Dear Colleagues,
Erin Lehman and I invite you to consider writing a proposal for our proposed edited collection, Preparing Writing Program and English Department Graduate Students for Successful Careers at Two-Year Colleges. Please read the CFP posted below. Please distribute widely and contact us with your questions and ideas at: jjanang and elehman4.
Thank you!
Joe Janangelo, Loyola University Chicago and Erin Lehman, Ivy Tech Community College
CFP: Preparing Writing Program and English Department Graduate Students for Successful Careers at Two-Year Colleges
Editors: Joseph Janangelo and Erin Lehman
Our Book’s Intended Outcomes and Interventions
We propose an edited collection of essays that helps graduate students prepare for successful careers teaching and administrating at two-year colleges (TYC).
We hope to inspire people in at least three ways:
• to highlight and share TYC faculty expertise, qualifications,and needs.
• to show graduate students the understudied array of opportunities and challenges for beginning and, over time, pursuing successful and enjoyable careers (as teachers and, perhaps, administrators) at TYCs.
• to inspire graduate faculty, particularly graduate program directors, to learn more about TYCs and TYC working lives so they can better prepare their students to become successful candidates for, and productive/satisfied members of TYCs.
Calendar and Details
Please send us your proposal to both of us as a Word Attachment with a subject line “Chapter Proposal.”
100-word chapter proposals by: July 22, 2023
Acceptances sent: August 7, 2023
Chapter drafts due: October 15, 2023
Editors’ response: December 10, 2023
Revisions due: February 10, 2024
Suggested Approaches
We welcome chapters that take a scholarly, critical, and constructive approach to helping graduate faculty and graduate students learn about TYC work, why they might want to contribute their talent and energy to TYC mission(s) and prepare intentionally to do their best work for TYC students, colleagues, and institutions.
We offer these questions as generative, not exhaustive. You are welcome to contact us to brainstorm ideas: jjanang and elehman4. Collaborative chapters, particularly across institutions and types of institutions (e.g., two- and four-year schools) are welcome! We also welcome co-authored chapters by TYC year faculty, two-and four-year faculty, current students, administrators, staff members, and former TYC students and alumni.
• Consider the 2016 TYCA Position Statement for Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-Year College and the 2012 Characteristics of the Highly Effective Two-Year College Instructor in English. How can we make these ideas actionable in our graduate programs and curricula? Are there any topics that a new version of the Statement should include? Think DEI and Inclusivity.
• Consider the 2022 Modern Language publication, “A Community College Teaching Career.” To what extent do you find the ideas accurate and helpful? What should be improved, included, or revised?
• What myths and misperceptions do graduate faculty, graduate students, and job candidates hold that keep them from becoming knowledgeable, competitive TYC job candidates?
• What myths and misperceptions do TYC faculty and administrators hold about job candidates from four-year institutions that keep them from welcoming and supporting job candidates from graduate programs?
• Do you see any one-sided or reciprocal othering going on, in practice and/or theory?
• How are, or could, Writing Studies teaching methods, Introduction to Graduate Study, and theory courses be reimagined and redesigned to include meaningful preparation for TYC teaching, collegiality, scholarship, leadership, and service?
• If graduate school did not prepare your for TYC work, how did you become entrepreneurial and build your own career? How did you prepare yourself to work at a TYC? What did you do, and how and why did you do it? What advice could you give current graduate students?
• What do you wish you had learned in graduate school about TYCs? What curricular or other programmatic content or opportunities do you suggest contemporary and future-oriented graduate programs offer?
• Think about reductive understandings of TYC Institutional Mission. What could you tell readers about the variety and scope of TYCs?
• Think about naïve, romanticized, and simplistic understanding and representations of TYC students. What might you write that could help complicate and change that(mis)understanding?
• For current TYC faculty, what advice can you give for finding and retaining funding, allies, and mentors?
• What do graduate faculty need to learn about DEI, inclusive or apart from four-year institutional conceptions and models, as it applies to TYC teaching, collegiality, service, scholarship, and working lives?
• What strategies and dispositions can you suggest for connecting with local needs and businesses?
• When you serve on hiring committees, what do you find makes candidates more and less desirable at the CV, interview, and teaching demonstration stages?
• How do you keep your writing life fully alive while teaching as a solo author and in collaborations with colleagues at and beyond your institution?
• For TYC Administrators: what advice can you offer aspiring and current TYC faculty to prepare for and assume leadership opportunities?
• Consider the ways changing technology impacts students, course content and curriculum, and course delivery. What kinds of technology skills and dispositions do successful TYC faculty and administrators need? How can graduate students develop that knowledge and those capacities? What can graduate programs do to help foster this professional development?