Message from National TYCA

Our Students Need You. We Need You. Join Us. 

Dear Colleagues, 

Now is the time for all good professors to come to the aid of their discipline. We need each other. Together, we can best respond to the opportunities to serve our overworked students, to collaborate with our resistant administrators, and to challenge our narrowing legislatures. Ours is a discipline worth defending, but if we are to defend and grow, our individual information and ego silos must give way to cross-discipline discussions, rigorous research, and vulnerable sharing. TYCA, C’s, and NCTE provide the tools, support, and strength to help us help our students.  

At my own college, where our mission statement has essentially been reduced to a promise that we are “the affordable pathway to the workforce,” the humanities and anything that doesn’t “have immediate impact” is routinely neglected. We rarely teach face-to-face literature courses anymore. In the humanities classrooms, my colleagues struggle against the tide of teaching technical readiness at the expense of critical thinking and reading. This onslaught of intellectual offloading is no more prevalent than in the composition classroom where my students ask, “Why should I learn to write when I can use generative AI to do it for me?” 

My quiet shout that critical thinking and creative problem solving are, in fact, workforce skills goes pale against the administrators and politicians promising secure incomes and lifelong happiness. Even suggesting that critical thinking is necessary for citizen formation in a vibrant democracy is too intangible as my students leave campus and return to vampiric jobs and, for many, food and housing insecurity. 

When facing these realities as open enrollment literacy educators, I lack determination, focus, and hope. In these darker moments, I’ve learned to turn to my colleagues that present and participate in TYCA, C’s, and NCTE. I’ve learned to trust their passion for our discipline, their drive for academic freedom, and their commitment for ensuring student success. 

I need your help. Our students need your help. It’s time, once again, to join us.   

TYCA National Conference in Baltimore, April 9, 2025

C’s in Baltimore, April 9-12, 2025

TYCA Midwest just outside of Chicago, October 16-18, 2025

NCTE Conference in Denver, November 20-23, 2025