English
2022-2023 Program Review

Our unit is made up of five distinct and overlapping programs. We provide students with access to in-person, online, and hybrid instruction in creative writing, literature, education, reading, and writing courses. These courses provide students with unique and meaningful ways to develop the skills that will help them meet their education and personal goals. We continue to innovate to develop courses that respond to legislation and, most importantly, students’ needs. Since 2019, all students entering English enroll in transfer-level writing, with or without corequisite support. We serve students at ARC’s main campus, the Natomas Educational Center, the McLellan Center, and via distance education through our expanding and high-quality online courses.

The ENGWR program, the largest in the unit, makes up two of the so-called “golden four” courses for transfer and graduation: composition and critical thinking. Our transfer-level composition courses help students meet graduation, certificate, AA/AS, and transfer requirements; the writing, reading, and critical thinking skills developed and refined in those courses also enable students to achieve their academic and career goals. 

Our second largest program, literature, offers courses that help students develop and refine many of those same skills with an additional focus on historical, cultural, and psychological analysis from a literary perspective. Students use these courses to meet General Education transfer and graduation requirements in Humanities as well as for personal enrichment and the development of cross-cultural and interpersonal empathy. 

The courses that make up our creative writing program offer students the opportunity to hone their writing for publication and for self-expression, often including members of the community or direct outreach to the community in the form of readings and publishing. As with the composition and literature courses, they help fulfill graduation and transfer requirements. 

Our support programs, Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Reading Across Disciplines (RAD), play an important role in providing students with additional one-on-one and small-group instruction in reading and writing along with study skills. Although WAC and RAD have played an integral part of our ENGWR 300 corequisite support, they also serve the broader college campus by providing services to students from all disciplines from technical education, general education, and developmental education. 

In addition to offering unique and needs-based support in RAD, our reading courses help students develop reading and creative thinking skills while also satisfying graduation and transfer requirements. 

Finally, our ENGED program offers students with the specific goal of becoming K-12 educators classes and focused tools used to teach reading and writing and includes field experience opportunities.

Over the last several years, all the programs in the English unit, from writing to education, have done extensive work to become race-conscious and develop culturally responsive and culturally relevant practices and pedagogies. We have participated in and developed equity research and training focused on assessments, course material, and positive faculty, staff, and student dynamics. While our unit still has work to be done, since equity is a process not a product, we continue to create and revise courses and programs where students can see themselves, understand the lives of others, and develop the skills to reach their personal, academic, and career goals.

Several of the unit’s goals were achieved or in progress, but many have been replaced with more relevant ones to meet the needs of our current students, in particular the need for equity and accessibility in an increased online setting. 

The department needs to continue to work on instructor variability in grading and success rates. In many ENGWR 300/94 and ENGWR 300 courses, faculty adopted the use of more transparent assignment rubrics for assessment and labor-based grading contracts. During the rollout of the corequisite combo, regular Community of Practice sessions helped faculty collaborate on ideas about diverse and challenging readings, scaffolding assignments as well as feedback and evaluation.

Strengths: 

