E d i t o r i a l
Teaching, Teaching, Teaching in the Two-Year
College
I am pleased to present this special issue on The Two-Year College and National
Trends/Developments in Higher Education. I think readers will find the essays
informative, thought-provoking, and, I hope, disturbing. They cover a range of
subjects, but then that seems to me to be the call issued to this journal by NCTE
and TYCA as illustrated by the multiple meanings of its title.
I have been gratified as editor by the many comments I’ve received from
readers about how helpful the journal has been to them in their classrooms. Certainly, the first meaning that comes to mind in our journal title is to read teaching as
a synonym for instructing. Our current issue is no exception, as I refer you to Teresa
Thonney’s “‘In This Article, I Argue’: An Analysis of Metatext in Research Article
Introductions,” in which she studies the apparent mismatch between the advice
writing instructors often pass along to students about how to write appropriate
introductions to their essays and the actual practice of publishing professors. The
essay has potential implications for first-year writing instructors’ work with their
students in their individual classrooms.
But the word teaching in our title also refers to our profession as college faculty, I would argue, and is thus not only a reference to the work we do in our own
classrooms, but also a reference to the work we do as a collective at our institutions.
In their essay “Unpredictable Journeys: Academically At-Risk Students, Developmental Education Reform, and the Two-Year College,” Joanne Baird Giordano and
Holly Hassel report on a study that examined how new underprepared students
transitioned to college in terms of their reading, writing, and thinking.Their work
compels us to think about larger issues than devising a single lesson plan for a single
classroom. Likewise, Christie Toth, Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt, and Patrick Sullivan
also ask us to expand our view beyond our own individual classroom in their essay,
“A Dubious Method of Improving Educational Outcomes: Accountability and the
Two-Year College,” which offers a response to governmental attempts to establish
postsecondary performance-based funding.
And finally, Teaching English in the Two-Year College also means teaching as a
job, as the work we do, as the place where we earn our living by instructing. In
“The Risky Business of Engaging Racial Equity in Writing Instruction: A Tragedy
in Five Acts,”Taiyon J. Coleman, Renee DeLong, Kathleen Sheerin DeVore, Shannon Gibney, and Michael C. Kuhne “investigate how writing programs, writing
instructors, and the profession itself engage in the erasure of race—of blackness and
brownness specifically—and perhaps most importantly in a hesitancy to address
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Copyright © 2016 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
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white privilege.” Their troubling story has a specific setting, the two-year campus
at which they teach, but it raises issues that extend beyond their midwestern location to the entire country. It’s not an easy story to read, but it is a necessary one.
I am proud and pleased to present this special issue to readers as it seems
to engage with the varied meanings of the journal’s title. I hope the issue informs,
provokes, and troubles all who read it.
****
A final word:
This is a special issue for me as well because it concludes my second term as editor,
the most fulfilling ten years I have spent in the profession. I owe some special thanks
to Paul Bodmer, at whose suggestion I applied for the editorship in the first place;
the late Kent Williamson, who got the wheels turning to reappoint me for a second
term; Kurt Austin, NCTE’s publication director, whose support for my work I have
greatly appreciated; Rona Smith, my wonderful production editor who so efficiently
ushered my forty issues through the process and into print; Kip Strasma, Jeff Klausman, and Annie Del Principe for their major contributions as book review editors;
Holly Hassel for her wonderful series of Inquiry columns as associate editor for the
past three years; Linda Walters-Moore, NCTE’s TYCA associate who helped me
organize my annual Editorial Board meetings at the CCCC: and Sharon Mitchler,
Eric Bateman, Sandie Barnhouse, Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt,Andy Anderson, and
Eva Payne, the TYCA chairs with whom I have worked over the years.
Additionally, I must express my gratitude to the dozens and dozens of reviewers whose time, energy, and expertise provided invaluable assistance in screening
the more than 1,100 manuscripts that our writers submitted. I am also grateful to
all of those writers who made the choice of submitting their work to TETYC.
You’re the lifeblood of the journal, obviously.
I’ve been blessed with colleagues at two institutions, Miami University
Middletown and West Chester University, who were always supportive, who were
willing to read manuscripts, who on occasion submitted manuscripts, and who were
always patient enough to listen to my anecdotes about the “great new manuscript”
I had just read.
And finally, I must thank my wife, Lynn, who never complained about my
being apparently chained to my desk working on manuscripts, copyedited files,
and the TETRIS-game of fitting pieces together to fill—but not overfill—my issues and whose expertise as a scholar and writer herself have always provided an
experienced and wise consultant.
I’ll miss the work. I’ll miss all the new friends and colleagues I’ve “met”
electronically through the years of working on the journal. I hope to meet many of
you in person at conferences in the future.The saving grace of my leaving office is
that for the first time in ten years, I can submit my own writing to my always–first
choice publication venue—TETYC. It’s you who read this journal to whom I owe
my greatest thanks, and I look forward to being able to write once again with all
of you in mind.
—J.S.
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