Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges: The Pursuit of Equity in Postsecondary Education
Edited by Jessica Nastal, Mya Poe, and Christie Toth
Copy edited by Meg Vezzu. Designed by Mike Palmquist.
This book won the Best Book Award for 2022 from the Council of Writing Program Administrators at its 2023 annual convention. Presented every two years, the award recognizes an outstanding book related to writing programs and program administration. (At the 2023 conference, awards were given for both 2021 and 2022.)
Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges brings together two-year college teacher-scholar-activists from across the U.S. to share stories, strategies, and data about local efforts at reforming writing placement assessment to advance educational access and equity. The chapters in this edited collection help faculty and writing program administrators navigate the shifting landscape of placement in the 2020s. Contributors demonstrate how two-year colleges have addressed local and state-level pressures for reform, especially at a time when the nation has been rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic with its inequitable economic, social, and physical toll.
Jessica Nastal is Interim Dean of Learning Resources and Assessment and Associate Professor of English at Prairie State College. Her research focuses on equity in writing assessment and writing pedagogy, particularly for New Majority college students. Nastal’s scholarship has appeared in Journal of Response to Writing, Composition Studies, ETS Research Reports, and Journal of Writing Assessment. She has served as Developmental Editor for the Journal of Writing Analytics, Associate Editor for the Journal of Writing Assessment, and on the editorial board of Composition Studies. She won an Excellence Award in 2021 from the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development in two-year colleges. As dean, she implemented PSC’s Learning Environment Award to recognize faculty and staff who make outstanding contributions in teaching and learning at the college..
Mya Poe is Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on writing assessment and writing development with particular attention to justice and fairness. She is the co-author of Learning to Communicate in Science and Engineering and co-editor of Race and Writing Assessment and Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity. She has also guest-edited special issues of Research in the Teaching of English and College English on the topic of social justice, diversity, and writing assessment. Her teaching and service have been recognized with the Northeastern University Teaching Excellence Award, the Northeastern College of Social Sciences and Humanities Outstanding Teaching Award, and the MIT Infinite Mile Award for Continued Outstanding Service and Innovative Teaching.
Christie Toth is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate studies in the University of Utah’s Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies. She is co-editor of the critical sourcebook Teaching Composition in the Two-Year College and recipient of a Mark Reynolds Best Article in Teaching English in the Two-Year College award. Christie has worked on several writing placement reform projects at both two- and four-year institutions. She has published on writing placement in Assessing Writing, Journal of Writing Assessment and the edited collection Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity. Christie collaborates closely with faculty, staff, and student colleagues at Salt Lake Community College on a variety of transfer initiatives, a partnership that won a 2021 Diana Hacker Outstanding Programs in English Award. Her co-authored book about these collaborations, Transfer in an Urban Writing Ecology: Reimagining Community College/University Relations in Composition Studies, will be published by CCCC’s Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series in 2022.
Series Editors: Aimee McClure, Clarke University; Mike Palmquist, Colorado State University; Aleashia Walton, University of Cincinnati Associate Editor: Jagadish Paudel, University of Texas at El Paso
This book is available in whole and in part in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). It is also available in a low-cost print edition from our publishing partner, the University Press of Colorado.
