The Emerging "Teacher-Scholar-Activist": Community College English Faculty, Disciplinary Professional Organizations, and Education Policy

• In Event: Honoring the (Often) Invisible: Community College Faculty in an Era of Reform

Abstract

The professional identities of community college faculty have long been the subject of scholarly debate. While some researchers have questioned whether community college teaching can be considered a profession at all (McGrath & Spear, 1991; Cohen & Brawer, 2008; Kroll, 2012), a subset of nationally networked two-year college English faculty has sought to articulate and propagate a unique professional identity that reflects their pedagogical, administrative, and scholarly work (Tinberg, 1997; Alford & Kroll, 2001; Reynolds & Holladay-Hicks, 2005; Andelora, 2005, 2008). Building on the growing presence of two-year college faculty within national professional organizations associated with the (inter)discipline of writing studies, as well as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning movement launched by Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered (1990), these efforts have led to the formation of the “teacher-scholar” professional model promoted by the Two-Year College English Association over the last decade (Buck et al., 2004; Sommers, 2004; Andelora, 2005, 2008; Tinberg, Duffy, & Mino, 2007; Two-Year English Association, 2011).

In response to recent developments in state and federal education policy, however, this ongoing identity construction has begun to shift in a new direction. The proposed paper will discuss an emerging model of professional identity that is currently being articulated by key leaders associated with TYCA: the teacher-scholar-activist (Andelora, 2013; Sullivan, 2015). The addition of the term “activist” to the more established “teacher-scholar” role reflects a growing desire among some community college faculty to assert professional authority and advocate for their students and institutions in the midst of mounting public scrutiny.

To understand the exigencies for and dimensions of teacher-scholar-activism, I bring together three types of data: a) several recent essays published in the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College; b) the activities of several relevant committees formed by TYCA; and c) findings from three recent studies I have conducted with faculty. These studies include a qualitative interview-based study of two-year college English instructors’ experiences participating in professional organizations (n=24); a national survey of TYCA members about how they access and use published scholarship (n=156); and a qualitative interview-based study of community college faculty experiences implementing directed self-placement, an approach to placement assessment developed by writing studies scholars (n=10).

Taken together, these sources demonstrate that a subset of community college English faculty are drawing on their local teaching and administrative roles, their engagement with scholarship across multiple disciplines, and their participation in professional organizations to assert their perspectives in institutional, state, and national policy decisionmaking that affects their work conditions. Increasingly, these activities are being organized under the banner of teacher-scholar-activism. While this emerging professional identity reflects the self-concept of a relatively small minority of community college instructors, it signals new modes of scholarly, professional, and public engagement among a group of educators that has often been “invisible” to researchers and policymakers (Grubb, 1999). These modes have implications for the dissemination and application of research from the fields of both writing studies and higher education, as well as for the rhetorical context in which higher education policy is being debated and implemented.

Author

• Christie Toth, University of Utah