The flexibility of labor-based contract grading allowed students in the study to make strategic, intentional, autonomous choices about the types of labor and products they produced. This strategic decision-making helped them to balance the workload requirements of their other classes, employment, and personal issues and laid important groundwork…

"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 author's fifteen years as a subscriber to "TETYC," he has yet to read an article as alarming as Keith Kroll's "The End of the Community College English Profession." His argument that neoliberalism--a political ideology and set of economic policies that look to the free market and privatization for answers to questions great and small--is…

As writing instructors, the authors spend hours "talking back" to their students through written comments on their drafts. But how do student writers receive their comments, and what do they "do" with this feedback? Teachers invest so much time and energy in their responses to papers. How do they know what gets through, what makes sense to their…

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 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…

This article presents the author's critique of Jennifer A. Rich's essay titled "How Do We See What We See? Pedagogical Lacunae and Their Pitfalls in the Classroom." Rather than adopting the classic "how I solved a problem" narrative, Rich relentlessly focuses on her questions and problems--their contexts, their complexity, other questions to which…

In her recent "Teaching English in the Two-Year College" ("TETYC") article, Denise Marchionda argues for a grading system in her first-year writing course that turns over responsibility to students for earning grades. The approach, which she calls "the point-by-point grading system," is a variation on a contract grading approach in which each…

This article shares the story of one student writer that shows how the challenges of writing from sources are tied to issues of voice and authority. Keith was a student in the author's first college writing class in the fall of 2002. As he undertook a transition from high school to college writer, the author was transitioning from high school to…

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…

In "After 40 Years, Has the Grand Experiment Failed?" Trum Simmons answers the question he poses in the essay's title by describing a community college teaching career that many "Teaching English in the Two-Year College" (TETYC) readers will find familiar: the diversity of community college students; student success and failure; conflicted…

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…

Whenever the author teaches English 102, a research-focused, second-semester composition course, at least one student asks her whether or not she "allows" Wikipedia. She then redesigned her course to leverage Wikipedia as a source of inquiry. In other words, she "allows" Wikipedia, but through the Wikipedia project, which is designed to address…

The silence regarding Appalachia is mirrored in the relative scarcity of focused studies regarding Appalachian dialect, composition, and classroom issues. Little work has been done exploring the ways the composition classroom, concerned as it is with language and the production of discourse, can affect Appalachian students' linguistic and social…

There has been a great deal of groundbreaking research done on motivation during the last twenty-five years, and all of it points to the importance of intrinsic motivation. This research has very significant ramifications for teachers of English. In this essay, the author engages the issue of "aversion" that Linda Brodkey raises in her essay…