This article heeds Susan Naomi Bernstein's call for an "embodied epistemology" for Basic Writing. In the wake of recent economic and health crises as well as the ongoing effects of neoliberal reform efforts at the two-year college, a materialist, embodied orientation for critical practitioners within two-year colleges is more necessary…

Researchers, organizations, companies, non-profits, practitioners, and to some extent, the public, are clamoring for massive reform in developmental coursework in higher education (American Association of Community Colleges, 2018; Edgecombe et al., 2014; Complete College America, 2012). One such reform is the push for integrated reading and…

The problem addressed in this study was that teachers have been challenged to implement effective strategies in recent years at a local community college in the southern region of the United States with a 47 to 49% student failure rate in developmental English. The purpose was to investigate the challenges encountered by developmental English…

California legislation (AB705, signed 2017) mandated accelerated community college writing education and implementation to begin just before the COVID-19 pandemic. This study captures faculty experiences with mandated pandemic-era acceleration via analysis of 131 open-ended faculty survey responses representing 60 of the 116 California community…

"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 article investigates a Basic Writing program shared between a University of California campus and a local community college in which the curriculum, assessment practices, and larger programmatic structures were heavily influenced by an exit exam modeled after the UC system's Analytical Writing Placement Exam (AWPE). Drawing from scholarship…

This article describes the results of a survey of community college instructors who were asked about the writing they assign in non-English courses. The 171 respondents, representing 140 colleges, identified the kinds of writing they assign and the challenges that come with assigning writing. These challenges included finding time to grade…

Limited research examines writing tutors' self-efficacy, or how tutors believe "in their abilities to produce given attainments" (Bandura, 2006, p. 307). This qualitative constant comparative study explored self-efficacy's impact on tutoring strategies writing tutors use in recorded digital tutoring conferences with community college…

As writing teachers at the community college level, we have a unique opportunity to teach writing that is infused with passion, but we must begin by first reconnecting with those writers who we read and admired as students and recall why we became community college composition teachers in the first place. We must remember that we write to make…

As a community college writing instructor, I found older students to be both an asset and a mentor in guiding students through the process of exploring their lives and values.

Developmental courses in community colleges often leave students unprepared, demeaned, and uninspired. These gatekeeper courses need reform, especially in terms of curriculum and instruction. One framework -- Dr. Gholdy Muhammed's Historically Responsive Literacy (HRL) -- could be useful for developmental courses and students. HRL is a teaching…

Substantial research indicates that students' beliefs mediate learning strategies. Nevertheless, students' strategy-related beliefs about feedback and their mediation on strategies to act on feedback are insufficiently addressed. This case study aimed to examine: (1) students' strategy-related beliefs about feedback in L2 writing and (2) how…

Community College Written Communication 1 (ENC) instructors encounter complex challenges when attempting to teach writing skills to diverse student populations. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study is to explore the perceptions of full-time community college ENC faculty and determine the instructional strategies they use to…

The purpose of this study was to measure to what extent an experimental method of teaching argument incorporating elements from both Toulmin's (2004) structural approach and Walton's (2013) dialectical approach effects first-year college students' ability to write strong arguments. This experimental instruction used critical questioning as a…

In this chapter, we examine how professional organizations shape teaching and programmatic excellence in two-year college writing instruction and how two-year college English faculty are reshaping two-year college writing studies to advance equitable educational access and outcomes.