Community college freshman composition instructors' choices of readings: The importance of context

This study investigates the processes through which community college composition teachers from an urban campus in Northern California choose their readings for their courses---a process inadequately documented in the literature of composition studies. This work is informed, or framed, by contemporary theoretical discussions in the college composition discipline, namely those concerning the marginalized status of contingent composition workers and what compositionists refer to as the "post-process" movement---infused with critical pedagogy and the post-positivism of postmodern theories. This post-process theoretical framework examines phenomena widely, positioning it within expansive local and global sociopolitical and epistemological contexts. The post-process framework of composition studies examines the contexts of composition teachers, their students, and the larger academic environment. The context of this study was also significantly influenced by the lack of existing empirical research on community college composition faculty and was thus broadly cast in order to gather contextual information that informed participants' choices of readings. Email surveys were completed by 14 faculty, 11 of whom were interviewed during the Fall semester of 2004. Participant responses to the email survey demonstrated clearly that participants came to teach composition by way of their love of literature, which led them to English departments that often channel graduate students into teaching sections of freshman composition while finishing their studies of literature. This "serendipitous" route to composition was a significant factor in participants' choices of readings and assignments, as was the marginalized status of those participants who are adjunct. The grounded theory that emerged from the data analysis proposes that community college composition instructors who primarily teach composition use the flexibility inherent in the freshman composition curriculum in order to adjust their courses (through readings and assignment topics) to make them meet their personal and intellectual needs. The final chapter discusses the implications of this study's findings in light of the American Library Association's recommendations for including information literacy standards in the higher education curriculum. It concludes with a discussion of the flexibility of the freshman composition curriculum, interdisciplinarity, and recommendations for the formal inclusion of the ALA standards into the freshman composition curriculum.