachers and those teaching the
first two years of English in four-year institutions.” Therefore, though I think it is
valuable for the journal to include work by two-year college teacher-scholars (as
I discuss later), the present assessment did not focus on this aspect of authorship.
Recommendations from the Past
Two areas Strasma and Resnick discussed in “Future Research” have been directly
addressed in the last decade by organizational documents: identity and technology.
First, our professional organization has taken up through historical documentation
the challenge to establish more firmly the roles, responsibilities, challenges, and
joys of teaching English in the two-year college. The journal has also published
articles outlining visions for the future, usually written by TYCA chairs and pieces
published in TETYC by writers engaging questions about professional identity.
Identity
In their 1999 essay, Strasma and Resnick observe that the identity of the twoyear college faculty member and the history of TYCA as an organization were
neglected areas of research. What they observe is that “one of these histories that
remains unwritten is the history of TYCA itself ” (107). TETYC responded with
a series of articles by Jeff Andelora on the history of the organization: “TYCA and
the Struggle for a National Voice: 1994-1997” and “TYCA and the Struggle for
a National Voice: 1991-1993,” as well as Andelora’s “Forging a National Identity:
TYCA and the Teacher-Scholar” and “The Professionalization of Two-Year College Faculty: 1950-1990. Each of these essays documents the establishment of
the Two-Year College English Association—our relationship with umbrella and
related professional organizations like the Conference on College Composition
and Communication and the National Council of Teachers of English, and how
the organization has evolved to respond to the needs of and advance the ambitions
of two-year college English faculty. Andelora’s essay titled “The Teacher/Scholars:
Reconstructing our Professional Identity in Two-Year Colleges” in the March 2005
issue of TETYC earned the distinction of best article of the year—and presents both
the history of and an argument for the participation of two-year college faculty in
professional conversations about the teaching of writing, the teaching of English,
and our disciplines. Andelora outlines two ways that we have sought to influence
the development of rhetoric and composition: (1) encouraging two-year college
faculty to engage in research and scholarship and (2) encouraging researchers and
scholars at four-year campuses to include two-year college students in their research.
Other notable essays have proposed trajectories for research, advocacy, or
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professional service—such as Eric Bateman’s “Ideas for the Future of TYCA,” which
suggests multiregion conferences, stronger relationships between NCTE constituency groups, and strategies for building a stronger membership. Sandie Barnhouse, as
well, exhorts TETYC readers to embrace the knowledge they bring to the national
conversation on a range of topics from student preparation for first-year writing
to dual credit courses in order to advocate for our discipline as policymakers seek
to impose new assessment measures, cut budgets, or eliminate programs. As a field,
we have, in the last thirteen years, made significant progress toward documenting
the formation of our identity, TYCA’s priorities, and the ways the organization
continues to evolve in meeting the needs of its constituent members and relating
to other professional organizations.
Technology
In 2005, the TYCA Research Initiative Committee distributed a national survey on
technology and other topics. The results of that work were published in a series of
articles, including Jody Millward’s “An Analysis of the National ‘TYCA Research
Initiative Survey Section II:Technology and Pedagogy’ in Two-Year College English
Programs.” Millward’s report provides an important snapshot of technology and
curriculum/pedagogy in the two-year college, or as Millward writes, “The data
allow us to assess access, training opportunities, curriculum innovation, and satisfaction levels with incorporating technology into community college teaching” (374).
With 338 respondents, the survey provided a rich set of data from which to draw
conclusions about technology and instruction in the two-year college setting. From
the survey, we learn that a majority of institutions offer transfer-level composition
(81 percent), while just 25 percent offer developmental writing courses online.
The open-ended responses help us understand critical national issues facing faculty
related to technology, such as faculty resistance to offering developmental writing
courses online because of their desire to provide pedagogically sound and ethical
instruction. The research report also presents findings on how instructors are paid,
how courses are staffed in online instruction, course maxima, computer resources
available on campuses, and professional training and development opportunities
for instructors in technology.
