Applying for Community College Positions
SDICCCA
Useful Resources for Applying for a Community College Job
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SDSU grad students - what to consider when applying for a community college job
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Mesa College's Graduate Tutor program. Run by Nicole Michals (Mark Manasse and Mariam Kushkaki also have key roles). This is a bit like SIDICCCA, but you get paid!
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GET ON THE CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COLLEGE REGISTRY - they will email you every new job notice that comes up.
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The Stanford Career Development Center Guide to Community College Jobs – see section on community college teaching
http://cardinalcareers.stanford.edu/guides/grad.html See also The Stanford Guide to Applying for Community College PositionsYour immediate social networksThis Inside Higher Education article ("Teaching the Writing Teachers," by Scott Jaschik) provides a useful overview of the qualities that community colleges are looking for, and considers the ways prospective teachers should be prepared for community college teaching jobs. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/18/cccc
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An Administrator's Guide to Writing Instruction, by Chris Gerben et al. NCTE document describing qualities program administrators are looking for when hiring writing teachers.
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California Community Colleges Registry lists current vacancies for all California community colleges: https://www.cccregistry.org/jobs/index.aspx
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The Chronicle of Higher Education – good place to find a) jobs being advertised nationally, b) advice, blogs, articles, forums, etc. on the job market. You can sign up for a version of the Chronicle designed just for Community Colleges. Maybe share a subscription.
- Main site: http://chronicle.com/section/Home/5
- Jobs: http://chronicle.com/section/Jobs/61/
- Job Advice: http://chronicle.com/section/Advice/66/
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Inside Higher Ed – similar to Chronicle, less formal http://www.insidehighered.com/advice
- "Confessions of a Community College Dean" - Blog http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/
- Bedford's Adjunct Central http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/
Teaching Philosophy Statements
Community College: Sample Job Description & Sample Applications Letters
Applying for PhD Programs
Sample Applications/Statements of Purpose
How to Organize Letters of Recommendation
- A model of how to organize letters of recommendation. This will provide professors with information that will optimize your chances of getting letters done in time and with the right kind of information included (and which professors will really appreciate and may enable them to customize the letters)
Things to Consider When Considering a Ph.D
- Is it even a good idea to undertake a PhD. in English, given the current market? Michael Berube, who has written extensively on the subject, considers the question. The comments and replies that follow are worth looking at.
- Factors to consider when applying for a PhD
- Graduate Education Initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – summary of a report on the state of the Humanities PhD. Instructive. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/12/doctoral
- A review by Thomas Benton of Menand's book about graduate education, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. While not directly about how to apply to graduate school, contains a useful discussion of issues surrounding graduate education.
- DEBATING THE PROSPECTS OF ENGLISH/HUMANITIES PHDs. "The Realities of Employment in the Humanities," Peter Conn, Chronicle of Higher Education. Part of a round table discussion of issues facing prospective PhD students. See also Profess, Don't Oppress by Lee S. Shulman, Where's the Data? by Frank Donoghue, Forum: Do We Need to Overhaul Graduate Education?, A Useful Crisis by Richard A. Greenwald, Clueless by David D. Perlmutter. See also letter from a PhD student responding to articles about the difficult job market.
Keeping up with Key Issues in the Field (that might show up in interview questions)
Issues that may be discussed
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This Inside Higher Education article ("Teaching the Writing Teachers," by Scott Jaschik) provides a useful overview of qualities community colleges are looking for, and considers the ways prospective teachers should be prepared for community college teaching jobs. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/18/cccc
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An Administrator's Guide to Writing Instruction, by Chris Gerben et al. NCTE document describing qualities program administrators are looking for when hiring writing teachers.
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How to do more/the same in times of budget crisis and exploding class sizes - "tips for overload" and how to grade many papers, from UF.
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Other predictable issues - participation, engagement, feedback, classroom management, diversity, first generation students, nontraditional students, etc.
How rhetoric participates in alignment between k-12 and SDSU in San Diego and CA
The Obama administration's effort to align k-12 and higher ed. language arts instruction
- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/education/28remedial.html "Ms. Martin blames chaotic high school classes. “The kids just took over,” she recalls. But her college instructors say that even well-run high school courses often fail to teach what students need to know in college. They say that Ms. Martin’s senior English class, for instance, focused on literature, but little on writing....poorly run public schools are a part of the problem, but so is a disconnect between high schools and colleges. “We need to better align what we expect somebody to be able to do to graduate high school with what we expect them to do in college,” said Billie A. Unger, the dean at Ms. Martin’s school, Blue Ridge Community and Technical College, who oversees “developmental” classes, a nice word for remedial. “If I’m to be a pro football player, and you teach me basketball all through school, I’ll end up in developmental sports,” she said."
