Composition Forum 47, Fall 2021
http://compositionforum.com/issue/47/

Teaching-for-Transfer and the Two-Year College Teacher-Scholar: An Interview with Howard Tinberg

Anna Hensley

Howard Tinberg has taught for over thirty years at Bristol Community College and has enriched the field of composition and rhetoric through his extensive scholarship and his service as a former Chair of CCCC and former Editor of Teaching English in the Two-Year College. As a two-year college professor myself, I am inspired by Howard’s career-long commitments to highlighting the work of the two-year college and to exploring new and innovative ways to support two-year students in the writing classroom. In this interview, Howard and I discuss his recent work adapting the teaching-for-transfer (TFT) curriculum for the diverse two-year college classroom. He also reflects on the importance of teaching reading in the writing classroom and offers advice for new two-year faculty as they develop their identities as teacher-scholars working in open-access institutions.

Anna: Could you talk a little then about your background teaching at the two-year college? How did you come to teach at a two-year college, and what are some of the challenges that you’ve faced?

Howard: Prior to teaching at Bristol where I teach now, I taught at a two-year college within a four-year university, and it was quite an interesting experience. I was teaching students who perhaps needed extra work in developmental writing and critical thinking before they could fully matriculate into the larger university and I liked the concept of helping students in that transition from high school to college. I saw an advertisement for a job about 45 minutes south on highway 95 at a community college and I’d known enough about the college that I sensed there would be a greater diversity in terms of age and background, and I thought that was a good next step for me. So, I applied to Bristol, where I now teach, and indeed I have a full range of students—all the way from high school to 60s, 70s, and 80s of age. It’s been a wonderful experience to be part of that diversity and to teach that range of students. My own preparation was at an R1 institution where I got my Master’s and PhD so there was some retooling that was necessary to teach at the community college.

Anna: Yeah, that diversity is something that I really appreciate too. It creates a very different kind of classroom experience that is really energizing.

Howard: Indeed, indeed. I was just talking to a tutor embedded in one of my English 101s about how nice it was to have older students together with younger students and to see how they interact, how interesting it is. You know, they’re both insecure in some ways, those directly out of high school and those who stepped out of college and have come back. But their experience is so different, and I think they can help each other in interesting ways.

Anna: Yeah, I agree. You’ve done a lot of work lately on the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) curriculum. What do you find especially valuable about the TFT model, and how does it speak to the needs of the wide range of learners that make up the typical two-year writing classroom?

Howard: Good question. Well, I’ve taught mostly English 101 with some developmental writing throughout my career, and I’m committed to the 101 especially as a critical course for acclimating students to college. Among the many things that English 101 can do, it does get students ready to do the heavy lifting that college courses require. And I’ve also been truly aware, of course, from talking to colleagues over the years and working in writing centers where faculty outside of the English area would come in and talk about their students, asking, “What’s going on with English 101? Why can’t students write?” So, I was intrigued by the transfer curriculum in the ways it would allow me to explicitly teach knowledge sets and skills that would transfer directly to writing in other contexts. So, it seemed like a natural thing to do.

I also thought that my own teaching of 101 was a little stale and I needed to try something different. And the TFT curriculum was so interesting and challenging. But also, it was very coherent and very organized, very cogent. You know, English 101 has always been a kind of wonderfully open experience to teach but, I always felt it needed to have a sense of sequencing assignments, that the logic of the course needed to be clear to students as well as to myself, and the TFT provided that kind of logic and coherence. I was just thinking about this the other day and how there was a struggle early on implementing TFT at the community college, but I’ve gotten really comfortable with it. I think the course is more coherent than it ever has been for me, and hopefully for my students. I think it has been.

Anna: That culminating assignment in the TFT curriculum asks students to develop their own theory of writing, and I’m really curious to know more about what those texts look like and how they help deepen student understanding beyond that kind of traditional end-of-course reflection that a lot of us might include.

Howard: Well, it’s funny you should ask that right now because my students are about to produce their drafts on that assignment on Monday and Tuesday. And to be perfectly frank, after a semester of talking about the so-called “theory of writing” many are still unclear about what I’m referring to. They need concrete examples of what a theory looks like, and so indeed I have put together something to show my students. I provide a sample of a full-blown theory of writing that a student—actually a couple of students—have done in the past. But it’s such an odd request to make of students, especially those who are very young and who may not be quite used to that kind of abstract move to theorize about writing. And so often students, inexperienced writers and younger writers, are working at the level of sentence, and you really have to stand back and offer structure.

I like the last assignment because it does ask students to reflect and look back at all the writing they’ve done. And the writing that they have done has been carefully sequenced so they’ve been writing and thinking about this so-called theory of writing for some time and have been using many of the key terms of the course, trying to apply them, trying to understand them. So now they need to demonstrate that they can use all these terms and draw upon the readings so they can explain how writers work. But it is a challenge. There’s no doubt about that, at the community college especially. There’s a piece that we wrote for TETYC (Teaching English in the Two-Year College) that we wrote that kind of spells out some of those challenges.