• English worked to apply an equity lens to several department processes. In committees like  the newly formed Integrated Reading and Writing Committee, faculty carefully revised curriculum to ensure the core ENGWR courses focus on equity for students, from the SLOs,  course content, sample assignments and textbooks used. These courses make up the majority of the classes our students take and the majority of the Department’s FTE.
• Faculty created four new courses that focus on the literature by and the experiences of People of Color: ENGLT 330: African-American Literature; ENGLT 334: Asian American Literature; ENGLT 335: Latino, Mexican-American, and Chicano Literature; and ENGLT 480: Honors African-American Literature.
• A team of English faculty earned an OER Departmental Award in Spring 2022 to create materials and a Canvas shell of collaboratively created OER-repository and material for our ENGWR 300 course. They shared their process and resources, geared around ensuring Zero Text Costs for students in one of their core required courses. Several faculty, including adjunct and part-time faculty, continue to use individual awards to research, curate, and create OER for their courses, with the full sequence now represented.
• Four classrooms, designated for the corequisite combo, were designed with an open concept and furnished with desks that include a hidden monitor lift to help facilitate small group and individual computer work. White boards surround the room to provide agency for student use, and desks were clustered to improve a collaborative and active style of teaching and learning. 
• As a result of the shift to online teaching, many creative writing and literature courses filled at higher rates than when previously offered on ground. The increased demand allowed the department to add several sections each semester. It also made the courses more accessible to working students and students with caregiving responsibilities.
• Creative Writing faculty collectively revised the full sequence of ENGCW curriculum to emphasize culturally relevant practices for the workshops, prompts, and the textbooks assigned.
• In a commitment to offering students a clear path toward completing the program, we revised the English AA-T to create a transparent process so students no longer needed to have course substitutions approved, revised the Literary Publishing Cert to remove a capstone that had no longer been offered, replacing it with courses students regularly take, deleted the English Education AA-T, which no students had completed, to be replaced by a local AA to better serve students, and are revising the INDIS English Communication and Literature local AA to better cohere with the program’s courses.
• The coreq combo developed in response to AB705 and the active classroom designed to create innovative learning spaces originally met the needs of our students. Based on data in Research Report 2427, prior to COVID shutdowns, students without HS GPA data succeeded at higher rates in the ENGWR 300/94 combo than they did in stand-alone 300 courses. Students in the combo courses had roughly a 5% higher likelihood of success, DI students included, when enrolling in the courses with coreq support. Students in the 2.0-2.5 GPA bandwidth were 10-15% more likely to succeed. The number of students with GPAs lower than 2.0 enrolled in stand-alone 300 did not meet a comparative threshold. The coreq support seemed to be helping the students it was designed to help. 
• Our overall response to the challenge of AB705 seems to be helping the students, too. Based on the Transfer-Level Gateway Completion Dashboard, the throughput rates for transfer-level writing rose from 48% to 70%, and while DI rates still persist, the throughput for Black and African American students rose from 31% to 63%; for Latinx students it rose from 42% to 64%. While the DI gap remained at the same rate for Latinx students, the overall success rose 22 points. The DI gap for Black and African American students not only closed (from 17 to 6 points), the overall success rose by 32 points. The CCCCO data does not disaggregate for Native American or API students. 
• The majority of English faculty have time and again shown their willingness to adapt and learn, working to revise course content and material in response to evolving legislation and deeper understanding of students’ needs.

Challenges: 

• Since the COVID pandemic, English enrollments steadily declined, resulting in canceled or low-enrolled sections. While on-ground sections were offered, students continue to prefer asynchronous courses. 
• Enrollment obstacles and loopholes have resulted in students not enrolling in the full set of corequisite courses for our ENGWR 94/300 combo, namely the WAC and RAD components. We now have a clear picture, using Research Report 2435, of the extent of the enrollment, success, mastery, and drop differences for students who enrolled in all four courses versus the various combinations of two or three of the courses, which helped shape a redesign of coreq support. We intend to roll out this revised coreq combo in Fall 2023.
• The data showed that students who enrolled in all four courses had an average success rate of 69% and a drop rate of 10%. In contrast, students enrolled in one support class and the combo had a success rate of 31-35% and a drop rate of 38-42%. Students enrolled in just the two-course combo had a success rate of 23% and a drop rate of 54%. 
• This data suggests that the wrap-around support of the four-combo course package is working, but it also shows that one-third of the students placed in the course are not receiving, for a variety of reasons, that support. This could be due students who do not pass the 300/94 course but do pass one or both of the support courses cannot repeat the course; it could be due to variability in how instructors assess students not enrolled in the support courses; it could be due to the privilege of time and resources had by the students who enroll in the two extra courses. 
• Regardless, without the kind of enrollment software needed to easily register in the four combo courses and with laws affecting the repeatability of the support classes, significant enrollment loopholes created very distinct experiences for our students, with deep effects in terms of whether students passed or dropped a course rooted to completing so many of their goals.
• In Fall ‘23, students whose placement indicates that their likelihood for succeeding in their writing courses would increase with extra support will enroll in ENGWR 300 and ENGWR 94, the two-course combo. The additional writing and reading support that contributed to student success will be embedded into the courses.
• The number of students earning an English AA-T and the INDIS English Communication and Literature degrees remains a discussion item. We have struggled to resolve the housing of the INDIS degree but have worked with our HomeBase to communicate with students about the nature of the two degrees and clarify which will likely help them reach their academic and career goals. However, faculty have not come to a consensus about the best path forward. 
• Perhaps most concerning is the recent decline in number of completions for the AA-T, where the average number for several years cut in half for 2021-2022, from around 20 to 11. Prior to this most recent year, the completion rate had been increasing. In terms of the percentage of the AA-Ts awarded across ARC, the English AA-T has gone from representing an average of 5% of the total awarded to 3% of the total number of AA-Ts awarded by ARC.
• The local AA completion rate went from 11 to 2. In terms of the percentage of the AAs awarded across ARC, the English Language and Communications degree has gone from representing an average of 2% of the total awarded to 0% of the total number of AAs awarded by ARC.

