In this dissertation, I present two studies on transnational, multilingual undergraduate students which focus on students' rich, complex communication patterns across contexts. First, I examine the linguistic, literate, rhetorical, and cultural resources they deploy to make meaning across non-academic contexts as they take care of everyday tasks,…

Background: Upon returning to in-person teaching at Kingsborough Community College after the pandemic, I realized something profound had shifted in my students. The well-documented drop in community college enrollment attributed to the pandemic seemed to reflect deeper disjunctures that had led students to an existential questioning of the purpose…

Like many of its contemporaries across the state, North Central Texas College's (NCTC) English and math faculty were committed to the promise of corequisite education and its students' success as outlined by the Dana Center, but they also understood the obstacles to implementing, assessing, and scaling its corequisite courses. NCTC's English and…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, institutional parameters shifted unexpectedly, which influenced how writing instructors took up and taught their courses. This article reflects on an instructor's experience teaching a corequisite support course during the pandemic, utilizing the concept of liminality, as basic writing scholarship draws on various…

"Mattering" is a key component of success for students (Rosenberg & McCullough, 1981). For community college students, the classroom plays a critical role in their college experience because community college students spend most of their time on campus (Lundberg, 2014). Among college courses, first-year writing classes hold…

This paper presents a qualitative study that used student interviews to investigate the influence of non-cognitive barriers on developmental student success in a corequisite first-year composition course that was offered on line following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students answered open-ended questions about their previous educational…

More community college professors are replacing expensive commercial textbooks with no-cost open educational resources (OER) to help make college more affordable for their students. With students having no financial reason to delay or forgo textbook purchases, many instructors also expect OER adoption will lead to improvements in academic outcomes…

Incorporating instructor continuity into the first-year composition (FYC) sequence represents an opportunity for community colleges to make an informed scheduling and advising decision in order to assist in the goal to increase student success rates in FYC. Utilizing course completion data from a community college in northern Alabama, this study…

Mindfulness is rapidly increasing its popularity amongst instructors and administrators in higher education (Bush, 2011; Egras, 2015; Egras and Hadars, 2019; Wenger, 2019). The simplicity of mindfulness makes it an inclusive practice that can be performed by every individual. Further, it is time and cost effective as it only requires a couple of…

To teach composition in this era means to engage students with technology; it is all but an unspoken requirement at the majority of universities. This dissertation theorizes, however, that the imbricated use of technology in first-year writing (FYW) classrooms places rural students at an inherent disadvantage, with issues of inadequate…

In the context of a first-year composition course at an HBCU, I explored the potential of Open Educational Resources (OER) and OER-Enabled Pedagogy (OEP) to better understand how the resources and the pedagogical practices surrounding their use might innovate teaching and learning. In this study conducted with 14 participants from online, hybrid,…

Writing is a crucial, interdisciplinary skill that incoming college students need to successfully complete many of the tasks assigned within their coursework. While teaching self-regulation skills for writing has become more commonplace in writing curricula, and research has investigated how students have been impacted by a writing-about-writing…

The Accessibility Working Group (AWG) aims to create a collaborative culture of access within our group, our composition program, and our larger professional and pedagogical communities. To create a culture of access, participants need to be collaborative members of a community to continuously negotiate access needs that change over time. The AWG…

This article explores how college instructors can use William Blake's unique pairing of image and text -- what W.J.T. Mitchell calls "composite art" -- to encourage students to think and write about the dynamic interplay of image and text in modern communications. Opening with an anecdote of teaching Songs of Innocence and of Experience…

Developmental English (DE) has been under fire from critics who think it acts as a barrier rather than as a support to the success of students placing into DE. In Texas, such pressures led to a wave of reforms and changes affecting delivery and structure of DE instruction. This dissertation draws on years of internal data at one community college…