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…

Learning communities are common on two- and four-year college campuses. Estimates suggest that they exist on four to five hundred campuses and can be found in most states. Such numbers signal that interest in learning communities is going strong, and there are indications that on two-year college campuses, interest continues to grow. As…

In this essay, the authors chronicle the overhauling of their English department's rubric design, curriculum, and portfolio in order to emphasize a wider range of "real-world" writing. The authors share that in the process of their overhaul, they redefined their identity--how they thought of themselves and how they wanted to approach…

This essay recounts the authors' experiences as community college faculty members in a learning community (LC) linking first-year composition with a class in life-career planning and development. The authors begin with a learning community story shared recently over drinks with a group of community college English teachers. They use the story to…

This article describes the Student Tutor Education Program (STEP) at Westchester Community College, which identifies and recruits potential future college English teachers at the community college level while they serve as peer writing tutors, with benefits to the entire college community as well as the teaching profession in general. STEP enables…

In this article, the author reflects on his experiences as a participant to the first CONNECT First-Year Writing Group seminar. It describes the development of collegiality and the positive results of professional synergy within a group of English professors from three community colleges, a state college, a university, and a maritime academy in…

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…

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.

This article describes the difficulties and hopes that the author, a compositionist in the English Department at Miami University, perceived in his attempts to establish a collaborative arrangement with the writing center at the regional campus where he works. (Contains 4 notes).

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…

The author, who worked as an adjunct while completing doctoral coursework in English education, had been teaching for 10 years but during most of that time had been a high school teacher. While working in an alternative high school, she had a great deal of freedom in instituting a critical literacy approach and social justice curriculum. The…

Relates how an English teacher, a fan of Willa Cather, searches for Cather's past in the physical environment, the Nebraska prairie, which formed her as a person and an author. Shows how this search led the teacher to examine her own past. (PA)

As a writer who teaches and a teacher who writes, this author offers creative ways of producing a positive first impression on the first day of school. The key is finding a way to surprise one's students and creating first impressions that somehow introduces the tone a teacher wants his or her class to have. The author has learned that if he can…

This article examines, in a variety of ways, the concept of identity and presents reports and views from regional representatives of the Two-Year College English Association on the issue of identity in the classroom. Reporting from TYCA-Northeast, Marsha Nourse echoes some dismay as she relates chance meetings with students. Elissa Caruth from…