Anna: That takes me into my next question, which was about that piece that you wrote with Sonja Andrus and Sharon Mitchler. In that piece, you were talking about adapting the TFT curriculum to the two-year college, and to different two-year college settings. And I was wondering if you could talk about the value of testing those emerging or trending pedagogical approaches in a range of two-year college settings.

Howard: That’s absolutely essential. The TFT curriculum while really interesting (and of course, I turned to it willingly) needed some serious adaptation, if only for pacing or even the amount of pages or words required for particular pieces of writing. That one size didn’t fit all and so, speaking only for myself, there was a little frustration trying to take that singular approach and applying it to a very different kind of institution.

So, we thought it worthwhile to a) acknowledge that fact and b) encourage community college faculty to take up the TFT curriculum but to be open to being flexible. Of course, it goes without saying that community college faculty have got to be flexible. It’s the nature of the teaching we do. But throughout my career I have tried to promote the idea of the teacher-scholar-researcher at the community college, and so I think whatever encouragement we can give to community college or 2-year college faculty to be current on these kinds of trends, read into them, study them, and then try to adapt them to the community college setting is a good thing. And not only that, but to then research the impact within their own classrooms and do some scholarship of teaching, do some reflective work, on their own teaching. So, it’s all sort of bundled up with my own career concerns to encourage more research at the community college level.

Anna: You’ve also done a lot of work on teaching reading in the writing classroom. And you wrote that piece recently for Teacher, Scholar, Activist where you said: “We have a moral and civic obligation to teach reading in our classrooms.” So, I was wondering if you could a little bit about why direct reading instruction in the writing classroom is especially important at this historical moment? And also a little bit about how that focus on reading intersects with a TFT approach?

Howard: Oh, good question. Well, I think I’m not alone in feeling after 2016 that we literacy instructors at the college level need to make reading one of our teaching subjects. And when I say reading, I mean deep reading—reading that goes beneath, more than skimming, that promotes healthy skepticism, obviously that has students regard reading rhetorically, [thinking about] the ethos of the writer and so forth. My first reaction after the election in 2016 was that I had somehow failed my students and again, I wasn’t alone. I’ve read enough accounts of teachers in the years since to know that feeling is shared by many of us. I’ve always assigned reading but the relationship between reading and my teaching of writing was never clearly spelled out. I guess I had students read for content—something from which they could be inspired to write their own pieces, or maybe they were reading exemplars of genres and then they could try to write in that particular genre.

But this semester is actually the first time in my four decades of teaching I have literally spent time in class having students read and read aloud in many cases and read with close attention, to underline key passages that draw them in or that confuse them, to annotate them, and we share the annotations. This came out of a workshop that I was involved in [in 2019] through MLA, the Teaching Institute on Reading and Writing at Access-Oriented Institutions and it got me thinking about some strategies—in fact, I learned in the summer certain strategies for how to teach this kind of deep reading in class. It’s been a really interesting experience, and I intend to write about it actually over the break, looking at how my students have annotated certain texts. And you know think about my pedagogy, my reading pedagogy specifically.

As far as transfer is concerned, Pat Sullivan and I have corresponded about this and, you know, he feels, and I agree with him, that the TFT model hasn’t adequately taken into account the activity of reading as a key element of transfer and as a threshold concept. That is, deep reading specifically and being able to ask the right questions, to be able to read for inference and irony. So, if our students are really going to be transferring useful knowledge from 101, surely among those tools should be the ability to read deeply. And so, I see the connection—I didn’t early on. And I must say, I’ve been involved with this TFT curriculum group for about three or four years, and a few of us from the two-year college were brought in for the precise point of providing diversity of institutions and we talk a lot about our own students, and they are very different from the students at four-year, R1 institutions. But one thing that’s become clear to those of us who teach at two-year colleges that are part of this transfer group is that more attention needs to be paid to how our students read various texts in the class. Maybe it was assumed at the R1 university level that students could be thoughtful and critical readers, but we can’t assume that the community college. So, more attention to teaching reading as part of transfer curriculum is really important. I think that’s one of the contributions we two-year college people have made to the project.

Anna: I just remember teaching at an R1 institution when I was in grad school and how easy it was to take for granted that my students had the same kind of literacy practices that I did because they came from roughly the same background. And then you get in that much more diverse classroom and that explodes, and you realize, of course you can’t make that assumption and it changes everything.

