two-year college workloads

This panel presented data gathered in a TYCA project funded by a CCCC Research Initiative Grant.

Patrick Sullivan, filling in for David Wong at the last minute, described answers to 2005 and 2006 surveys of two-year colleges. Surveys were returned by two-year colleges in all 50 states and included colleges in rural, urban, and suburban areas. A couple findings I found most interesting are that WAC/WID programs at two-year colleges tend to be informal with very few campus-wide integrated programs, and that access to technology tends to vary greatly, even from campus to campus among multi-campus institutions.

Lois Powers discussed hiring practices and professional development at two-year colleges. The most alarming finding she shared is that 72.5% of two-year colleges have a teaching load of between 71-110 composition students PER SEMESTER. This is often IN ADDITION to students in other non-composition courses. The NCTE recommends that instructors have no more than two sections of composition with 16-20 students/section per semester.

This panel’s findings helps explain why the profession tends to ignore two-year college faculty and two-year college teaching: two-year college faculty are too damn busy teaching 71-110 composition students/semester to write up anything they are doing. One of my major pet peeves about the profession is that the vast majority of literature on our profession is generated by research-focused institutions, and when we talk about “the profession” in our journals and listservs, we tend to be talking about research-focused institutions. In reality, however, most of the work of compositionists takes place in teaching-focused institutions. The MLA found that over 90% of English programs and between one-half and two-thirds of professorial-rank appointments are outside doctorate-granting institutions. But our picture of the profession as drawn in the journals and in presentations at conventions that are dominated by research-focused institutions. So we don’t have a clear picture of how the profession exists today. John Lovas (I miss him so much) charged that the profession has an “intellectual blind spot” about knowledge produced in two-year colleges, meaning both that the profession doesn’t pay attention to what happens in two-year college classrooms and that the profession doesn’t pay attention to the role of faculty in two-year colleges as knowledge producers. In Lovas’s words, what the profession claims to know about itself has a “thin empirical base.”

The session ended with some discussion of how two-year college faculty can advocate for better teaching conditions. Recommendations included working at the local level, through college organizational structures and the community, the state level, through TYCA regionals and state legislatures, and the national level, through national TYCA, NCTE, CCCC, MLA, the Secretary of Education, and the Congress. The panelists emphasized the importance of supporting our arguments with research. The panelists also suggested that two-year faculty consider teaching literature and classes in related disciplines to balance their composition workloads and explore release time or reassigned time as a way to lessen their workload.

tags: cccc  conference  community_college  

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