Equity gaps: 

• Our ENGWR 300 courses, which serve the highest number of students in our program, have high equity gaps. The average success rate for all students is 63%. For Black and African American students, the average is 52%; for Latinx students, 58%; for multiracial students, 59%, and for Pacific Islander students, 51%. This general pattern, with similar point differences, exists for ENGWR 301, 302, 303, and the corequisite combo, 300/94. While Native American students had higher than average success rates in ENGWR 300 and the 300/94 Combo, for all other composition courses, their success rates are nearing the DI threshold or are underrepresented, suggesting the need to improve how our courses help these students persist from first-semester to second-semester composition courses.
• When examining the intersection of race and gender, our ENGWR 300 courses are under-serving men of color by roughly 3-5 percentage points. However, our second-semester composition courses invert this dynamic, where women of color are typically under-served in comparison to men of color. 
• Our LT courses show equity gaps for Latinx, multiracial, and Black and African American students. For each course where no DI is present for mulitracial and Black and African American students, there is an equal number of courses where DI is present. Equity gaps for our Latinx students' success is present in one-third of our LT courses, a notable improvement since our last Program Review, but one showing work still to be done. The data for the success of Native American and Pacific Islander students in these courses did not meet a level of certainty to be included.
• Our CW classes show equity gaps for multiracial students. It appears as if faculty teaching some CW courses have reduced the disproportionate impact that had affected Latinx and Black and African American students’ success in prior years; however, too little data exist for many of these courses. The data for the success of Native American and Pacific Islander students in these courses did not meet a level of certainty to be included.
• While some data on the benefits of concurrent enrollment in RAD and WAC and ENGWR 300/94 shows a boost to course success as compared with those not enrolled in our support programs, disproportionate impact still exists in our WAC and RAD course. Our support program coordinators are working to address this through more equity-minded program policies and practices in addition to an examination of whether it is beneficial to include required enrollment in RAD and WAC as part of the ENGWR 300/94 corequisite course package. We have been exploring the idea of instead delivering our support services within the ENGWR 300/94 course without additional program enrollment. We are also interested in collaborating with our Learning Community coordinators to continue discussions on how to improve support for our DI students. 

Influencing factors: 

• In each AUP submitted, we have sought to build and sustain communities of practice to reduce instructor variability in terms of assessment and curriculum. Buy-in without incentives have limited our ability to do so. Workload creep has affected our ability to develop this, too. Between our teaching assignments, committee memberships, college service, coordinator positions, department and Area service, and our individualized self-guided learning, little time remains to give to these shared investments. For our adjunct and part-time colleagues, attending in-person community of practice sessions often poses scheduling conflicts and unpaid labor. 
• The unit might consider shifting committee membership to community of practice membership and restructuring the long-lasting structure of each program. Developing a shared sense of our courses might ameliorate the impact of instructor variability, both in terms of success, mastery, and drop rates and in terms of DI.
• There has been discussion, too, of the  Dean preconditioning teaching assignments on participation in communities of practice, particularly for the corequisite combo course. However, without some compromise in terms of lowering of student caps across all classes, this is far too extensive of a burden to add to individual instructors and to current department and committee chairs and co-chairs. This, by definition, seems to epitomize workload creep.
• This preconditioning of participation in a community of practice seems to go against the spirit if not the letter of both the contract and the best practices for these kinds of communities. 
• Preconditioning participation also unfairly burdens adjunct and part-time instructors by essentially forcing them into further unpaid labor.
• Since our last program review, our unit has not seen a single year that resembles the prior year, which has made gathering consistent data and developing our courses incredibly difficult. When examining the success rates for ENGWR 300 and the ENGWR 300/94 combo, the first year and a half of offering the coreq support course seemed to improve the success rates for students. As mentioned above in reference to RR2427, students without high school GPA data and students with HS GPAs between 2.0-2.5 succeeded at a greater rate in the combo than they did in stand-alone 300. Those improvements disappeared as campus shutdowns came into effect. But those declines might also be influenced by fewer students enrolling with unknown GPAs (down from over 900 to around 250 for the combo and over 1000 to around 550 for stand-alone 300). The decline could be due to the difficulty of transitioning instruction and support online. It could also be due to inconsistent offerings of in-person instruction. It could be due to instructor variability in terms of practices, assessments, and preparation to deliver online writing instruction. It could be due to the generalized fatigue that most parts of society experienced over the last several years. There are severe limitations to our ability to account for and control all factors that affect our students' success and collective efforts made by instructors.
• It might not be possible to research the impact of success as related to OER material, at least for a few years out, as the number of instructors using them has not reached the level of the threshold needed for data to be significant.
• Instructor variability in grading and practices seems to be, perhaps, the largest influencing factor.