Howard: It sure does. And you have to be careful as to what reading you’re going to assign. Sometimes the subject matter will trigger certain things in our students. I think Sharon Mitchler writes in our piece, about how in one of the readings in the transfer curriculum there was a kind of comical, farcical representation of an older student as a joker, you know being kind of funny and not as polished as they should be. And Sharon’s students objected to the way the student was represented, and they saw something of themselves in the student—someone trying to fit in and figure out how the academic world works. And I appreciated Sharon pointing that out because that is a good, clear, concrete example of the need to consider what we assign to our students, generally speaking at whatever institutions, but especially at the community college where students tend to be tentative readers and tend to lack confidence in their academic skills. The last thing we want to do is undermine that confidence even further with some of the readings, some of the images, that we might use.

Anna: That takes us right into my next question, which is about what Hassel and Giordano refer to as “the teaching majority.” The fact that nearly half of tenured and tenure-track English instructors are at two-year colleges and that the majority of people teaching composition classes are doing so off the tenure track and this growing number of students that are taking their composition classes at two-year colleges. Your work has done so much to bring writing at the two-year college to the forefront but I’m wondering what else you think could or should be done to center that work in the field.

Howard: Well, it has been a long slog, I must admit. Others have written about this and as the late John Lovas eloquently put it in his CCCC chair’s address, too often our work is not cited even though we teach so many of the students in our English 101 or basic writing courses nationally. But I have to admit I’m impressed with the number of two-year college and community college teacher-scholars that have emerged from the field. Many of the battles no longer have to be fought. TYCA is a strong organization. TYCA has its own national conference now, right before Cs. The journal, TETYC, has never been stronger. There have been some really eloquent teacher-scholars and teacher-activists from the community college like Pat [Sullivan] and others who have been published in Cs and other journals that are important to the discipline.

But, as you know, at the community college we’re fighting our own separate battles to maintain full-time lines and to support adjunct faculty who obviously don’t have the sort of professional development funding they need. So, I think the struggles go beyond the discipline or finding a voice in the discipline to making certain that the community college remains a solid academic institution and not simply providing evidence of performance measures. It’s an ongoing concern, for sure.

Anna: I’m wondering what advice you have to offer to new two-year college faculty, both as they transition into the distinctive context of the two-institution and as they look for ways to make the work of the two-year college more visible.

Howard: Well, many things have to happen. One of the things I discovered early on was how truly important it was to be open and flexible about the teaching. To change, to adjust… it goes to what [Sonja and Sharon and I] were talking about in the [TETYC] article on transfer. To make adjustments that are necessary, to acknowledge mistakes. And I think I learned that early on. An assignment didn’t work? You know, own it. Even own it to our students. Share some of our own writing and our own projects with our students to show them—I wouldn’t call it failure necessarily, but that sometimes it takes time to understand how to make our meaning clear, to understand our purposes. So, I think that was the biggest lesson I had, which was to really be flexible and to own and learn from any mishaps. And our students are very forgiving of errors as long as we acknowledge them and try to be as human as possible about them.

As far as larger trends and the career trajectories of people thinking about entering the community college, I think we have to be honest about the demands—the teaching demands, obviously. For a good chunk of my career, I was directing a writing lab, did a lot of tutoring, did a good deal of teaching but not a full-time 5 course teaching load. But for the last several years I’ve been doing a full-time 5 course teaching load and there’s no doubt about it—it does take a lot of your energy and time.

I think what’s really important though is to carve out some time for the kind of reading that needs to happen in the field and also writing for presentations. And, you know, be connected to organizations, regional or national. That’s really important, and part of the identity-making of community college teachers. We have a local identity, clearly, within our own departments and divisions and we have a role to play. But I think we need to identify ourselves professionally within some set of organizations. I don’t mean national, necessarily, but regional TYCA, regional MLA. We need to define ourselves that way too. Not only locally, but also in terms of larger national or regional settings. It is too tempting to kind of hunker down and worry only about your own little garden, your own little classroom, without maintaining connections with others. You know, in the old days, even before email, you really had to go to conferences and schmooze in that way, and obviously read what other people had written and maybe write stuff on your own. It’s a lot easier now to connect with others now through social media and that’s cool.

Anna: Thank you for that. That’s super helpful!

Howard: It’s been wonderful to chat with you.

Works Cited

Andrus, Sonja, et al. Teaching Writing for Transfer: A Practical Guide for Teachers. Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 47, no. 1, 2019, pp. 76-89.

Hassel, Holly, and Joanne Baird Giordano. Occupy Writing Studies: Rethinking College Composition for the Needs of the Teaching Majority. College Composition and Communication, vol. 65, no. 1, 2013, pp. 117-139.

Lovas, John C. All Good Writing Develops at the Edge of Risk. College Composition and Communication, vol. 54., no. 2, 2002, pp. 264-288.

Tinberg, Howard. The Activist-Reader, or Teaching (Deep) Reading as a Moral and Civic Imperative. Teacher-Scholar-Activist, 22 Oct. 2019, https://teacher-scholar-activist.org/2019/10/22/the-activist-reader-or-teaching-deep-reading-as-a-moral-and-civic-imperative/.