College English - Volume 79, Issue 6, 2017

Intended to contextualize and elaborate on the Two-Year College English Association's 2016 Guidelines for Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-Year College, this article examines the history, current status, and possible futures of graduate preparation for two-year-college English professionals. It traces the five-decade history of efforts among two-year-college English faculty to articulate the distinct demands and opportunities of their profession and to hold university-based graduate programs accountable for providing meaningful preparation for future two-year- college teacher-scholars. Based on our survey of this history and the current landscape of graduate education in English studies, we argue that transforming graduate programs to meet the needs of the teaching majority will require embracing the four principles articulated in TYCA's 2016 Guidelines: develop curricula relevant to two-year-college teaching; collaborate with two-year-college colleagues; prepare future two-year-college faculty to be engaged professionals; and make two-year colleges visible to all graduate students.

This article sheds light on moments when educators affirm and when writers assert their epistemic rights— the rights to knowledge, experience, and earned expertise. Affirmations and assertions of epistemic rights can work to counter epistemic injustice, or harm done to people in their capacities as knowers. Though an understanding of rhetoric as "epistemic" or "epistemological" is not new (e.g., Berlin; Dowst; Scott; Villanueva), I argue that we need to bring attention to the related terms and conceptual frameworks of epistemic rights and epistemic injustice. Together, these terms help to explain the wrongs (micro-inequities leading to macro-injustices) that manifest when writers are stripped of language, experience, or expertise and their attendant agency, confidence, and even personhood. This study highlights both the social stakes involved and the interactional work needed for putting one's words into the world. Hence, this project contributes empirical research in addition to an understanding of epistemic rights that can counter epistemic injustice.

This essay explores how Black LGBTQ students use writing to translate and transmit African American vernacular language codes in their everyday lives. Through documenting how students experience and interpret homophobia through the prism of African American vernacular English (AAVE), I demonstrate how some use language and literacy practices to critique and perform dominant gender behaviors reflected in their community. I theorize a Black queer rhetoric as a framework for understanding and nuancing the discursive limits of African American vernacular English