Faculty members take pride in the great diversity of students attending LaGuardia Community College. Their students self-identify with various nationalities, races, religions, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. Not only do students adopt diverse identity markers, but they also come to their classroom with variant skill levels. It is difficult…

Teaching the Holocaust in a first-year writing course--using photographs of the Shoah as a primary resource--authorizes students to engage in research and writing that provides a place of empathetic, dignified witnessing for those who were denied the possibility of realizing the lives they were meant to live. The author believes that in engaging…

The author never planned to work at a college, but she finds she is vice president of student development at a community college; she served previously as assistant to the dean of academic services, as registrar, and as dean of enrollment management. She started her career in health care administration, and her master's was in public…

Developmental courses in English, math, and reading have an important purpose in higher education, especially in the open-access world of community colleges. These classes--also referred to as "remedial"--are intended to give less-prepared students a chance to catch up and meet the challenges of college-level coursework. However,…

Competence in written English is essential for success at work in the United States. For deaf and hard-of-hearing people, especially for those who do not use spoken language, the ability to express themselves in writing with competence assures clear communication with hearing people. However, learning how to do so presents challenges for both deaf…

In this essay, the author offers basic suggestions for faculty to become active teacher-scholars within the two-year college professional community. Among his suggestions are: (1) become familiar with the major professional journals in the field; (2) joining a professional organization and attending professional meetings; (3) publication in…

Each time the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development announces that America's students are falling behind those of other countries, and with every business section article on America's trade deficit with China, America sees a new commission to reinforce the negatives and urge dramatic upgrading of the workforce. This author states…

American educators have a mindset about learners and the learning process. Although all educators do not have the same mindset, many see teaching in terms of controlling: what students learn, how they learn, and how the learning is measured. This mindset focusing on teaching--rather than on learners and the learning process--seems to be fairly…

They say necessity is the mother of invention. In the author's 42 years with community colleges, it has never been more necessary to become proactive at raising revenue. The economic recession has adversely affected the colleges as never before. Across the U.S., enrollment growth is unprecedented, as are budget cuts. Such imbalance presents a…

The nature of teaching requires reflection for anyone (students or teacher) to learn anything at all, especially in the community-college classroom, where students often come because traditional teaching methods simply haven't served their needs. As all teacher-scholars know, stand and deliver simply does not work for most of them. They do have to…

Educational centers serve a number of purposes. Foremost, they are a more cost-effective way of meeting increased student demand than building costly comprehensive full-service campuses. Educational centers also promote shared facility use and intersegmental collaboration, which enables higher education systems to use resources more efficiently.…

This essay frames the connections between punk principles and writing theory in order to re-form what the author emphasizes in his own composition classroom, in particular the do-it-yourself ethic, a sense of passion and fearlessness, the agency to attack institutions, and the seeking of pleasure. (Contains 1 note.)

There is something very democratic and creative about reader-response criticism. In a reader-response classroom, students progress from passive to active reading, from discovering a text to creating one. Also, students progress from passive to active reading, from discovering a text to creating one. However, a problem emerges when the spirit and…

In the truly vast body of literature about community colleges, no one seems to be asking the rather basic question: Do we really need these schools? Has whatever purpose they may have served a hundred years go, gone away or been supplanted or something of the sort? Such an assessment would be a major undertaking. This paper is a prolegomenon,…

In this article, the author writes from the perspective of a community college research practitioner, an institutional researcher whose daily work is intended primarily to affect policies, procedures and understanding of student learning and institutional effectiveness. The audience for this work is composed of faculty, administrators, staff,…