For decades, two-year college scholars have documented how the field of writing studies and its scholarship does not sufficiently reflect the needs of their classrooms and writing programs (Lovas, 2002; Tinberg, 1997; Hassel and Giordano 2013; Larson, 2018). Most recently the "TYCA Guidelines for Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-Year College" (Calhoon-Dillahunt, et al 2017) calls upon graduate programs to offer coursework and create programs that will specifically prepare MA and Ph.D. students to effectively work in two-year college contexts in order to respond to the reality that "most graduate programs either explicitly or implicitly professionalize students for careers at four-year institutions, with little or no attention to community colleges, the contexts where many graduate students are likely to make their careers" (Calhoon-Dillahunt, 2017 12). Despite the pressing nature of this issue, little to no empirical or systematic work has been conducted to trace the career transitions of graduate students earning masters or doctorate degrees as they acclimate to the two-year college writing program environments. It will remain challenging to make research-based curricular and academic planning choices at the graduate level without having a clearer sense of the professional learning and skills that most benefit these early-career educators moving from one kind of academic environment (in terms of student populations; roles and responsibilities for curriculum, assessment, and evaluation; and program development and leadership work) to another equally common institutional context.
Because of the nature of graduate education in the US, writing instructors at two-year colleges are trained through graduate teaching assistantships where they are responsible for teaching students in first-year or in some cases upper-division writing. However, writing programs (sometimes loosely defined) in two-year colleges are managed in significantly different ways, and full-time and part-time instructors must adapt quickly to these new contexts (Calhoon-Dillahunt, 2011). Community colleges serve students with a much broader range of proficiencies and learning needs as readers and writers, which means that they typically offer multiple levels of first-year writing courses and developmental English through a range of program structures, including accelerated learning, integrated reading and writing, and co-requisite support and programs like dual credit or competency-based education (Hassel, et al, 2015; Nazzal, 2019). New instructors may or may not receive support from a designated writing program administrator (most often not--see Charlton and Rose; Klausman, 2008, 2010, and 2013). Two-year college English instructors also often underake service, administration and mentoring work and uncompensated social-emotional labor that may differ from the work they were prepared for by graduate education (see Coleman, et al 2016; Naynaha, 2016; Kareem, 2019).
To investigate this significant issue of alignment between the preparation of writing instructors and work in two-year college writing programs, our project will explore the following research questions:
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