In the midst of disciplinary and public debates about education at open-access institutions, it's more important than ever that institutions set a clear path for inquiry and scholarship that will meet the needs of the professional community. This essay provides an assessment of the research achievements in two-year college English, particularly…

"Teaching English in the Two-Year College's" series "What Works for Me" is a unique artifact in the development of composition as a field. In this article, the author claims "What Works for Me" as a valuable genre, a hybrid of new and old disciplinary forms. In the spirit of Derek N. Mueller's "Views from a Distance: A Nephological Model of the…

Whenever the author teaches English 102, a research-focused, second-semester composition course, at least one student asks her whether or not she "allows" Wikipedia. She then redesigned her course to leverage Wikipedia as a source of inquiry. In other words, she "allows" Wikipedia, but through the Wikipedia project, which is designed to address…

In "After 40 Years, Has the Grand Experiment Failed?" Trum Simmons answers the question he poses in the essay's title by describing a community college teaching career that many "Teaching English in the Two-Year College" (TETYC) readers will find familiar: the diversity of community college students; student success and failure; conflicted…

When Sean Murphy designed the Graduate Student Internship Program at the College of Lake County (CLC), his 2001 TETYC article about the then two-year-old program detailed his programmatic response to the job market. Ten years later, the CLC-DePaul University partnership remains the strongest of the original dozen cross-sector relationships CLC…

In her recent "Teaching English in the Two-Year College" ("TETYC") article, Denise Marchionda argues for a grading system in her first-year writing course that turns over responsibility to students for earning grades. The approach, which she calls "the point-by-point grading system," is a variation on a contract grading approach in which each…

In 1990 Helon Howell Raines published "Is There a Writing Program in This College? Two Hundred and Thirty-Six Two-Year Schools Respond," in which she reported on her study, via survey and eight follow-up telephone interviews, of two-year college writing programs across the country. Raines asked questions about departmental and institutional…

In this essay, the author "maps" a town that has grown in what was formerly frontier: he looked at twenty-four essays focusing on grammar instruction from "Teaching English in the Two-Year College (TETYC)," published between 1987 and 2006, with a goal of identifying key areas of focus--town squares. While he found several trends and foci, most…

Over the years of teaching, the author has been more and more interested in making course content and goals relevant to the real, lived experiences of students. Based on this interest and spurred by an article on community-based research in "Teaching English in the Two-Year College" (TETYC) in September of 2005 as well as a move in composition to…

Reflects on making "Teaching English in the Two-Year College" a viable journal. Discusses formation of the Two-Year College Organization, and its formal recognition by the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1997. (SC)

The word "idea" assumed special meaning in composition studies when Stephen M. North, in "The Idea of a Writing Center," showed how an idea can evoke and ignite intense expectations and aversions surrounding literacy instruction. In particular, North lamented the "false sense of knowing" that made getting a message through (in this case, about…

In the early 1990s, a small group of dedicated two-year college English faculty, led by Helon Raines, began the fight for the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), a professional organization that would give two-year college English faculty across the nation a respected identity and voice within the National Council of Teachers of English…

In 1986, Paul Friedman and Reva Jenkins-Friedman introduced "Fostering Academic Excellence through Honors Programs" by warning readers that "One might assume that the brightest college undergraduates feel well served during their years on campus and that procedures for educating them are common knowledge." The research on the importance of honors…

Two-year colleges have long struggled with questions of status and identity. For most of the twentieth century, two-year college faculty were heir to many of the same issues of status and identity that plagued their institutions. Because the majority of two-year colleges were under the control of local secondary-school districts--and faculty and…

Several years ago, when his college first financed a writing program administrator (WPA) position--reassigned time and a budget to pay adjunct faculty stipends for program development--the author met with all the most senior adjunct faculty. "Without you," he told them, "this effort to build a better writing program won't work. Participation and…