Two-Year College Writing Studies: Rationale and Praxis for Just Teaching

Two-Year College Writing Studies is a comprehensive overview of the two-year college writing teaching experience within our current political and historical contexts, with examples for teachers to better enact just teaching practices in their colleges. Editors Darin Jensen and Brett Griffiths present grounded, well-theorized, and practical strategies for teachers to implement in classrooms, institutions, and geopolitical contexts to advocate more effectively for their students.

Contributors draw on theories of identity, rhetorical third space, and linguistics to articulate a praxis of just teaching. They describe existing institutional challenges and opportunities that foster equity and offer cautionary tales of educational systems dismantled for short-term economic and political gains. Two-year college writing studies--when properly resourced--holds the potential to foster (or undermine) democratic ideals of civic literacy and uplift. Chapters in this volume offer case study examples of changes in departmental practices for reflection, interaction, and assessment that empower faculty to break free and engage directly with institutional, regional, state, and national constraints.

By making these resilient practices visible, Two-Year College Writing Studies amplifies the voices and validates the experiences of instructors engaging in this work. It will serve generalists, specialists, and academics interested in the subdiscipline of student success pedagogies and the political histories of two-year colleges and be useful for instructors new to the field, as professional development for veteran instructors, and as an introduction for graduate students entering two-year college writing studies programs.

Darin Jensen is associate professor at Salt Lake Community College and the editor of Teaching English in the Two-Year College. He is also the editor and cofounder of the Teacher-Scholar-Activist blog, which won the John Lovas Award from Kairos in 2018.

Brett Griffiths teaches writing full-time at Schoolcraft College and is a teacher-scholar-activist committed to equitable and inclusive literacy instruction. Her work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Pedagogy, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and other publications. She has served on the executive board for the Midwest chapter of the Two-Year College English Association.