Feature: The Profession of Teaching English in the Two-Year College: Findings from the 2019 TYCA Workload Survey

Abstract

In fall 2019, the Two-Year College English Association distributed a survey to two-year college English faculty across the United States through professional listservs, regional distribution lists, and social media platforms. This report summarizes the key data derived from 1,062 responses to close-ended questions about workload related to teaching, service, leadership, and professional development. The report discusses the demographic profile, employment status, and contractual obligations in course assignments of the two-year college English faculty who responded. It also summarizes Information about respondents’ overload teaching, their autonomy within their teaching responsibilities, and the kinds of service and professional development activities in which they engaged.

The Complex Nature of Student Retention at America’s Community Colleges

“…It would include developing culturally sustaining pedagogy across the curriculum (Kynard, 2014;Ladson-Billings, 2021;Love, 2019;Milner, 2020;Minor, 2018;Paris & Alim, 2017), developing more equitable grading practices (Feldman, 2019;Inoue, 2015;Staats, 2014), and hiring more diverse faculty and staff (Bitar et al, 2022;Jawaharlal, 2022;Suh et al, 2021, p. 334). It would rebuild and reprofessionalize the teaching workforce on community college campuses, which currently relies heavily on contingent faculty working under precarious (and what could be described as perhaps sometimes unethical) conditions (CCCSE, 2014;Childress, 2019;Christie & Dean, 2022;Kezar et al, 2019;Klausman, 2010;Suh et al, 2021;Umbach, 2007). As Tinto (2008) has urged us to remember, "access without support is not opportunity."…”

“…The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) has published a series of white papers on issues related to retention and student learning that offer key insights about some of these variables. This work includes Hassel et al (2015), Klausman et al (2016), Suh et al (2021), and the TYCA Workload Issues Committee report from 2022. English teachers are key stakeholders in conversations related to retention at community colleges because they teach foundational academic skills-reading, writing, and critical and creative thinkingand gateway academic courses including first-year composition and developmental English classes.…”

Professionalizing from the Fringe: Informally Supporting Teaching Assistants via (and Welcoming Them Into) the OWI Community

“…These models provide instructors with a completely developed course that they can then adapt and personalize over time as they respond to student needs. Online community college instructors typically work off the tenure track with high teaching loads and often for more than one institution (Suh et al, 2021). Their compensation rarely accounts for labor-intensive work required for designing multiple effective online courses that support equitable learning for students (Giordano et al, 2022).…”

Professional Development for Online Writing Instruction: The Place of Instructional Design

“…These models provide instructors with a completely developed course that they can then adapt and personalize over time as they respond to student needs. Online community college instructors typically work off the tenure track with high teaching loads and often for more than one institution (Suh et al, 2021). Their compensation rarely accounts for labor-intensive work required for designing multiple effective online courses that support equitable learning for students (Giordano et al, 2022).…”