Debates over Emphasis on Literature vs.Non-fiction/Argument in K-12
What Should Children Read? By SARA MOSLE. New York Times, Nov. 22, 2012. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/what-should-children-read/?src=me&ref=general
Doing More with Less (aka managing increased class sizes)
"A Unilateral Grading Contract to Improve Learning and Teaching," by Jane Danielewicz and Peter Elbow.
College Composition and Communication, vol 61, no. 2, December 2009. http://www.ncte.org/cccc/ccc/issues/v61-2
ABSTRACT: Contract grading has achieved some prominence in our field as a practice associated with critical pedagogy. In this context we describe a hybrid grading contract where students earn a course grade of B based not on our evaluation of their writing quality but solely on their completion of the specified activities. The contract lists activities we’ve found most reliable in producing B-quality writing over fourteen weeks. Higher grades are awarded to students who produce exemplary portfolios. Thus we freely give students lots of evaluative feedback on their writing, but students can count on a course grade of B if they do all the required activities—no matter our feedback. Our goal in using contracts is to enable teachers and students to give as much attention as possible to writing and as little as possible to grades.
The "Academically Adrift" Debate and Research - there needs to be more reading and writing
There has been much discussion of a new book called Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. It argues that an alarming number of students get through college learning very little. Over a third show no increase over their entire undergraduate experience in fundamental writing and thinking skills (as measured by the College Learning Assessment test.)
One of the main reasons for this is that very little reading and writing is required. Some quotes from an Inside Higher Ed summary of findings:
- 32 percent of students each semester do not take any courses with more than 40 pages of reading assigned a week, and that half don't take a single course in which they must write more than 20 pages over the course of a semester. Students who study by themselves for more hours each week gain more knowledge -- while those who spend more time studying in peer groups see diminishing gains.
- Students whose classes reflect high expectations (more than 40 pages of reading a week and more than 20 pages of writing a semester) gained more than other students.
- Students who spend more time in fraternities and sororities show smaller gains than other students.
- Students who engage in off-campus or extracurricular activities (including clubs and volunteer opportunities) have no notable gains or losses in learning.
- Students majoring in liberal arts fields see "significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study." Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the smallest gains. (The authors note that this could be more a reflection of more-demanding reading and writing assignments, on average, in the liberal arts courses than of the substance of the material.)
Money Quote: “If students are not being asked . . . to read and write on a regular basis . . . it is hard to imagine how they will improve their capacity to master performance tasks.”
STANLEY FISH ON THE "ADRIFT" BOOK http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/race-to-the-top-of-what-obama-on-education/
Academically Adrift Revisited - Business Schools and Writing Skills
Supporting/Justifying an Argument-Centered Approach to Writing Instruction
Given that we work in a time of perpetual crisis and universities need reminding why writing programs exist, and even some faculty in other disciplines may think of writing instruction in terms of "repair" or "hygiene," such research is useful. It may also be helpful for TAs in order to a) understand why our program is structured as it is, b) so TAs can make the case to their students/provide justification/explanation c) so TAS can explain to future employers why the program focused on argument, d) so TAs can justify what we do to other academics, who will sometimes assume teaching writing is mostly about showing students where to put a comma, that it’s a service job, not real work, etc.
Argumentative writing is an important component of the work done in most disciplines. As Gerald Graff notes, “argument literacy” is essential to understanding and joining academic discourse communities. (Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003, page 3.) This finding has been voiced by a significant number of researchers. Some representative texts include Argumentation in Higher Education (Richard Andrews, 2010), “Argumentation Across the Curriculum” (Christopher Wolfe, Written Communication, 2011), and the Common Core State Standards Initiative of the National Governors’ Association. The Common Core State Standards Initiative, which has been adopted by most states, makes argument central to language arts instruction. The web site is at http://www.corestandards.org/
For an overview of the research/common claims supporting the value of argument-centered writing programs, see “Argumentation Across the Curriculum,” Christopher R. Wolfe, Written Communication, 2011.
Abstract: This study explores how different kinds of arguments are situated in academic contexts and provides an analysis of undergraduate writing assignments. Assignments were collected from the schools of business, education, engineering, fine arts, and interdisciplinary studies as well as the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences in the College of Arts and Science. A total of 265 undergraduate writing assignments from 71 courses were analyzed. Assignments were reliably categorized into these major categories of argumentative writing: explicitly thesis-driven assignments, text analysis, empirical arguments, decision-based arguments, proposals, short answer arguments, and compound arguments. A majority of writing assignments (59%) required argumentation. All engineering writing assignments required argumentation, as did 90% in fine arts, 80% of interdisciplinary assignments, 72% of social science assignments, 60% of education assignments, 53% in natural science, 47% in the humanities, and 46% in business. Argumentation is valued across the curriculum, yet different academic contexts require different forms of argumentation.
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