Christie Toth | University of Utah (original) (raw)

Papers by Christie Toth

The present volume celebrates an important milestone in the history of Writing Studies: a unified... more The present volume celebrates an important milestone in the history of Writing Studies: a unified call to action. In the field of writing assessment, the time has come to end the disciplinary isolation of writing assessment. In ending the isolation of writing assessment as mere technique and bureaucratic action, we end the isolation that has denied student agency over their educative processes in written language development. In what has become a nightmare of unequal power relations, standing with our students is restorative. To secure this restoration and place students at the center of teaching and assessing writing, we turn to a new conception of writing assessment—a conceptualization that advances opportunity for every student. As we noted in the introduction, authors for Writing Assessment, Social Justice , and the Advancement of Opportunity were invited to deliberate on a single question regarding the relationship of writing assessment to opportunity: How can we ensure that writing assessment leads to the advancement of opportunity? In their answers, our colleagues addressed this question in terms of theoriza-tion, research methods, policy implications, and future directions for research. What becomes clear in their contributions is that a body of knowledge now exists connecting the achievement of social justice through opportunities created by writing assessment.

Executive Summary Reform movements aimed at improving success and completion rates of underpre-pa... more Executive Summary Reform movements aimed at improving success and completion rates of underpre-pared 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 offer recommendations. Overall, TYCA expresses reservations about legislative imperatives to reform developmental 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. Current reform movements Current reform movements revolve around several interconnected areas: admissions to four-year colleges, placement in developmental or college-level courses, curriculum and program design, and support programs. In some states, four-year state colleges are no longer allowed to offer developmental coursework, which pushes students into already overburdened two-year colleges. Placement into degree-credit courses is also being mandated. In some states, a single test is being implemented across all colleges, regardless of best practices. In other states, more welcome reforms are offered, such as multiple measures of placement, including high-school GPA. At the same time, certain category-based exemptions from readiness assessment—high-school diploma holders, veterans—raise serious questions. Curricula and program designs are also being legislatively mandated, too often without attention to local context and without appropriate faculty training and input. Concerns Two-year college faculty are frequently charged with implementing these initiatives and asked to make decisions about program redesign with little time for study and without training or compensation. Moreover, legislative reforms routinely overlook the varying institutional structures that reflect deep divides in training, pedagogy,

This white paper presents current research and makes recommendations on the array of placement pr... more This white paper presents current research and makes recommendations on the array of placement practices for writing courses at two-year colleges. Specifically, this white paper (1) identifies the current state of placement practices and trends, (2) offers an overview of placement alternatives, and (3) provides recommendations on placement reform and processes. TYCA encourages two-year college faculty to use this white paper to guide placement reform on their campuses, to be leaders in the field and professional organizations, and to advocate for best practices with policymakers.

Research Problem: Recent research suggests that the standardized tests used for writing placement... more Research Problem: Recent research suggests that the standardized tests used for writing placement at a majority of open admissions community colleges may be systematically under-placing students in ways that undermine their likelihood of persistence and degree completion. These tests may have particularly negative consequences for students from some structurally disadvantaged groups. Directed Self-Placement (DSP) has been touted as a more socially just approach to writing placement, but to date there has been little published research on the consequences of DSP in community college settings. Research Questions: What are the motivations of community colleges that adopt DSP? What have been the consequences of adopting DSP at these community colleges? What are the consequences of DSP for different groups of students at community colleges? Literature Review: I ground this study in an examination of the social justice issues surrounding writing placement at open admissions community colleges and the various social justice-related arguments made for and against DSP. I also synthesize the available literature on how DSP affects different groups of students. Methodology: I reviewed the scholarly literature, searched the archives of professional listservs, and used listservs and professional email lists to identify community colleges that have implemented DSP. I then conducted semi-structured interviews with faculty and administrators at twelve two-year colleges that either have imple

on the 2015 task force that rewrote the "Guidelines for Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-... more on the 2015 task force that rewrote the "Guidelines for Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-Year College." Although both of us have worked in or with two-year colleges for over a decade, we were, in many ways, the greenest members of the group. However, because our own graduate experiences are so recent, we have fresh perspective on the longstanding disconnects between the work of two-year college English and the assumptions underpinning most graduate education. For us, contributing to the new "Guidelines" was an opportunity to speak directly to university colleagues about the need for systemic change.