In addition, 19 of 239 articles reviewed addressed issues of technology, ranging from meditations on digital literacy to teaching and learning with digital texts
to the issue of plagiarism and the increasing availability of online source materials. Other essays explore incorporating technology into college culture and using
course management software as tools in the writing classroom (ranging from online
writing groups to assessing student work electronically).Though progress has been
made in this area, given the explosion of online education and the encouragement
(and sometimes pressure) that two-year college faculty feel to “technologize” the
classroom, the existing scholarly work on the topic of online writing instruction
and the use of technology is potentially only a starting point for further work on
how two-year college students and faculty experience, use, or avoid technology.
Though we can certainly benefit from the published research on online writing
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instruction aimed more broadly at college writing instructors (see Warnock; Hewett
and Powers), two-year college students may have specific questions or challenges
that could be addressed (for example, students who are underprepared in reading
and the challenge online learning presents, low-income students with more limited
access to college-appropriate technology, or nontraditional students returning to
school with less familiarity with now widely used course management software
systems or even with word-processing programs). Sarah Nakamaru’s May 2011 essay “Making (and Not Making) Connections with Web 2.0 Technology in the ESL
Composition Classroom” represents one entry into this area of need by reporting
and reflecting on her effort to introduce wikis into an ESL classroom; as two-year
colleges are more likely to serve immigrant, refugee, “generation 1.5,” and limited
English proficient students, research and writing like Nakamaru’s that addresses the
intersections between technology and diversity could be one way to move forward
in developing a body of knowledge about technology’s role in the two-year college.
Diversity
Strasma and Resnick’s original discussion notes that “[a] great deal of energy is
being invested from education, governmental, and corporate interests in the area of
diversity” (108) and encouraging two-year college teacher-scholars to investigate
an array of questions, from how to incorporate multicultural literature into our
curricula to assessments of whether our programs are meeting the needs of ESL
students. Many of the 239 articles I reviewed that were published between 2001
and 2012 addressed questions of diversity and teaching or diverse student populations and respond to the 1999 call for research. Articles focused on a range of topics
within the notion of diversity: teaching multicultural literature courses, working with
students from diverse backgrounds (ESL writers, deaf writers), for example; other
approaches include case studies of students of color, the effects of gender on peer
review group outcomes in first-year writing courses. Within this broadly defined
category, 42 feature articles, or 17 percent, invite readers to think about teaching
English in the two-year college through the lens of diversity and inclusion. A closer
look at these 42 articles reveals some trends. For example, the largest cluster of them
address ESL courses or students—accelerated courses and ESL Writers (Scordaras
2009), using film, literature, or technology in ESL courses (Kasper and Singer
2001; Hirvela 2005; Nakamaru 2011), or understanding the needs of ESL writers
(Shin 2002; Carroll and Dunkelblau 2011).3 Just five essays addressed gender—on
topics such as women writers in the literature classroom (Shafer 2001, “Literary”),
helping students avoid gender-biased language (Petit 2003), gender roles in peer
review groups (Tomlinson 2009), and whether traditionally feminine characteristics
translate into academic success for women students (DuPre 2010) . Other articles
published in this date range have explored questions about racial diversity in the
classroom (Mazurek 2009; Corkery 2009; Perryman-Clark 2012), disability studies
(Gould 2008), and working with student veterans (Leonhardy 2009).
