#TYCAMW26

Call for Proposals: Two-Year College English Association 2026 Midwest Conference (TYCAMW)

Date: October 8-10, 2026

Location: Omaha, NE

Proposals due: June 15, 2026 

Our 2026 conference theme, “The Cutting Edge,” invites your consideration in two ways. First, we seek presentations that address community colleges as sites of innovation in teaching writing. Second, we call on presenters to consider how we work amid political hostility that threatens our rights, our funding, our students, our identities, and our values. 

On its first level, the conference theme recognizes that community colleges are often on the cutting edge in responding to our students’ diverse backgrounds, needs, and goals. Many community college students exist in proximity to vulnerability, making them among the first to feel the effects of social unrest and increasing economic pressure. Some students are also facing the demands of work and family in addition to their studies. Thus as teachers, advisors, writers, tutors, activists, scholars, and/or program administrators, we have expertise in creating approaches that can support our students, equipping them for life and work beyond the classroom. This call asks you to speak to your innovations in this crucial work. 

On its second level, the conference theme names the way that the community college and those connected to it are increasingly on the chopping block. The current federal administration threatens our funding, our rights, our pedagogies, our identities, our communities, and our values. This significantly adds to the difficulty of our work, both as teachers and as humans in a stressful environment. This call invites presenters to speak to the ways we sustain ourselves, protect our departments across campuses, engage with students across the political spectrum, support students in jeopardy, reclaim our values when we are pushed to change, and continue to exist amid uncertainty as many of the long-standing assumptions about the value of education come into question. 

Thus we seek proposals that explore any of these ideas: 

• How do you experience the cutting edge at the two-year college, personally or professionally?

• How does change provoke us to reground ourselves in the core values of the humanities?  

• How can we retain or reclaim our values in moments when we’re being pushed at cultural, federal, and institutional levels to change our teaching? 

• What classroom practices have you tried or would like to try in response to this moment and our students? 

• How are you responding to the unique challenges posed by dual enrollment, technical education, transfer challenges, learning modalities, outside partnerships, and so on?  

We invite proposals examining all aspects of teaching English at the two-year college, including but not limited to first-year writing, developmental education, college reading, teaching English to speakers of other languages, inclusive teaching, evidence-based pedagogy, literature, creative writing, writing centers and other learning assistance programs, intermediate composition, communications, linguistics, technical writing, business writing, professional development, teacher-scholar activism, community engagement, program administration and innovation, preparing to teach at a two-year college, and the role of contingent faculty.

Formats

To keep our sessions vibrant, the TYCAMW 2026 Conference Team kindly asks that presenters offer conversational and engaging presentations rather than reading papers verbatim. Presentations can take various formats, including:

• Group Panel: Presentations with 2-3 people; may use handouts or visual aids. Presentations will be 45-60 minutes including discussion time.

• Individual presentations: Approximately 15 minutes in length; may use handouts or visual aids. 

• Workshop: Lead workshop participants through problem solving of a particular issue or developing techniques. Workshops should include  about 30 minutes of instructions with 15-30 minutes of “play.”

• Roundtable: 3-10 participants give brief, informal presentations of 5-10 minutes, then the session is open to conversation and debate. Roundtables should be pre-formed at submission, 45-60 minutes total time.

• Rapid-Fire: 10-minute presentation with 5 minutes for questions. These mini-presentations will be paired with other rapid-fire presentations.

• Virtual: Any of the above formats virtually presented to the conference attendees. These may be recorded. 

• Other: Do you have an idea for a different format? Please feel free to suggest alternative ideas!

Proposals for TYCAMW 2026 are due on June 15th, 2026. Please follow these steps in submitting proposals: 

1. Prepare an abstract of no more than 300 words that identifies format preference, purpose, goals, significance to conference theme, and, if relevant, methodology. 

2. Include presenters’ names, emails, and institutional affiliations.

3. Prepare an abstract of approximately 50 words for inclusion in the conference program.

4. Identify keywords for your session.

5. Submit proposals here.

Presenters will be notified by July 31, 2026. Registration will go live in mid-June.