VOICES FROM THE UNDERBELLY: COMMUNITY COLLEGE ENGLISH FACULTY EXPERIENCES WITH STATE-MANDATED DEVELOMPMENTAL EDUCATION REFORM

Abstract

Over the past decade, state legislatures across the country have passed laws that attempt to control developmental or “remedial” education with community colleges as their primary target. These laws require community colleges to replace all “standalone” developmental courses in English and Math with a corequisite model in which students enroll in the college-level course as well as a corequisite support course in their first semester. While corequisite instruction has demonstrated some success, the research driving state-mandated developmental education reform is “deficit-oriented” (McGee et al, 2022) and fails to account for the theoretical and practical knowledge of community college English faculty. Our voices, especially those of developmental educators, have been absent from policy-level conversations and the national research that informs them (Nix et al, 2021; Suh et al, 2022). In this single instrumental case study, full-time faculty in the English department at one mid-size suburban community college were asked to describe how state-mandated developmental education reform has shaped their teaching experiences, and to reflect on how their professional affiliations may have shifted alongside the changing landscape of postsecondary literacy instruction. This study also captures the experiences of developmental English faculty at this institution who have been uniquely impacted by state-mandated reform. Data collected includes transcripts from focus group meetings, interviews, and my own reflective teaching and research journals. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to generate story-focused themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006; 2020) that coalesce around the “underbelly” of corequisite instruction and the “unvoicing” of developmental educators (Suh et al, 2022). Implications for teaching, research, and policy-making focus on re-situating community college English faculty as experts whose knowledge should be considered at all levels.