Abstract
First-year composition (FYC) instructors face myriad challenges. In a moment in which neoliberal restructuring of the 2-year college adds complexity to those challenges in areas from curriculum to departmental collaboration to demands on faculty labor, Meryl Siegal and Betsy Gilliland’s (2021) collection Empowering the community college first-year composition teacher: pedagogies and policies offers an intervention intended to empower FYC faculty in small and large ways. The volume is organized into four sections that explore how to enhance composition instruction at the classroom level, the program, the institution, and the discipline through interventions in “pedagogy and policy/research” (Siegal & Gilliland, 2021, p. 11).
Siegal and Gilliland (2021) direct attention to pedagogy in the opening section of their book, with a particular focus on the way that metacognitive strategies and units focused on “writing about writing” can increase student engagement and success in the composition classroom. In the section’s opening chapter, “Negotiating Writing Identities Online and in Person: The Growth of Metacognition and Writing Awareness in FYC,” Brenda Refaei and Ruth Benander (2021) address how reflective journaling can transition students from thinking about writing as a daunting task to complete to seeing it as a process through which they can become empowered and develop identities as writers. Authors Michael Larkin (2021), Barbara A. Auris (2021), and Miriam Moore (2021) provide additional reflections on the way that techniques such as modeling, scaffolding, and applying reading and writing theory to their own processes can help students build confidence in their writing and reading abilities. However, their articles did not fully explore the unique ways in which community college students are positioned and therefore, might be better applied to the FYC classroom in general rather than to the 2-year college in particular.
The volume’s second section takes up the task of supporting teachers who are providing reading and writing instruction in the increasingly widespread context of acceleration. Sarah Klotz and Carl Whithaus’s article “Contract Grading as Anti-Racist Praxis in the Community College Context” argues that contract grading, a process through which instructors and students mutually develop grading-related course expectations, supports equity by “encourag[ing] students to think critically about how power, privilege, and language intersect in their educational experiences” (2021, p. 66). They provide both theoretical grounding and practical examples of contract grading, though their chapter does leave open the question of whether nontraditional students with significant responsibilities outside of school would ultimately be disadvantaged by this model. Andrew Kranzman and Chandra Howard (2021) offer specific interventions to effectively build strong student-instructor relationships in the composition classroom. Caroline Torres (2021) explores the intersection between English language learning and disability, reminding instructors of the importance of accounting for how students’ identities and experiences might intersect when designing coursework and ensuring that course materials directly incorporate intersectional frameworks. Overall, the section emphasizes the necessity of bringing both empathy and structured support to all students within the FYC or, indeed, any classroom.
The third section of the collection focuses on the challenge of creating dynamic and efficacious composition classrooms outside the more traditional context of the liberal arts. Gonzalo Arrizon (2021) discusses the benefits of integrating science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) content and concepts into FYC composition classrooms aimed specifically at STEM students, focusing on the way that this pedagogical strategy keeps students engaged in writing that feels directly relevant to their fields of study. Similarly, Eric B. Jensen, Jennifer Stieger, and Whitney Zulim (2021) conduct work elaborating context and strategies for working with career and technical students on writing and reading. And in their chapter “Motivating Students from Afar: Teaching English in a Live Broadcast Concurrent Enrollment Program,” which draws on pre-COVID experiences that are nonetheless very relevant for pandemic-era teaching. Kellyanne Ure, Kade Parry, and David A. Allred (2021) outline the challenges of teaching college classes to high school students remotely. Their work demonstrates both the extreme challenges of simultaneously teaching students in multiple classrooms dispersed across a wide geographical area and details teaching-inspired best practices that have allowed these instructors to ensure that their students receive college-level instruction and the support needed to succeed in such environments, lessons that many instructors will benefit from as they continue to negotiate pandemic-era teaching. All three chapters in this section demonstrate the ingenuity and commitment to students that FYC instructors faced with challenging contexts often display.
In what is perhaps the strongest section of the book, several articles examine the FYC curriculum through the lens of research and policy. Rebecca M. Callahan, Catherine E. Hartman, and Hongwei Yu’s (2021) article “Heterogeneity among Community College English Learners: Who Are Our ELs in FYC and How Do They Compare?” provides a data-driven analysis of how English Learners (ELs) at community colleges differ from ELs in primary and secondary education environments. Ultimately, the authors argue, “effective CCEL programming must focus attention on the specific linguistic, social, and academic needs of this linguistically, racially, and culturally diverse population,” rather than relying on the same strategies found to be effective in the context of K-12 education (p. 174). In his article “Avoiding the ‘Cliffs’: Korean International Community College Students and Rhetorical Flexibility,” Justin G. Whitney (2021) discusses the increasing enrollment of international students in 2-year colleges, situating that trend as it applies to Korean students within the academic and cultural context of their home country. Whitney argues that community colleges have a unique role to play in offering Korean students without extensive socioeconomic means the opportunity to compete against their more economically privileged peers in the Korean job market.
The remaining three articles of the section all do the detailed and necessary work of investigating how faculty members experience shifts in community college policy. George C. Bunch, Ann Endris, and Kylie Alisa Kenner (2021) complicate earlier models that outlined faculty support for and resistance to reform, ultimately arguing for the importance “for faculty to position themselves as agents and leaders in the context of reform rather than as merely supporters, resisters, or critical responders to changes imposed by others” (p. 219). Heather B. Finn and Sharon Avni (2021) point to the ways in which co-requisite models in accelerated writing programs often clash with instructor experience and practice and suggest that a more rigorous, systemic approach that more authentically integrates faculty into the design and implementation of such programs is needed to ensure that instructors and students alike are supported in accelerated FYC classrooms. Meryl Siegal (2021) outlines recent changes to the way in which developmental and FYC education are structured at the community colleges within the University of Hawaii system, finding that more research is needed on instruction in the FYC classroom and on the emotional labor that instructors perform within its context, that changing program structures requires more support than is often given, and that “teachers need to be part of the decision-making process and must be part of all research when it comes to curricular changes” (p. 255). Siegal’s article is followed by the work of Terrence Willett, Mallory Newell, and Craig Hayward (2021), who provide an overview of the role that Institutional Research currently plays in the community college context. Taken together, the last four articles in this section overwhelmingly emphasize the need for faculty to have, and to fight for, a seat at the table whenever institutional-level policy or curricular changes are made.
Ultimately, this volume is characterized by both a general resistance to neoliberal, consumer-based models of the FYC classroom and a desire to explore best practices through engagement with established and emerging research in the field of writing studies. Siegal and Gilliland make a compelling case that reflective pedagogy, research at the classroom and the policy level, and active participation in the development of policy and curriculum on the part of faculty are essential components of any FYC program. The collection would have been strengthened by including the work of more 2-year college scholars who actively engage in research on writing within the community college context: the fact that many of the research-based articles are driven by scholars at 4-year schools, while the majority of teaching-based articles are by instructors at 2-year schools does a disservice to the extensive and rigorous research being done by scholars working at 2-year colleges. Ultimately, the shortage of such articles serves to underscore the collection’s point about the need for scholarship and teaching to be more closely interwoven.
In their conclusion, Siegal and Gilliland (2021) emphasize the importance of using an intersectional, nuanced lens to focus on students, conducting additional research to determine the state and efficacy of current pedagogy in the FYC classroom, and addressing shortcomings in the support and professionalization available to community college instructors. They argue strongly that such interventions can be most effectively realized by following the straightforward practice of “listening to the teachers” (p. 289, emphasis in original). Their book offers readers several opportunities to do exactly that.
