Teaching English in the Two-Year College - Volume 45, Issue 1, 2017

This report, produced by the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), provides guidelines for preparing future two-year college English faculty. The document, which aligns with the “CCCC Position Statement on Preparing Teachers of College Writing” and TYCA’s “Characteristics of a Highly Effective Two-Year College English Instructor,” presents recommendations for those who train future two-year college English professionals: directors and faculty of English studies graduate programs. These guidelines also provide graduate students who are interested in two-year college teaching careers with recommendations for a combination of relevant coursework and research, professionalization activities, and hands-on experiences that will prepare them to be engaged two-year college teacher-scholars.

In this article, the author narrates the experience of crafting two related position statements, one for CCCC and one for TYCA, describing their differences and explaining how each can be useful for two-year college professionals.

Together, these four essays by Mark Reynolds, Emily Suh, Cheri Lemieux Spiegel and Mark Blaauw-Hara, and Jeff Andelora, offer additional insights and resources for graduate programs and two-year college English departments seeking to implement the “Guidelines” principles in their local contexts. We anticipate that this symposium will further a much-needed dialogue about how two-year college English teachers are prepared.

The author draws on analysis of a three-part study to argue that reprofessionalization of writing instructors at two-year colleges requires instructors to become better prepared and positioned to assert their teaching expertise through departmental and institutional interactions beyond the classroom.

TETYC’s Instructional Note genre has evolved and begun to contribute to an ongoing scholarly conversation by contributing new knowledge, not merely passing along teaching lore.

The “TYCA Guidelines for Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-Year College” neglects to mention portfolios or eportfolios as a best practice with which two-year faculty should be prepared; the authors argue that eportfolio pedagogy and practice should be part of two-year faculty preparation to best serve both students and faculty at two-year colleges.