TYCA Position Statements

TYCA has developed the following documents which may be of interest to Two-Year College English Educators:

 

TYCA White Paper on Placement Reform 

Recently, two-year colleges have witnessed broad reforms to developmental education, instituted partly by state legislatures, partly by faculty and administrators, and partly by non-profit organizations such as Achieving the Dream. These reforms are intended to improve student success. A major obstacle to success, according to research from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University and elsewhere, is misplacement into developmental English courses, usually via unsound and unfair high-stakes placement tests. Fortunately, alternative placement processes have been developed that diminish if not fully eliminate the frequency of misplacement, thus expanding access to college-level courses, reducing financial cost and time to degree, and improving student success rates.

 

TYCA Guidelines for Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-Year College

This report, produced by the Two-Year College Association (TYCA), provides guidelines for preparing future two-year college English faculty. The document, which aligns with the CCCC Position Statement on Preparing Teachers of College Writing and TYCA’s Characteristics of a Highly Effective Two-Year College English Instructor, presents recommendations for those who train future two-year college English professionals: directors and faculty of English studies graduate programs. These guidelines also provide graduate students who are interested in two-year college teaching careers with recommendations for a combination of relevant coursework and research, professionalization activities, and hands-on experiences that will prepare them to be engaged two-year college teacher-scholars.

 

TYCA White Paper on Developmental Education Reforms

Executive Summary: Reform movements aimed at improving success and completion rates of underprepared students at America’s two-year colleges are sweeping the country. Legislatures from Florida to Washington, from Connecticut to Colorado, are mandating reform. The Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) offers this white paper to provide an overview of this current reform movement, highlight some of the potential problems, and offers recommendations. Overall, TYCA expresses reservations about legislative imperatives to reform development reading and writing instruction in postsecondary education, particularly those efforts that exclude two-year college faculty from the public discourse and ignore the academic and material realities of two-year college students’ lives.

 

TYCA Executive Committee Statement on Concurrent Enrollment
Because of the significant investment undertaken by states in funding concurrent enrollment programs, it is important that states commit to programs that will benefit all students, regardless of economic status.

For more information on Dual Credit and Concurrent Enrollment, go to: https://sites.google.com/site/tycadualcredit.

 

Characteristics of a Highly Effective Two-Year College English Instructor
This statement offers guidelines for individual faculty, faculty groups, administrators, boards of trustees, accrediting agencies—in short, those who may screen, hire, assess, or evaluate two-year college English faculty.  The document identifies and briefly describes the unique strengths of highly effective two-year college English instructors.