Over the past 10 to 15 years, as the nation has discussed the high cost of a college education and the worth of the college degree and experience, community college has become a first-choice experience for many traditional college-aged students. Assessment and accountability occupy center stage in current discussions of higher education, and…

This article presents the author's response to "How Do We See What We See? Pedagogical Lacunae and Their Pitfalls in the Classroom" by Jennifer A. Rich. McKinney describes how she tweaked a rhetorical analysis assignment to have it produce more summary, description and response. She stresses that teachers can create a more rhetorically viable…

Multimodal writing is considered as a "new" way of composing, or, somewhat cynically, as a strategy for adding relevance or interest to a required composition course. Jody Shipka's "A Multimodal Task-Based Framework for Composing" suggests that "students' uptakes of a much wider, richer repertoire of semiotic resources,…

Research conducted by the Community College Research Center (CCRC) and others was criticized in an article by Alexandros M. Goudas and Hunter R. Boylan (2012) published in the "Journal of Developmental Education," Volume 36, Issue 1. They raise specific contentions related to the methodology applied in the CCRC studies, the review of…

This final chapter provides observations about institutional research in community colleges derived from the preceding chapters and the issue editors' own experiences. Taken as a whole, the chapters in this issue, as well as the editors' experiences, suggest several observations about institutional research in community colleges. These include the…

In 2007, the College Board's Community College Advisory Panel--a group of college presidents that advises the organization's membership on community college issues--asked these authors to write a paper describing effective remedial education programs. They never wrote the paper. The problem was not the lack of dedicated faculty and staff working…

In two-year college writing classrooms and beyond, peer review is one of the most widely used tools for helping students improve their writing. Despite its widespread usage, however, it is one of the most diffuse, inconsistent, and ambiguous practices associated with writing instruction. This essay aims to explore the widely varying terminology…

In 2007 the faculty at Miami Dade College joined the student body in signing a covenant "to build a foundation for the success of future students." The event capped a two-year effort on the part of the faculty to articulate the foundations of a 21st-century college education and codify them into 10 clear statements. However, creating a…

Frank Christ is the founder and co-director of the Winter Institutes for Learning Assistance Professionals and has been actively involved with learning assistance and learning centers for the past 40 years. In this interview, Christ talks about how learning centers today differ from those with which he was associated at the beginning of his…

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,…

For those seeking ways by which they might serve more knowledgeably and effectively as members of their institution's leadership team--particularly when it comes to issues of institutional assessment and effectiveness--the author strongly recommends active participation in any aspect of the accreditation/reaffirmation process, including serving as…

This essay recounts the authors' experiences as community college faculty members in a learning community (LC) linking first-year composition with a class in life-career planning and development. The authors begin with a learning community story shared recently over drinks with a group of community college English teachers. They use the story to…

In this Cross Talk, Mark Blaauw-Hara, the author of "Mapping the Frontier: A Survey of Twenty Years of Grammar Articles in 'TETYC,'" and one of the manuscript's reviewers, Andy Anderson, engage in a brief conversation about the essay, its content, and the processes of writing, reviewing, and revising. This article is presented in three sections:…

The author provides insights on the experience of serving on a community college accreditation Visiting Team. The article includes a discussion of roles and responsibilities as well as a discussion of what to expect on an accreditation visit.

In this article, the author discusses how instructors' feedback on their students' texts can exact a toll on the students. Based from her own experiences, the author relates that teachers often do not have enough time to grade their students' writing. Even so, she argues that teachers like her should adopt strategies that promote self-reflective…