Though many of the essays published in TETYC address diversity broadly
within a theme of difference, we could use more work here, particularly because
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the student populations served by two-year colleges are disproportionately diverse
in race and class when compared with our four-year counterparts. For example,
in my own state, approximately 66 percent of all students at the open-admission,
two-year liberal arts campuses in my institution are the first in their families to
attend college; by contrast, just 20 percent of the students at our selective, flagship institution are first generation. We know that first-generation (and usually
working-class or low-income) college students face challenges in acculturating to
the expectations of postsecondary education, and yet very little work published in
TETYC addresses this reality.4 Only two articles—Ira Shor’s “Why Teach about
Social Class?” and Patrick Sullivan’s “Cultural Narratives about Success and the
Material Conditions of Class at the Community College,” both in the December
2005 issue—directly discuss social class, while a third article, “‘The Expression of
Wise Others’: Using Students’ Views of Discourse to Talk about Social Justice”
by Faith Kurtyka indirectly addresses how social class and social privilege can be
powerful subjects for teaching and learning. Future areas of research must explore
how class, race, and other forms of difference disproportionately impact students
at two-year campuses and how we can and should address them.
Pedagogy
The 1999 essay identified pedagogy as an area requiring additional investigation—
more scholarship of teaching and learning, more exchanges of ideas, more inquiry
into what works. This area is where TETYC has concentrated its focus over the
last decade.There is some overlap here with the issue of technology—for example,
Strasma and Resnick invite readers to think further about effective approaches to
online teaching or other kinds of distance education, about new learning theories,
or about which aspects of writing to prioritize in the classroom or writing centers.
The vast majority of the articles in the journal over the last decade have taken up
this challenge and address questions of pedagogy or course design, sometimes using
a systematic methodology and sometimes using a “best practices” approach. Of 239
articles reviewed, 173 addressed questions of teaching and learning—73 percent.
This is sensible, given the journal title and editorial focus and the institutional mission of most two-year colleges. However, there’s an enormous range within those
teaching- and pedagogy-focused articles, and to get a sense of the trends, I grouped
them in four areas of focus:
Teaching Reflection. Of these 173 articles, the smallest group, about 10 percent,
focused on what I think of as teacher narratives, usually reflective pieces that share
long- or short-term narratives about the writer’s work in the classroom.These range
from teachers reflecting on a Fulbright-Hays seminar (Martin) to lyrical meditations on the relationship that develops between a teacher and a particular student
(Shafer, “Exceptional” and “Conferencing”). For many readers, these sorts of texts
serve important purposes—to share in the joys and challenges of teaching English,
to learn from the experiences of fellow teachers, and to stimulate readers to reflect
on their own classroom experiences.
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Systematic Assessment. I characterized a somewhat larger group of articles within
the category of pedagogy as “systematic assessment,” or structured research projects.
About 20 percent of the essays focusing on pedagogy engaged in some kind of
original research as traditionally defined—the writer(s) posed a research question,
developed a method for answering that question, deployed that methodology to collect data or evidence (of varying kinds), and report on the outcomes of that project.
Nearly all of the essays using this more traditional research-based approach focused
on the classroom, on teaching approaches, or on measuring student learning, and all
had relevance to teaching.Typical studies include Fallon, Lahar, and Susman’s “Taking the High Road to Transfer: Building Bridges between English and Psychology,”
which investigated “whether and how the skills taught and practiced in English
101 transferred to an assignment in a different class” (41). The authors answered
this question by collecting surveys from students along with samples of student
writing. In addition to themes of “transfer” being represented in this category, other
topical trends focus on methods for assessing writing (Del Principe and GrazianoKing 2008; Albertson and Marwitz 2001; Daemmrich 2010; Helmbrecht 2007);
responding to student writing (Edgington 2004; Scrocco 2012); online teaching
approaches (Jones 2003; Rubin 2002; Crank 2002); and learning the conventions
of academic discourse (Thonney 2011; Kuhne and Creel 2006).
