Gateway courses are foundational, college-level courses that apply to a student's program of study or to a college's general education requirements. These courses are typically considered first-year or lower-division courses and serve as a basis for more advanced studies. Research has demonstrated that completing gateway courses in two key…

The course described in this article is a contextualized version of ENGL 1100 Composition I, a first year writing (FYW) course, designed specifically for students who declare majors in business and hospitality services programs to study composition in the context of their majors and future professions. This version of ENGL 1100 counts for FYW…

It has been twenty-seven years since a small group of faculty at the Community College of Baltimore County, faced with the discovery that two-thirds of students placed in our upper-level basic writing course never passed first year composition, began the development of the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP), one of the earliest corequisite…

Vampires and a Moco Jumbie is a narrative-essay about teaching Basic Composition in New York City in the early 1990s. To the surprise and delight of the teacher, the students describe in class discussions and in their writings their beliefs in the supernatural. Contains one note.

The search for a common model of instruction in first-year composition began in the 1960s when composition first began to separate from literature in college English departments. Because writing is essentially a methods course with no standard curriculum as one might find in physics or economics, common model has been elusive. A sign that…

Mass incarceration in America is a moral, economic, and societal crisis with serious implications for many men of color and high school non-completers who are incarcerated at proportionally higher rates than Whites or college graduates. For the formerly incarcerated, engagement in adult learning, whether high school equivalency (HSE) or college,…

This paper will give a step-by-step demonstration on how to create MP4 files to video-grade undergraduate writing assignments. The process of using prepared rubrics to guide video and audio feedback will be presented and examples shown. This assessment method provides students with personalized video-feedback as a re-usable learning object. The…

This author organized and taught the new ENG 09/111 classes at her college, as well as authoring the course text and workbook. English 09/111 offers a unique opportunity for students who are not quite ready for freshmen composition, but more than likely do not need an entire semester of developmental English. In this article, she details the…

This article presents a consideration of how students' existing information-seeking behaviors affect traditional methods of teaching library research in first-year writing courses and offers an alternative method that uses both library and popular Internet search tools. It addresses one aspect of the ongoing pedagogical struggle with new…

This paper is one of a collection of papers written by the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) to support the use of content review as the basis for establishing communication and computation prerequisites. "Student Success: The Case for Establishing Prerequisites Through Content Review" was adopted at the Fall 2010…

This article describes how the author applied principles of universal design to hybrid course materials to increase student understanding and, ultimately, success. Pulling the three principles of universal design--consistency, color, and icon representation--into the author's Blackboard course allowed her to change the types of reading skills…

Describing the Harlem Riot of 1935, black author and poet Claude McKay wrote, "On Tuesday the crowds went crazy like the remnants of a defeated, abandoned, and hungry army. Their rioting was the gesture of despair of a bewildered, baffled, and disillusioned people". By nearly all accounts, the riot marks the historical end of the Harlem…

Contends that service learning--community service linked to academic courses--adds a valuable experiential dimension to composition classes. Describes service learning at Raritan Valley Community College where in composition it fits as an optional alternative for the research paper assignment that is the culminating course project. Discusses how…

Describes a class discussion in the author's first-year composition class at a New York City community college, after students read a volume of Sappho's poetry. Discusses issues of reading comprehension, poetry, gender-preference prejudice, and how they were all set straight by one student from Brooklyn. (SR)

Describes the bibliographic instruction program at Columbia State Community College's Learning Resource Center, which involves a mini-course taken in conjunction with freshman composition. Provides a syllabus and course outline. (DMM)