Describes an assignment that uses Spanish, Chinese, and French texts in addition to customary English texts, allowing class members to share one another's languages, embrace diversity, and shift privilege. Argues that this move foregrounds oppositional discourse for both students and faculty, creating classrooms in which "right thinking is…

The purpose of this case study was to describe the role of teacher knowledge in the instructional methods of a community college developmental literacy instructor and determine in what ways that knowledge may have impacted the perceptions of the student participants regarding their authority over their academic progress in the class. Therefore,…

Presents a case study of two college tutors that demonstrates the importance for writing instructors and tutors to engage in collaborative reflection to identify and examine their frame of reference, including their assumptions, beliefs, values and practices. Finds that the tutors' interpretation of writing instructors' authority influenced…

Commonly accepted ideas, on the one hand, about how small groups in a writing class should work and, on the other hand, psychological research about what makes a small group work well are not consistent. Social psychologist Clovis Shepherd claims that the "popular notion that the democratic ideal is a group in which all members exert an equal…

Notes that writing instructors want to resist authoritarian classroom arrangements because they want students to be active in their education and in their lives. Describes efforts to develop a "new model of authority, a new space," using peer group leaders, advanced standing students who facilitated writing groups in a first-year basic writing…

A collaborative teaching model that replaces the hierarchical graduate teaching assistant (TA)/tutor structure can be used to train basic writing TAs with a pedagogy that stresses reflection and dialogue. Usually, new graduate students tutor for a semester in Basic Writing classrooms and then later move on to teach their own classes; in this case,…

A multilingual basic writing course is an ideal laboratory for language learning for both second language students and native English speakers. This latter group at Bronx Community College (New York), which is located in a poor, minority urban community, are generally English-as-a-Second-Dialect (ESD) students. What one instructor tries to do is…

This inaugural journal issue presents the perspectives of Massachusetts Bay Community College's faculty, administrators, and students on various aspects of community college education as practiced at the college. The journal contains the following articles: (1) "Adult Second Language Beginning Reading," by Ann Hilferty; (2) "Making Education a…