Descriptions of Teaching Strategies. The second largest group of articles on pedagogy
focused on specific teaching strategies, usually structured around the writer’s description of a teaching approach, strategy, activity, or assignment, followed by critical
reflection about its effectiveness. Of the 173 articles focused on pedagogy, 31 percent
were of this nature. Though there were few “trends” in this group, a few stand out
(and are also reflected in the note above that technology in teaching English in the
two-year college has emerged as a key priority for instructors). A handful of these
articles specifically address strategies for classes is an online environment—three
focused on class discussion (Cody; Olson-Horswill; Sullivan, “Reimagining”),
while others more generally addressed other strategies for effective online writing
instruction A small number raised questions or presented approaches for addressing
questions of voice and creativity, in both literature and composition courses—Tim
Blue’s December 2006 “A Creative Approach to the Research Paper: Combining
Creative Writing with Academic Research” and Ting Man Tsao’s September 2006
“The Immense Possibilities of Narrating ‘I’: Developing Student Voice through a
Career Research Project” are two examples. Others provide suggestions or strategies for incorporating particular texts or films into the classroom.
Descriptions of Course Design. The greatest percentage of articles on teaching (38
percent) were essays in which the writers present not just a specific teaching instructional strategy, assignment, or reading but rather a broader vision for a course or
argue for a particular approach to teaching two-year college English. Strikingly, it is
in this category that we find the greatest discussion of literature teaching, with nearly
a third of these essays focused on some aspect of designing a literature course: the
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student-generated syllabus (Peterson); multicultural literature and service-learning
(Grobman); discussing race and class in early American literature courses (Mazurek),
and incorporating literature into composition courses (Raymond). Other trends
include basic writing, multicultural and diversity issues in the classroom, critical
pedagogy/critical theory and first-year writing, and themed courses.
More to Do
The authors of “Future Research in Two-Year Colleges” identified six areas—four
of which have been explored in some way, and another two that have not been
sufficiently addressed: literacy and methodology. My own review of the work published in TETYC in the last decade suggests additional research gaps that need to be
addressed if we are to reflect (1) the needs of the majority of professionals working
in two-year college English, (2) the issues that have the most critical impact on the
day-to-day working conditions of TYC English instructors, and (3) the teaching
and learning needs of the broad range of students served by two-year colleges.
Two calls for inquiry that were on the agenda in 1999 have been answered in
only minimal ways: literacy and methodology. I should clarify here that by “literacy,”
Strasma and Resnick mean not just the ability to read and write, or a subfield of
writing studies, but varying types of literacies—digital literacies, for example—or
other kinds of emerging fields of literacy—workplace literacies, civic literacies.We
have addressed this topic in a limited way if we separate out the research published
in TETYC that doesn’t address technical or information literacy. Little work has
been published in our flagship journal that addresses the kinds of literacies students
will potentially use outside the classroom after they leave us, or the way that they
negotiate their existing literacy practices as they intersect with academic literacy.
For example, Michael Michaud’s essay “The ‘Reverse Commute’: Adult Students
and the Transition from Professional to Academic Literacy” is one example of a
research-based reflection that examines the overlap and conflict in the kinds of
literacy an adult student with a significant (but non-academic) writing history experiences upon returning to the college classroom. Another recent essay, Howard
Tinberg’s “Under History’s Wheel: the Uses of Literacy,” presses readers to think
about the multiple literacies that both students and instructors develop throughout
their learning journeys. However, articles of this nature—exploring literacies as
types/ways of knowing, thinking, and doing within a particular context—appear
infrequently in the past issues of Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Perhaps
we should, as a field, think more collectively about the ways this theme could and
should be fruitfully explored and whether additional kinds of literacies relevant to
our students’ academic and extracurricular needs merit more attention.
In addition, Strasma and Resnick observe, “On the one hand, we have a
tradition that views empirical research as a narrow form of scientific study, while
a growing collection of researchers are redefining it to mean wider collection of
ethnographic, case study, and multimodal methodologies.We have questions about
how to best apply ethnographic research designs to construct teacher narratives at
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all classroom levels. . . . What are the best methodologies to use for publication?”