Data limitations: 

• The pandemic added to the challenge of analyzing the data from the last three years as the courses shifted from fully in-person to fully online and back again, partially. English faculty’s training and experience in Distance Education makes students’ experiences in those classes vary widely.
• The data for many of our non-ENGWR courses are anonymized since only one or two instructors teach those courses, so the more specific number ranges for DI present in the generalized support cannot be given. We honor our colleagues' decisions to share–or not share–this data across the college and department, but hope establishing communities of practice for all our programs might reduce instructor variability in terms of assessment and culturally responsive teaching.
• At this time, we do not have data specific to the success, mastery, and drop rates for the Southeast Asian students and the distinct ethnic populations that designator groups. We hope, as the college begins to disaggregate for this student population, that we can more completely account for how our classes support these students’ goals and success. 
• While CCCCO data shows that the throughput for ENGWR 300 improved dramatically on a year-by-year basis, the data sets provided by the college for 2021-2022 are the first sets of DI report data not affected by the support courses and composition sequence that existed prior to AB705. This is due to these reports accumulating three years of data. The legislative effects on our courses are somewhat clear, except that all these data sets include teaching through and supporting students while we all responded to a global pandemic. Notably, most of the success rates in the classes across our program stayed roughly the same or improved. We are hoping that at some point there will be enough stability (without legislative and global pandemic disruptions) to create data benchmarks, so that we can have a more accurate measure of how we are reaching our students and helping them reach their goals. 
• Only one section of each ENGED course is taught each semester, and this is done by the same instructor each time. Because of this and because few students of color take the courses, there is very limited data, and patterns in disproportionate impacts are difficult to accurately identify.

Area for further research: 

• Are there distinct causes for gaps in success, mastery, and drop rates for DI groups in courses across the unit? 
• Continue to reflect on DI Project Reports and and seek data for each program, with buy-in for developing research requests.
• The data that has played a part in the revision of the support needed in 300/94 suggests the unit needs to use creative thinking to describe enrollment and success patterns that may not be apparent from the outside.

Our biggest discovery came when analyzing the success, mastery and drop rates for the four-course ENGWR 300/94 combo, which OIR completed for us at the beginning of the Spring 23 semester, in RR 2435. We now have a clear picture of the extent of the enrollment, success, mastery, and drop differences for students who enrolled in all four courses versus the various combinations of two or three of the courses, which helped shape our redesign of the coreq support.

We are currently working to embed the support in a more holistic way. This revision removes the enrollment obstacle and closes the enrollment loophole. The revision of the four-class combo to a two-class combo might also remove any inadvertent privilege given to students who could afford both the extra classes and time that the previous model allowed.

Finally, creating communities of practice across the unit for each program seems needed.

Embodying a commitment to reflect and assess, English, as a unit, will continue to revise and innovate.

To serve as many students well as possible, we hope to develop our commitment to multilingual students, related both to the content in our courses and to the assessment of student writing, and establish a bridge between ESL courses and both the ENGWR 300 and the second-semester composition courses.

We also hope to address the variability in students’ experiences in online courses by

• increasing the use of OER materials,
• sharing the OER materials many of us have already developed, and
• publishing course material in Canvas Commons to make access more available, especially to part-time/adjunct instructors and new instructors.

Another variability we hope to address is the reduction in instructor variability in terms of grading and success rates. Regular norming sessions would likely ensure more equitable grading and assessment practices. 

We will advocate for the lowering of caps for our ENGWR courses in order to develop communities of practice and provide the support students need at all levels of their writing instruction.

