Teaching English in the Two-Year College - Volume 50, Issue 1, 2022

This essay examines the breakthrough one academic had in negotiating her fear of failure with writing and discusses how that breakthrough affected the way she teaches her community college composition courses.

This article describes the importance of pedagogies of access for equity in literacy classrooms, especially for first-generation students, who are more likely to bring what sociologists call strategies of deference that have been shaped by differences in class culture. A threshold concepts approach can bring transparency to the values of college-level core literacy skills to help interrogate and address those differences.

This article reports on the working conditions of one hundred faculty who teach first-year composition at two-year colleges across the US.

The following is the Opening Address given at the 2022 TYCA National Conference. It explains the exigence for the conference theme, “Recovery and Reinvention in Our Profession: Emerging from a Recent Time of Crisis,” in this current moment—particularly, the conference’s call for a mobilization of previously overlooked narratives in the two-year writing classroom. The talk has been lightly edited for inclusion here.