(111), and they pose a series of other questions. We can draw conclusions about
the comprehensiveness of our response to this charge in a couple of ways. First, we
can look at whether “methodology” as a topic has been addressed in any direct way
by any articles in TETYC. In my judgment, this has happened very minimally. For
example, Jeff Sommers’s 2004 essay “Two-Year College English Faculty and the
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: The Journey Awaits” is one example of an
essay that proposes methods of gaining accurate knowledge about our classrooms,
students, and experiences, but it is the only such essay that has appeared in the last
decade that specifically addresses the question of conducting research and methods
that might be appropriately deployed in two-year college settings.
Many instructors in a two-year college setting have research interests. The
process of inquiry is intrinsic to our profession; we all have questions to which
we want to know the answer—questions about whether a particular pedagogical
approach, or about a particular way of reading a text, or about an administrative
challenge or workplace condition.At the same time, we work at teaching-intensive,
not research-intensive, institutions, usually out of our passion for the classroom, and
our research interests often emerge from that work. TETYC could assist readers
who are looking for ways to take up systematic investigation in order to find the
answers to those questions. Greater attention should be paid in the journal to assisting readers and would-be writers with developing and executing successful research
strategies—using qualitative or quantitative methods, conducting or funding research,
collaborating with colleagues to answer research questions, or translating “problems”
that occur in the classroom into profitable opportunities for inquiry (see Bass for a
now-landmark discussion of how classroom research can be inspired by “teaching
problems”). Informational pieces about how to fund research projects or how to
navigate the protocols for human subjects research required for most scholarship of
teaching and learning projects could also be of use to readers.5 This might require
a concerted effort on the part of the journal—a new feature along the lines of
the “Instructional Note” or “What Works for Me” could be put in place in which
readers are invited to share research strategies, techniques, or practices; challenges
they have overcome in conducting systematic research at their institution; or ways
of making inquiry part of the work we do at the two-year college. Alternatively,
TETYC could include a brief section in each issue with online resources that direct
readers to websites that can assist with developing and completing research projects,
particularly those that intersect with teaching and service responsibilities. Examples
might include the University of Wisconsin–Lacrosse’s Lesson Study Project (http://
www.uwlax.edu/sotl/lsp/), some of the robust web resources on the scholarship
of teaching and learning from Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching or the International
Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), or information
directing readers to training or webinars on IRB protocols.
Second, we can look at the kinds of methodologies that are represented in
this review of research. The published articles over the last two decades can be put
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tice, synthesis of sources, or arguments (particularly best practices or approaches
to teaching based on personal experience or on previously published work) and
those that were systematic—that is, that posed a research question and undertook a
systematic collection of and review of evidence: really, those that are formal studies.
The former far outnumbered the latter, with just 43 articles (18 percent) using a
formal study design.This is a significant gap in the kinds of scholarly work that are
available to two-year college English faculty who are the readers of TETYC, and
who come to rely on the journal as both the source of classroom ideas and as the
reliable expert on new developments in the field.
TETYC fills a particular niche, and let me qualify this observation with the
note that I do not expect (nor do I think readers expect) TETYC to be Research
in the Teaching of English or any other highly empirical publication that privileges
quantitative research studies over qualitative or other kinds of systematic analyses.
However, the readers of TETYC would benefit from additional insight gained by
scholarship of teaching and learning approaches that (a) pose a research question,
(b) implement a methodologically sound, systematic research design, (c) collect evidence of student learning in ways that are appropriate to our discipline of writing studies,
and (d) reflect the texture and nuances of teaching English in the two-year college.
My own position is that TETYC can give us more resources for conducting scholarly inquiry and disseminating it to colleagues, both on our campuses
and more broadly, and support for navigating institutional challenges (fiscal and
human resources, policy); further, we need more empirical and systematic research
that will help guide national policy and direct best practices that can be used at
our institutions, particularly those that may be experiencing external pressure from
administration or state government to implement admissions, assessment, or curriculum reform. This belief that more two-year college instructors should engage
in scholarly work and systematic research is driven generally by my sense that we
are underrepresented in the publications in our field (even in TETYC), proportional to the number of students and instructors who are learning and teaching
in two-year colleges. There is a different resonance to work that is produced in
the two-year college setting, by its instructors and about its students, than to work
emerging from the lower-division curriculum of a selective or modestly selective
university, even though there is certainly overlap between the two teaching and
learning environments. I would like to pose a few questions about this: How might
we encourage more potential writers for TETYC or other publications focused
on issues in two-year college English to deploy systematic inquiry? What resources
are required? Is this even something we want to encourage? What could be gained
or lost by doing so? These are questions that, I would argue, we as a field need to
consider more fully.