We are dedicating ourselves to making our courses increasingly appealing by developing cultural relevance in practice and in technology and delivery.

• The American River Review has recently moved to digitize its annual journal of student writing and has recently been awarded a grant to develop a podcasting presence.
• We will integrate Online Writing Instruction more completely into our ENGWR courses.
• We will integrate course materials into Canvas to create authentic web experiences rather than simply as a file-sharing and video-housing service.

We will take a more active role in promoting and recruiting English majors in an effort to increase the completion of the English AA-T. Steps toward that goal will include

• creating a welcoming space for English students and majors and continuing to work with Language & People HomeBase to advertise information/advising sessions and social events,
• tracking transfer rates for English degrees and using data from OIR to investigate and address why students choose but don’t complete an English degree, and
• revising the INDIS English Communication and Literature to house it in English, updating the courses and outcomes represented in it. 

We will need to understand how a revision or possible deletion affects how students move through the program and how the local AA supports their needs.

We will participate and lead district-wide conversations regarding the aligning of shared courses.

In an effort to increase faculty diversity and better reflect our student population, we will request new hires. 

As our department widens its focus from primarily a Western canon or Eurocentric course requirements to make space for more diverse voices and histories, we might also begin a conversation with our sister colleges about what we call our departments in an effort to better represent the content of our programs.

Perhaps most important, we will work to create and maintain communities of practice for all of our programs to reduce siloed instruction and to reduce the variability referenced above. We hope to normalize and grow our work with

• norming assignments, texts, and assessments,
• sharing in the curriculum revision and development process, and
• creating and taking part in PD with an equity focus and to decenter whiteness in the instruction of writing, reading, literature, education, and creative writing.

The most obvious answer to this question is our current revision to the ENGWR 94/300 corequisite courses where we reduce unit load (from 6 to 5) and embed reading and writing support to close enrollment and support loopholes. These courses account for nearly a quarter of the students who take an English class (ENGCW, ENGED, ENGLT, ENGRD, or ENGWR) and typically serve students who have historically been underserved. If we can make the success, mastery, and drop rates of the two-course ENGWR 94/300 combo match the success, mastery, and drop rates of the four-course combo (when students enrolled in all four courses), our unit’s effectiveness will dramatically improve. More importantly, roughly one-third of our students will be closer to achieving their personal, academic, and career goals. In mathematical terms, this revision should immediately account for nearly 300 more students per academic year successfully completing their composition requirement. 

Still, the success we need to measure is how much we close the DI gaps for Latinx, Native American, and Black and African American students in these courses, too. We are currently working with administration to lower the cap sizes of these classes, preferably to 20 students. This lowering of class size and embedding of support has a strong relationship to self-reported factors that lead to student success. 

In the DI Project reports, Latinx, Native American, API, and Black and African American students ranked “Positive interaction with a professor at ARC” as the number one factor that encouraged them. Those same students also ranked clear explanations for success as the top ranking factor, while Latinx, API, and Black and African American students ranked regular feedback as the second highest factor that likely contributed to their success. According to the position statement “Why Class Size Matters Today” by the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE), smaller classes helps student groups experiencing DI: 

For minority and at-risk students as well as those who struggle with English literacy, smaller classes enhance academic performance. Class size also shapes the quality of writing instruction at all levels, including college, because smaller classes are essential for students to get sufficient feedback on multiple drafts. Not surprisingly, smaller writing classes increase retention at the college level (Blatchford et al., 2002; Horning, 2007).

Along with the NCTE, the Association of Departments of English (ADE) recommends class sizes of 15-20 students for writing classes.This number allows instructors to reach the needs of the diverse set of learners, regardless of modality.

Having 20 students in a 5-unit program makes case management support feasible for instructors and support, but, perhaps most importantly, it allows for more regular, positive interactions with instructors, clearer and more personalized explanations of course expectations, and the type and frequency of feedback that can likely lead to greater success. 

Finally, we need for our administration to continue to support WAC and RAD as productivity and enrollment changes as a result of redirecting resources to the embedded corequisite model.

By closing the DI gaps described above and by striving to build more equitable assessment practices along with culturally responsive and relevant courses across the five programs that make up our unit, English will more completely and evenly meet the needs of our students, providing resources students need in order to achieve their personal, academic, and career goals, a deep measure of social justice and equity.