Rethinking Class:

Considering Students, Teachers, and Writing Assessment: Volume 1, Technical and Political Contexts

“…Not all two-year college students aspire to transfer or even earn degrees: Many are pursuing two-year vocational, technical, or para-professional certifications, or they may be "testing the waters" to see whether college is for them; others are dual-enrollment/ early college high school students or "reverse transfers" who have already attended four-year institutions and, for a variety of reasons, stopped out or changed their goals. Degree-seeking students may also shift their aspirations as they gain exposure to and experience with postsecondary education, and many students find themselves facing financial pressures, life crises, or family and community responsibilities that take priority over schooling, at least temporarily (Griffiths & Toth, 2017;Sullivan, 2008Sullivan, , 2017. Furthermore, longstanding federal measures of completion rates have penalized community colleges by not including part-time students or those who transfer to four-year-institutions in their success metrics.…”

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

“…Graduate work in composition studies alone insufficiently prepares instructors to teach at two-year colleges, in part because the administrative structures at two-year colleges are radically different from those at four-year institutions, with faculty positioned similarly to K-12 instructors (Griffiths 2015;Griffiths 2017;Griffiths 2020). More, for instructors whose only teaching experiences Copyrighted material, not for distribution have been at four-year institutions, it is difficult to anticipate these differences alongside the diversity in student experiences, goals, and needs of students at two-year colleges-not only those tied to academic goals but those tied to the transportation, sustenance, and safety necessary to achieve those goals (Goldrick-Rab 2018;Nazmi et al 2019;Nikolaus et al 2020;Phillips, McDaniel, and Croft 2018), requiring increased flexibility and creativity from instructors (Griffiths and Toth 2017). To wit, practical strategies for teaching writing successfully to a student group that includes overlapping identities of students with unstable housing and insufficient access to food, forced immigrants, academic high achievers, underprepared students, domestic-violence survivors, new veterans, and minoritized students is rarely discussed in graduate programs, even if the concept of equity and individualized teaching is celebrated in abstraction.…”