Other Critical Areas
Beyond the topics of literacy and methodology that Strasma and Resnick identified,
I would like to see additional topics addressed by Teaching English in the Two-Year
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College. The document Research and Scholarship in the Two-Year College, updated for
2010 under the auspices of TYCA, addressed some of these research gaps and needs
for inquiry in the field; I identify below where my observations here overlap with
or reinforce the recommendations by that professional document. For example, the
report highlights the importance of supporting research in the two-year college in
various areas of the profession (the literature/composition divide and how it plays
out in the two-year college, graduate preparation of two-year college instructors,
research and scholarship activity by contingent faculty, workload considerations);
pedagogical research (including longitudinal studies of students to provide needed
information on particular problems in writing, service-learning, and the nonacademic aspects of students’ lives); and other areas of inquiry such as the need to
look carefully at the development of two-year college English departments and
their programs (including the state of first-year composition in the two-year college,
the prevalence of writing program administrators in two-year college settings, new
trends in curriculum and program development, and the ways departments respond
to community needs). My own analysis of the publication in the last decade echoes
and adds to these recommendations in a more systematic way. I highlight what I see
as the most important gaps below—that is, what we need to address as a profession
in order to more effectively meet the needs of students in the two-year college
English classroom, and of instructors in the two-year college English department
working both on and off the tenure track.
Writing Center Studies in the Two-Year College. This is a strikingly underrepresented
research area in TETYC. I could only find five articles that explicitly focused on
writing centers in the two-year college setting—including the “Position Statement
on Two-Year College Writing Centers” (Pennington and Gardner) published in
March of 2006 and one of three published reports on the TYCA research initiative,
“An Analysis of the National TYCA Research Initiative Survey Section IV:Writing
Across the Curriculum and Writing Centers in Two-Year College English Programs”
(Roberts) published in 2008.We know that writing center studies is a distinct area
of research with its own professional organization (International Writing Centers
Association) and a number of peer-reviewed publications such as the Writing Lab
Newsletter and the Writing Center Journal. Many students at open-access institutions
have significant needs for learning support services, and writing centers are one of
the three greatest contributors to retention at two-year public colleges, according
to a report issued by ACT, What Works in Student Retention? Two-Year Public Colleges
(Habley and McClanahan). As the report notes, along with academic advising and
mandatory course placement testing, learning support,“including a comprehensive
learning assistance center/lab; required remedial/developmental coursework; tutoring program; and math, writing, and reading centers/labs” (6), showed the greatest
impact on the retention of students to higher education. Though not every reader
might be directly involved in this work at their institution, additional work that
explores, for example, how to overcome challenges in writing center work, best
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.
based or online writing centers would be of benefit to the field as a whole if we
hope to support students, effect institutional change, or encourage investment in
writing centers at our open-admission campuses.
