College Forum

Function: Identifying and addressing issues of broad concern to NCTE members in higher education; developing position statements and other publications helpful to teachers, administrators, and policymakers in higher education; maintaining a presence in the American Council of Learned Societies and similar organizations securing grants for special initiatives; and exploring ways to increase memberships by engaging other college groups in collaborative projects.

What major actions or projects have been completed by your group since July 1, 2005?

• Recommendations to Squire Policy Office apropos the TEACH Act
• Three assessment recommendations to NCTE EC at Presidential Team request:

RECOMMENDATION 1: NCTE should collect and make readily available the assessment policy recommendations and materials in our collections.

RECOMMENDATION 2: More importantly NCTE should generate a Call for Exemplary Assessment Practices that will be accumulated and vetted on the NCTE site. We imagined these to be available as:
1. Short summary descriptions.
2. More elaborate descriptions of policy, process, and rationale (theory).
3. Even more elaborate descriptions with artifacts.
4. Video PSAs that speak to our publics about each of these Exemplary Assessment Practices, to be featured on the web site, on PBS channels, and in presentations. All this, of course, should be searchable.

RECOMMENDATION 3: Consider additional venues for assessment events (at all levels and in each unique college environment). They might include:

• yearly workshops sited at strong assessment institutions (this type of workshop was proposed to the College Forum by the College Section, written by Brian Huot several years ago. He can provide that description to the EC. <)">>)
• special advertised, invited conference panels, workshops, or day-long events at NCTE, CCCC, TYCA Regionals, CEE
• research monographs (published by NCTE) that come out of these events or out of a study of the collection of Exemplary Assessment Practices database mentioned above.

• Recommendation to NCTE EC for Issue Management Study
  21st Century roles for Teachers and Students:  Preparing for new economic and civic competencies.

To meet the emerging roles of teachers and students for civic and economic responsibilities in the 21st century, we need to clarify the nature of teacher preparation in higher education, in K-12 schooling, and through professional organizations to prepare and sustain teaching at all levels.
The dramatic changes in the educational environment—what a classroom means today that it did not mean before, who is in the classroom, how globalization is affecting learning (including distance learning),

how information is processed, how literacy is changing, the new demands of workplace literacy (including SCANS, 21st Century ITC skills), what it means to “read” a “text,” how national and state policies influence classroom practices, the reconfiguring of authority in the classroom and education in general—all have implications for preparing teachers/faculty for the 21st century, preK-university.  We hope this study group will extend the work of the earlier study groups to broaden the issues and embrace the newest factors that ultimately affect teaching at all levels. 

• Recommendation to NCTE EC concerning research
  Last year the Forum applauded the establishment of the Squire Research Office and particularly the appointment of Anne Gere to head that office.  Once again, our discussions surfaced the need for NCTE to continue to develop its reputation as the source for the important research in English Language Arts education.  Specifically, we saw the need to make research across NCTE more intentional:
  • We need to encourage and coordinate some research efforts across educational contexts in our field (high school to college, two-year college to four-year college, English departments to teacher education, teacher education to K-12 schools, high school to workplace).
  • We should use current position statements as potential occasions for specific research.  (i.e., In the case of the workload statements, we could sponsor research studies intended to provide evidence for guidelines.)
  • We should encourage or sponsor meta-studies that support the political and policy issues that we need to frame, especially when such studies may otherwise not be attractive to researchers.
  • We need to encourage the publication/distribution of strategic or policy-based research, particularly when such studies may receive low priority from journal editorial policies.  One suggestion for dissemination was to consider using the Council Chronicle or book publication series.

We briefly explored specific studies that might be beneficial.  For example, in order for NCTE to develop policies about the articulation between K-12 and college writing, we might ask for and sponsor research around this question:  “What kinds of writing tasks are actually assigned in college, and what implications do these patterns have for assessment and teaching at various levels?”

• Endorsed the 1940 AAUP statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

What projects, initiatives, or studies are “in progress” at this time?

• • Monitoring the meetings and reports of the Department of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education with the intent of producing a response/reaction to the Commission Report.
• Monitoring the findings of the “Study of Teacher Preparation Programs” of the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science to determine the impact on teacher preparation programs.
• CCCC has commissioned a study on high school and college writing experiences in part, as a response to one of our own recommendations on research (above).
• Maintain presence and activity with the American Council of Learned Societies.

Strategic Governance: Over the past two years, the NCTE Executive Committee has established outcomes and priorities relating to these key topics in our field: Teacher Quality, Adolescent Literacy, Assessment, Writing, Multimodal Literacy and Technology, Research and Teaching, and English Language Learners. Currently, they are investigating the broad topic of professional development for literacy educators.

Does your group have research findings or suggestions to contribute that are relevant to on-going work on these strategic governance topics?

Teacher Quality.  The following are identified as challenges in maintaining and developing teacher quality at all levels:

• With the unbundling of faculty roles, institutions, departments, and faculty are challenged with meeting the needs of students and the public in creating knowledge, teaching knowledge, and serving the community.
• With the growing use of adjunct faculty, whether part-time or full-time, institutional and departmental programs lose the cohesion and centrality of mission achieved when all faculty are part of the same institutional community.
• With the growth of alternative courses (online, interactive television, web courses, college in high school) and alternative institutions (for-profit, limited mission), and the lack of a consistent system to ensure quality, teacher quality may be compromised.
• At the same time that we are in need of highly qualified teachers in the Pre-12 school system, the teacher preparation programs are being challenged, and questioned by authorities.  Alternative processes for teacher certification are growing, and we have limited data on the success of those programs.

Adolescent Literacy.  While the NCTE EC motions on Adolescent Literacy are timely, necessary, and proving to help move the Council in appropriate directions, the general problem of literacy for college students also needs to be addressed.  Not only are students arriving from high school with limited literacy skills in reading and writing for college work, students are arriving from multiple adult ages with limited literacy skills for college work.

Assessment.  When the College Forum responded to the assessment issue last year, we reported that the DOE’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education would likely recommend assessments for college students.  While their report is not finished, that possibility appears even more likely.  We continue to recommend our 2005 recommendations on assessment.

Deborah Appleman, Chair