Accelerated Learning Pedagogy & Politics

Have First Year Writing Courses Become the New Frontline of Two-Year Institutions? 

Lansing Community College, among first community colleges to embrace accelerated learning, is an open-enrollment institution that serves urban, rural, and suburban communities. Since adopting the approach in 2012, the institution has employed both ALP and co-requisite course designs.

We will provide and analyze data that chronicles our institution's ten-year history with accelerated learning.

TYCA presentation will be on February 15, 2023 in Chicago at the annual conference.

In assessing the importance and efficacy of community college first year composition curriculum, an essential area of discussion is the extent to which writing programs find themselves subordinated to other institutional imperatives. In many cases, the priorities of a writing program are determined externally, either directly by administration or indirectly by forces which may be beyond the institution. For one example of this discussion, is found in Sharon Crowley's Composition in the University. At the community college level, however, we this effect is even more pronounced, and writing instructors and administrators often exercise even less control over their own priorities and imperatives. In recent years, developmental writing programs have been tasked with the responsibility of teaching more content in less time.

Our two-year institution is an open-enrollment institution that serves urban, rural, and suburban communities. Our population includes health science, trade, and transfer students and includes a substantial refugee population. Our institution was among the first community colleges to embrace the ALP model, drawn from Peter Adams' Community College of Baltimore County's 2012 ALP workshops. Since adopting the accelerated learning approach in 2012, the institution has employed both ALP and co-requisite course designs. Our current co-requisite model reached scale in 2018 and draws from ALP components as well as our own institutional research in its design. Our 2021-2022 enrollment for freshman composition was approximately 3,000; one-third of those students were enrolled in our co-requisite course.

Our co-requisite courses are designed to meet students at their current skill level while enabling access to first-year composition. Students of color are overrepresented in this program. Our qualitative research suggests many students of color and reduced means do not trust public institutions. Their experiences with social service agencies, underfunded schools, welfare programs, law enforcement, and the foster care system introduce them to institutional racism and elitism from a young age. Colleges are no different. Too often, college faculty and administrators dictate policies that privilege middle and upper-middle-class white students. The pandemic provided more privilege to the privileged and further deprived the underprivileged while revealing more issues of inequity and exclusion. Observations and data make evident faculty teaching underprepared students remain on the front lines.

In an open-door institution, composition faculty are among the students' first instructional contact. Prior to recent developmental education reform, faculty with related educational experience taught high risk students. Currently, in the era of accelerated learning, professors with literature or rhetoric Ph.D.s and creative writing MFAs teach this vulnerable population. Moreover, these professors do so under the microscope of the entire institution as well as the entire state. As community college "frontliners", first-year writing faculty at our two-year institution are, like many similar institutions across the United States, expected to both retain, encourage, motivate, and move students toward success despite the supposed failure of developmental educators in the previous decade. Moreover, because of institutional changes in response to the pandemic, faculty are expected to deliver ALP first-year composition asynchronously, synchronously, via hyflex, and in hybrid models as well as focus on resilient teaching and institutional data to evaluate implications for the future to a group that has undergone an exceptional, collective trauma.