"Teaching English in the Two-Year College's" series "What Works for Me" is a unique artifact in the development of composition as a field. In this article, the author claims "What Works for Me" as a valuable genre, a hybrid of new and old disciplinary forms. In the spirit of Derek N. Mueller's "Views from a Distance: A Nephological Model of the…

In the midst of disciplinary and public debates about education at open-access institutions, it's more important than ever that institutions set a clear path for inquiry and scholarship that will meet the needs of the professional community. This essay provides an assessment of the research achievements in two-year college English, particularly…

In 2008, Miami Dade College received a $1.9 million Title V grant from the US Department of Education to develop an Accelerated Content-Based English for Academic Purposes (EAP) track called Project ACE for ESL students. The ACE curriculum is anchored by the principles of flexibility, contextualization, and faculty buy-in--critical matters given…

In 1986, Paul Friedman and Reva Jenkins-Friedman introduced "Fostering Academic Excellence through Honors Programs" by warning readers that "One might assume that the brightest college undergraduates feel well served during their years on campus and that procedures for educating them are common knowledge." The research on the importance of honors…

In November 2008, the National Council of Teachers of English published "The NCTE Definition of 21st Century Literacies" (21CL); its objectives include using technology, producing and analyzing multimedia texts, accessing and evaluating complex research sources, building relationships to enable collaboration, considering the diversity of a global…

To writing, painting, drawing, and photography as artistic media, the author would like to add teaching as a creative endeavor as well. Especially in a classroom where English is not the first language for many students, the writing teacher needs to be creative with assignments and activities that address nontraditional ways of learning. Her…

In this essay, the authors argue that only by sharing their mistakes and uncertainty can they fully reflect on their own process as teachers, only by understanding their process can they begin to identify the many factors that contribute to classroom messes in the first place, and only by acknowledging the perpetual messiness of their practice can…

Peer-response remains a central process in first-year composition; faculty can make it effective and efficient by "spotlighting"--designing the process as digital, emergent, and distributive. In this article, the author first elaborates on his own use of peer-response terminology. He favors "peer-response" as the descriptive term for…

The third goal of Zen practice, helping others achieve enlightenment, suggests that teachers should help students learn about their own composing practices and histories as part of their instruction, but they cannot help others until they learn to help themselves by reflecting on their own processes and histories, becoming enlightened, and…

This article presents an exchange between Kip Strasma and Elizabeth Tomlinson. Strasma responds to "Gender and Peer Response" by Tomlinson, and Tomlinson responds to Strasma's ""Spotlighting": Peer-Response in Digitally Supported First-Year Writing Courses." Both of them respond to each other's cross talk.

Almost all of the author's community college students feel self-conscious about their vocabulary. She thinks that their resistance to expanding their vocabulary has many tangled roots: sometimes the students seem nervous about what they leave behind as they notch their vocabulary up to a more formal, college level. This article discusses how the…

This article describes a pilot study that suggests writing-faculty workload may affect the pedagogical focus and rhetorical effectiveness of written response to students' essays. To study the relationship between writing-faculty workload and comments that faculty write on students' essays, the author sent an eleven-question survey to 30 English…

Some teaching strategies grow out of the curricula educators inherit or develop through professional reading; others originate in the aromatic humus of their autobiographies. This article presents a proposal that has its origins in the latter. The author recognized that what delights her in prose or poetry is the figurative language a writer uses…

In this essay, the author describes her own attempt at incorporating Web 2.0 technology into her teaching: a wiki project that she used in her English as a second language (ESL) composition course. The theme she traces throughout the rest of this essay is the wiki's ability (or inability) to make "connections" of various kinds. Like any text, the…

Much has been written by academics lamenting the lack of preparedness of students for entrance to the university (and, by employers, lamenting the additional training that students need after college to enter the workforce). Although such lamentations may be merited, students pick up the binary rhetoric of real world versus academic world that…