333 irst-year writing courses or programs at many universities are often founded on three related... more 333 irst-year writing courses or programs at many universities are often founded on three related assumptions: a) the first-year composition (FYC) course(s) should be part of general education for all students; b) FYC courses will provide students with a common learning experience to support their academic writing in other courses; and c) FYC provides a foundation on which a program's upper-level writing courses build. These assumptions are embedded in institutional claims central to many FYC courses, as well as in documents like the WPA Outcomes Statement, which argues that " faculty in all

This report, produced by the Two-Year College Association (TYCA), provides guidelines for prepari... more 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.

Drawing on findings from a national survey of TYCA members about how and why they access publishe... more Drawing on findings from a national survey of TYCA members about how and why they access published scholarship, this article makes recommendations for fostering local teacher-scholar communities of practice within two-year college English departments. T his article emerged from our work as editors of Teaching Composition in the Two-Year College, a new addition to Bedford/St. Martin's Background Readings series for college English teachers. Our collection is the first volume in the series to compile key academic scholarship specifically for two-year college composition instructors, and it features readings that examine the unique complexities, challenges, and opportunities of teaching writing at open admissions institutions. From the outset, we wanted our colleagues at two-year colleges to help shape the collection's scope and character. To achieve this end, we conducted a national survey of Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) members. The survey posed a variety of questions—both multiple choice and open response—about how faculty find and use published scholarship (see the Appendix). The response rate was modest: 175 (9.7%) of the 1,775 TYCA-affiliated National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) members we contacted answered the survey. Thus, our findings are not generalizable to the entire TYCA membership, or to the broader population of two-year college English instructors nationwide. Nonetheless, those who did respond constitute an important subset of professionally engaged two-year college faculty, and their answers offer rich insight into how scholarship shapes their teaching, administrative practices, and professional identities. To our knowledge, this is the first survey ever conducted about the use of academic scholarship among two-year college English faculty—an important group of educators who teach roughly half of all composition classes nationwide—and we therefore approached this research with multiple goals. Our most immediate objective was to identify scholarship that TYCA members found useful to their work as teachers, administrators, and professionals for possible inclusion in our Bedford collection. However, we also saw the survey as an opportunity to gather

Like many new PhDs in writing studies (see Giberson et al.), I went on the job market having give... more Like many new PhDs in writing studies (see Giberson et al.), I went on the job market having given little thought to the undergraduate major. I loved working with first-year writers, and I was interested in graduate education, so the opportunity to teach upper-division courses in the University of Utah's new Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies was more bonus than deciding factor when I accepted my position. Now, as I finish my first year at the U, I realize our major is one of the most exciting aspects of my job. It has given me the opportunity to collaborate with undergraduates on digital scholarship that pushes the boundaries of my own knowledge and abilities. Two of those students-Mitchell Reber and Aaron Clark-decided to write with me about our experiences for this special issue of Composition Studies.

Over the last fifteen years, directed self-placement (DSP) has become a widespread approach to wr... more Over the last fifteen years, directed self-placement (DSP) has become a widespread approach to writing placement in US post- secondary settings. However, to date, the theoretical underpinnings of DSP instruments have received little scholarly attention. Drawing on survey design principles, this study analyzes a corpus of thirty DSP questionnaires to identify the range of theoretical concepts underlying DSP questions, as well as the dimensions used to measure those concepts. Arguing that the validity of DSP in local contexts depends to a great extent on the initial theoretical and empirical basis of the instruments used to structure DSP processes, the researchers discuss the problems as well as the possibilities of the concepts and dimensions currently used in DSP questionnaires. Finally, they offer the example of one of their own universities’ DSP questionnaires, which is grounded in rhetorical genre theory, as a case study for how attending to questionnaire concepts and dimensions can contribute to the thoughtful design of locally situated DSP instruments.

Teaching English the Two-Year College

Assessing Writing, 2014

ABSTRACT Over the last fifteen years, directed self-placement (DSP) has become a widespread appro... more ABSTRACT Over the last fifteen years, directed self-placement (DSP) has become a widespread approach to writing placement in US postsecondary settings. However, to date, the theoretical underpinnings of DSP instruments have received little scholarly attention. Drawing on survey design principles, this study analyzes a corpus of thirty DSP questionnaires to identify the range of theoretical concepts underlying DSP questions, as well as the dimensions used to measure those concepts. Arguing that the validity of DSP in local contexts depends to a great extent on the initial theoretical and empirical basis of the instruments used to structure DSP processes, the researchers discuss the problems as well as the possibilities of the concepts and dimensions currently used in DSP questionnaires. Finally, they offer the example of one of their own universities' DSP questionnaires, which is grounded in rhetorical genre theory, as a case study for how attending to questionnaire concepts and dimensions can contribute to the thoughtful design of locally situated DSP instruments.

WPA/CompPile.Org Annotated Bibliographies

College Composition and Communication