President Obama's America's College Promise proposal has brought renewed attention to community colleges' capacity to connect the college and career aspirations of today's undergraduates. Despite this capacity, however, community colleges have historically offered students two distinct educational pathways: a liberal education transfer-oriented…

This paper documents the perceptions and experiences of faculty members in the midst of statewide reform efforts in Virginia and North Carolina to integrate developmental reading and writing courses. Using interview and focus group data from 161 faculty and administrators in both states (combined) as well as three detailed case studies of faculty…

This qualitative study offers critical insight into how language policy interacts with daily classroom decisions at a large and highly diverse urban community college in the United States. Specifically, it examines the challenges that faculty teaching developmental writing courses for English language learners experience when determining what…

This article relates the efforts of faculty at one community college to define standards for achievement of two SLOs (critical thinking and effective communication) and to gather and analyze evidence of how well students meet those standards. Faculty from 13 disciplines assessed writing samples from 265 students. We found that, in general,…

This essay explores the influence of the discourse and practices of the learning outcomes assessment (LOA) movement on three composition instructors' assignments and assessments. While outcomes assessment by itself can be a useful tool, it cannot be separated from the exigency that compels it, in which educational practices must be defended…

The theory of learning multimodality is receiving greater attention. Its application in language learning classes is also increasing in number. Since Chinese-speaking EFL learners are likely to be visual learners, as an instructor of Taiwanese EFL students, I have come to believe that arts integrated, multimodal projects help less confident and…

How can writing instructors prepare students for informed and engaged civic discourse when opportunities for such discourse are seemingly limited and ineffective? This essay examines this question by reporting on a case study that explored civic discourse and civic participation at the local level of government. The aims of the case study were to…

In this article, the author talks about the college writing center, which is a place of political confrontation, where cultural issues involving dialect and values are probed, contested, and negotiated. He suggests a post-process approach to composition--one that ushers writers into a world of exploration and social engagement--one that transcends…