Preparing Future Faculty for Work in the Two-Year College Just 8 of 239 (3 percent)
of articles addressed preparing faculty to teach in the two-year college, including a group of five professional documents (such as the Research and Scholarship
in the Two-Year College position statement first published in TETYC in 2005 and
updated again in 2010). Further, all 8 articles that addressed preparing faculty to
teach in the two-year college were narratives or descriptions of programs that had
been implemented or partnerships formed rather than formal studies. A number
of pieces have been written that discuss the future agenda for TYCA, such as Eric
Bateman’s “Ideas for the Future of TYCA,” which outlines primarily his recommended organizational shifts in terms of TYCA’s role nationally, within NCTE, and
in service to its members. Organization-sponsored reports such as the Guidelines for
the Academic Preparation of English Faculty at the Two-Year College (initially released in
2004, with an update forthcoming) provide sets of recommendations that can serve
as resources for two-year college administrators, faculty, and (in theory) graduate
programs in English. Though a spate of essays were published in the 1980s and
1990s in the ADE Newsletter on the topic of graduate education (see, for example,
Mognis; Langland), very little has seen publication in TETYC.With more and more
instructors stepping into teaching-intensive positions at two-year colleges, graduate
education in English departments must adapt to prepare professionals in English to
meaningfully participate in the work of two-year college English teaching, research,
and service. Many instructors new to the two-year college setting (particularly those
without extensive training in composition pedagogy and theory), are overwhelmed
by the adjustment to new demands of teaching in the two-year college: working
with a broad range of learners, teaching across two, three, or four developmental or
degree-credit courses in a writing sequence; potentially balancing teaching, grading, and preparation with the other duties that come with full-time and sometimes
even part-time teaching in a two-year college; becoming a flexible generalist who
can meet the curricular needs of the lower division, and so forth. Articles addressing these and other challenges could help prepare instructors for the realities of
two-year college teaching. Further, full-time faculty are also, increasingly, working
as administrators at the program level or serving as mentors or lead teachers, and
departmental administration becomes part of our expected duties, one for which
most faculty were untrained. Support for doing program development, evaluating
and mentoring instructors, and conducting assessment of student learning would
all be of value to two-year college faculty.
Program D evelopment. By “Program Development,” I mean essays that either
discuss developing a formal curriculum or approach within a department or across
functional units. Other topics within this category include assessment of student
learning, creation of collegial faculty development opportunities, or efforts to reR e s e a r c h G a p s i n Te a c h i n g E n g l i s h i n t h e T w o - Y e a r C o l l e g e
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think a departmental approach to a course or series of courses. Of the 239 articles
I examined, 19 addressed this topic, or 8 percent. Given the incredible importance
of (1) offering students a cohesive and coherent experience as they move through
and beyond the first-year writing sequence, (2) the large percentage of instructors
in two-year colleges who are contingent faculty, (3) the heavy teaching load that
most two-year college faculty have, and (4) the small number of two-year colleges
who have writing program administrators, it seems pressing that we as a profession
do more to articulate how we are creating a cohesive experience for students, providing support to instructors, and assessing the effectiveness of our work. Important
work has been done in this area by Jeff Klausman (see “Mapping”; “Not Just”) and
the field would benefit from additional work that both systematically investigates
research questions related to program development in the two-year college English
department and shares best practices (with concomitant assessment data) about
program development.
A related issue is preparation and transfer of students. Two-year colleges
with university transfer programs face challenges in preparing often underprepared students for the rigors of the upper division and transfer into a baccalaureate
program. Data from the National Student Clearinghouse show that the six-year
baccalaureate-achievement rate nationally for students who begin their studies at
community colleges is, on average, 12 percent (National Center). Our institutions
must balance a commitment to access to higher education with maintaining standards for college-level work. In addition, instructors as well as institutions need to
know more about what helps underprepared students to be academically successful
so that we can be sure we are implementing these best practices inside and outside
of the classroom and on a program level.
Faculty Development and Working Conditions. Unlike the “preparing future faculty”
theme, which addressed the ways that graduate programs could prepare students
to work in a two-year college setting, this theme addresses what happens after instructors begin their work there. I could only find three articles that addressed the
issue of faculty development or working conditions (see Lee; Griffin, Falberg, and
Krygier; Klausman, “Not Just”). Working conditions are a subtopic of some of the
agenda-setting pieces, such as former TYCA president Eric Bateman’s March 2009
essay, which addresses the topic of working conditions in a limited way; however,
this is pressing national issue that has been given little attention in our professional publications. Though the contingent faculty insert Forum appears regularly
in TETYC (rotating among other NCTE journals), we do ourselves a disservice
as a profession if we do not realistically and publicly address the issue of ongoing
faculty development and working conditions for the “new teaching majority.”
