While there have been several studies of writing programs at larger, baccalaureate institutions, the community college classroom has often been overlooked. Authors Howard Tinberg and Jean-Paul Nadeau fill this gap with The Community College Writer, a systematic and unique case study of first semester writing students at a community college. Drawing on surveys, interviews, and samples of classroom assignments, Tinberg and Nadeau use their research at one community college to reach out to instructors throughout the nation, fostering communication between community college faculty members in the effort to establish full-fledged writing programs geared toward student success. At the heart of the book are the voices of the students themselves, as they discuss both their teachers’ expectations and their own. Through a series of case studies, the authors reveal the challenges students face as budding writers, and their firsthand experiences with writing programs at the community college level. With this informative study, Tinberg and Nadeau seek not only to encourage dialogue between student and teacher or community college instructors, but to expand the conversation about program improvement to include both two- and four-year colleges, bringing composition faculty together in an effort to improve writing programs in all schools. Included in the volume are seven appendices, including surveys and interviews with faculty and students, making The Community College Writer a comprehensive and practical guide to tackling the issues facing writing programs and instructors.

[This text] provide[s] coverage of the writing process for today's visually oriented students. The text also included a wealth of rhetorical strategies that instructors and students found accessible and helpful. [It] reinforces these strengths with enhanced coverage of many important topics such as analyzing the rhetorical situation, evaluating sources, avoiding plagiarism, and developing visual literacy.-Pref.

The West Guide to Writing: Success from Community College to University

Based on 100 interviews with students who had recently finished first-year writing, Todd Taylor’s groundbreaking multimedia text is shaped by student writers like no other textbook before. Their words and voices—in brief videos and example texts—create a conversation about writing that asks students to engage with other college writers personally, learning from their challenges and successes. Conceived as a multimedia text in LaunchPad from the outset, the brief, modular chapters are organized into four parts that support the best practices and content areas in the CWPA Outcomes Statement — Rhetoric, Context, Process, and Convention — so that you and your students have just what you need in one resource to support writing, working with sources, and multimodal composing.

Prepared by writing center directors, the articles in this book examine the pedagogical theories of tutorial services and relate them to actual center practices. The 19 articles are arranged into three categories: writing center theory, writing center administration, and special concerns. Specific topics discussed in the articles include the following: (1) collaborative learning, (2) writing center research, (3) promoting cognitive development in the writing center, (4) writing centers in the two-year college, (5) developing a peer tutoring program, (6) the handbook as a supplement to a tutor training program, (7) reluctant students, (8) prewriting for the laboratory, (9) meeting the needs of foreign students, (10) tutoring business and technical students, (11) attitudes in writing center relationships, (12) financial responsibility, (13) form design and record management, and (14) undergraduate staffing in the center. A selected bibliography concludes the book. (FL)

div Composition research consistently demonstrates that the social context of writing determines the majority of conventions any writer must observe. Still, most universities organize the required first-year composition course as if there were an intuitive set of general writing "skills" usable across academic and work-world settings. In College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, Anne Beaufort reports on a longitudinal study comparing one student’s experience in FYC, in history, in engineering,;

In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction. Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost. Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.