TYCA Breakfast

The TYCA breakfast was a fabulous event.

With aplomb and grace, breakfast chair Jane Wagoner shepherded the event from the planning stages through the presentations of awards. She is the adept at organizing events, and she is always a strong member of any team. TYCA –Midwest provided centerpieces, and members helped with the finishing preparations. They even arrived extra early to help with set up and taking tickets. The breakfast starts at 7:00am, so this is really saying something!

Once again, this was an event not to be missed. There were about 200 people present in the Red Lacquer room at the Palmer House Hilton. We shared an amazing space – think posh, and then add to that image – wonderful conversation and the chance to recognize the winners of the Diana Hacker TYCA Outstanding Program Awards . I will link to the complete list when it is up on the TYCA web pages later this week. We celebrated Howard Tinberg’s work. He just completed his five year term as TETYC editor. Jeff Sommers is the new editor, so be sure to send submissions to him. ( http://www.ncte.org/pubs/journals/tetyc )

Sterling Warner, chair of the TYCA Public Image Committee, had wonderful news. For the first year, the committee did not award a “shame” award. This is usually reserved for especially egregious, incorrect or just plain shameful representations of two-year colleges in the public sphere. We all have our fingers crossed that we will not have a shame award next year, too.

I’ll write more once I’m back home in Washington.

TYCA Research Initiative

Jody Millward, Leslie Roberts, Patrick Sullivan, and Lois Powers presented TYCA research initiative preliminary data, and it was amazing. To begin, there was a substantial response rate to the survey. Although I was hoping for enough responses for a statistically valid response, TYCA people once again rose well beyond what was necessary. There were more than 330 responses, and there was even representation between urban, suburban and rural colleges.

Why does this matter? It means that the data will give us an accurate “snap shot” of a number of areas where there just has not been data for two-year colleges.

assessment programs and practices
teaching conditions and their link with pedagogy and programs
WAC, WID and writing centers
connections between technical support, technical access and computer assisted pedagogy

The committee will move into the next phase of the initiative, which includes a series of follow up phone interviews with select survey respondents.

Even the little bit that they were able to share confirmed some general ideas I had and completely surprised me in other areas. I am looking forward to the more formal reports and articles that will follow later.

and one more thing....

The other TYCA document that Frank Madden referenced in the A.1 session is Research and Scholarship in the Two-Year College . It defines our space in the academic landscape as connected powerfully to both pedagogy and to scholarship. It also has a helpful collection of major works written by and about two-year college faculties’ professional lives. It is a must read.

2yr Colleges: Spaces for Change

The first session I attended to day was an amazing panel made up of former TYCA chairs. Each was asked to elaborate on their sense of where we should be going in the future.

Lynn Troyka emphasized the need for TYCA to connect with graduate students.

Paul Bodmer discussed the need for continued reinvention of our teaching space due to the continuously changing needs of our students.

Georgia Newman focused on the TYCA document, “Guidelines for the Academic Preparation of Two-Year College English Faculty” and the need to develop graudate programs which focus on people’s needs to be generalists for work in at two-year college campuses.

Frank Madden advocated for continued pressure to define our professional lives as teacher-scholars.

Jay Wooten reminded the audience that numerous first generation students are attending two-year colleges, and their needs, especially in the sense of their confidence, require a faculty member to work in different ways. She emphasized what we all know; 1st generation students are just as academically capable, but do not a sense of the “academic” world to guide them.

Ben Wiley reminded us that we have a choice to accept or reject the vision of the two-year college that others project. He reminded us that we do vigorously reject the image of the two-year college student and faculty as “less than” or deficient in any way. Instead, we need to continue to challenge these false images and continue to project our version of the professional world in which we work.

Grading Freshman Comp at Texas Tech

I just finished rereading the article “A+ A New Way to Grade” that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education on March 10. I could go on and on about why separating instruction from instructor feedback has pedagogical problems, but one thought kept asserting itself for me. How is this form of writing instruction going to encourage students to continue writing after the course is over? Lindsay Hutton, a Ph.D. student in creative writing who grades students' work in in this system commented on how she felt less responsibility to the students because she is focused on the time factor for her grading.

Scary….. If the graders feel disconnected from the students, how will this help to retain students? How will students see a larger purpose for their writing than just completing a generic assignment? How can students develop their skills and flexibility of expression for multiple uses in their academic, professional and personal lives?