We don’t know enough about the material conditions in which many instructors
teach. Groups like the Coalition on the Academic Workforce have endeavored to
document the material conditions of contingent faculty—access to office space,
computers, sufficient compensation, benefits, and so on.With nearly 80 percent of
instructors in two-year college English programs working off the tenure track, we
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need to know more about how to support these instructors in their work.This seems
to be a critical need for our field—what experiences do these instructors have in
their classrooms and in their departments? What resources are available to them to
develop as faculty, pursue scholarly inquiry, learn new forms of technology, or talk
with colleagues about teaching? How are they providing (or are they?) input into
the governance of their institutions or their departments’ culture and practices?
How do (or might) they contribute to the two-year college curriculum? What
needs do two-year college faculty have to continually improve in the work they do?
To conclude, my review of TETYC reveals the ways in which we have
made significant progress in meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century
and of filling identified gaps over the last fourteen years. What stands out to me,
though, is the changing shape of teaching English in higher education today and
what professional needs are currently unmet. Historically, our sense of what teachers need has been that we need more ideas for and about teaching—strategies for
classroom activities, ideas about course design. However, the conditions of higher
education—greater demands for accountability, fewer full-time faculty, increased
reliance on contingent faculty with fewer institutional resources dedicated to such
instructors, cuts to institutional budgets, greater numbers of students (many unprepared for college-level work) attending college—mean that “teaching English in the
two-year college” requires paying attention to more than just what happens in the
classroom; the conditions under which we teach take on greater importance than
ever. As we move into an era of higher education that is increasingly defined by
political agendas, national goal-setting, administrative pressures to demonstrate our
institutional effectiveness, and other external forces, it’s more important than ever
that our research agenda be matched to the needs of the colleagues and students
who both support and benefit from the mission of two-year colleges. <
Notes
1. Given the role that TETYC fulfills in widely and accessibly disseminating
research relevant to two-year college English instructors, I have elected to focus
on this journal rather than on other kinds of work—dissertations or graduate
theses are not widely accessible; articles in College Composition and Communication or College English on two-year college English instruction are rare; and other
journals such as TESOL Quarterly or the Journal of Basic Writing focus on narrower specializations within college English teaching.
2. See Linda Adler-Kassner’s “The Companies We Keep or The Companies
We Would Like To Keep: Strategies and Tactics in Challenging Times” in the fall/
winter 2012 issue of WPA Journal for an overview of the growing influence of
“five players”—including governmental, partisan, and nonpartisan groups—in
defining student learning outcomes, setting benchmarks for assessing student
readiness at the end of high school and college, and establishing descriptions of
various college degree achievements.
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3. It should also be noted that recent issues of TETYC falling outside this
date range have focused on these topics. For example, the September 2012
special issue of the journal consists of articles on the theme of ESL work in the
two-year college.
4. As Richard Greenwald’s November 2012 commentary in the Chronicle of
Higher Education observed about first-generation college students, “More than a
quarter of these students don’t make it past the first year, and almost 90 percent
don’t graduate within six years.”
5. Securing Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for scholarship of
teaching and learning research or classroom-based research can be especially
challenging in two ways for two-year college teacher-researchers. First, many
faculty, even those with research training in graduate school, may not have previously had to secure such permissions if they worked primarily with texts or in
literature or other English subfields like creative writing or linguistics; therefore,
IRB paperwork for conducting classroom-based research can be complicated
and unfamiliar; second, because many two-year colleges have not historically
been supportive of or expected faculty to do research, they do not have a constituted IRB, which can present challenges; researchers who want to abide by the
CCCC position statement Ethical Conduct of Research in Composition Studies will
find this a barrier to engaging in this type of inquiry.
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