Mission Statement

The Butte College English Department focuses on teaching critical reading, thinking, analysis, and writing to better prepare our students for success in college, work, and life.

Program Description

The English Department�s primary focus is teaching transfer-level composition and preparing the "now student" to successfully employ current literacy practices, especially digital literacies, in the remainder of their academic pathway and as they continue into their profession.  

We strongly believe that the move to comply with AB705 by offering all students transfer-level English, including transfer-level English with additional support (English 3) will improve our English completion rates overall, and we're trying to make changes to our pedagogy that will better ensure their success, especially by focusing more on student metacognition of their own and other possible literacy practices, including academic literacies  they will encounter in college, and empowering them to successfully appropriate these practices and see the transferability in the literacy practices that may feel more comfortable and natural to them.  We are also placing more emphasis on the value and success of individual conferencing with the instructor for students who might need a extra help to feel comfortable with academic literacy practices, and as such, we need to ensure student access to faculty outside of class.

We're also focusing more attention on supporting digital literacy-learning in all of our reading and composition courses, but in order to do this effectively, we need access to computers to be used as reading, annotating, critical thinking/responding, researching, and writing tools in class every day.  The idea is that the old technologies of pen, paper, and textbook used in class have almost been completely replaced by computers, tablets, and smartphones for our "now students" who have been reading, discussing, and writing using digital technologies throughout middle school and high school.  When they enter our classroom, with sedentary tables they can't move around with their laptops for effective collaborative work, and then see the antiquated model of one computer at the front of the classroom controlled solely by the instructor, this immediately makes the class feel irrelevant and outmoded to them.  We're hoping that over time we can be supported with the facilities and resources we need to bring our pedagogy into the 21st century. 
 
Continuing support for professional development that can be accessed by all of our instructors, e.g. on an online platform, will be crucial. 
 
We also continue to provide rigorous transfer-focused instruction in writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking and communicating through our English 2, which is required for an AA or for transfer. Our English 11 meets the Critical Thinking (CSU A3) GE Requirement for transfer. 

This past year, we've offered between 62 sections (Fall 18) and 42 (Spring 19) of English 2, which was only only 4 sections less for the year than the total of 106 sections we offered the 2017/18 academic year. We had 63 wait listed students in the fall but simply couldn't add any more courses due to lack of classroom space and staff availability. 

We also offered 8 sections of English 119/2 fast track courses, which were serving as our co-requisite pilot, in fall 2018 and 3 sections of these in spring 19.  Enrollments were sluggish, probably due in part to the major time commitment required of these courses, but the success rates were quite high. The average success rate for English 119 in the 2017/18 academic year was 89% and the average success rate for the English 2 fast track for 2017/18 was 79%, which is significantly higher than our regular transfer-level success rate for the year, despite the fact that students taking the course at the time were assessing at one-level below transfer.  Because the model didn't exactly replicate our English 3 model and because of the lower enrollments, it was not a great pilot for English 3, and there is still uncertainty about how successful that model will be.  We plan to follow our retention and success rates in these courses closely compared to the regular transfer-level courses and suggest improvements to our support models based on that data at the end of the 2019/20 academic year.

Having access to embedded support (IAs and Student Success Specialists) in all English 3s and also trying to get embedded support for English 2 instructors who find themselves with a greater proportion of high needs students will also be crucial for student success post AB 705.

Currently, for Fall 19, we have 12 sections of English 3 scheduled and may increase or decrease these depending on enrollments in August.  We are also offering 63 sections of English 2, but this number may also increase or decrease depending on student enrollments.  We expect it to increase, so we're currently interviewing associate faculty so that if we need to increase our schedule, we could do so without relying on yearlong work agreements.  We had to offer more than ten of those last fall, which caused many problems for scheduling.

Additionally in 2018/19, we've offered 15 sections of English 11, "Critical Thinking" in the fall and 19 sections in the spring, including a new late-start section that is on track to fill.  We're also offering a summer online English 11 for students who still need the course for transfer but cannot get into a section in the spring, since we know this has presented a hardship for students in the past, and the summer scheduled face to face English 11s don't work well for working students.

We've also offered 7 sections of English 4 (3 in the fall and 4 in spring), 5 sections of English 6, Introduction to Creative Writing (2 in the fall and 3 in the spring), our early American and British Lit courses, once section each in the fall to serve the core of our AA-T, and one section each of the late American and British in the spring, both fulfilling the core and articulating with these required core courses for various CSU, Chico English majors.  We are in the process of adding English 12 to our course offerings, which is a 4 unit critical thinking through literature course that meets the needs of many out of state second semester English requirements as well as GE critical thinking requirements in one course, which they'd otherwise have to take two separate courses to complete.  We also offer 4 English elective courses in the fall and 2 English elective courses in the spring, several of which meet the U.S. diversity or world cultures GE requirements at CSU, Chico and count toward their completion of an AA-T in English.  We offer one Honors English course each year, either "Great Books" or "Modern World Cultures," and we're in the process of developing an honors English 2 or English 4 to help students have an honors pathway toward meeting GE requirements.  Finally, we offer English 31, "Existential Literature" each semester now, and the courses have been making.  This is a popular way for students to fulfill their Area E (CSU) Area F (Butte) requirement in a non-conventional and very meaningful way. As we roll out Guided Pathways, our department will continue to revisit our literature offerings and pursue possible articulation agreements to better support completion of an AA or AA-T degree or transfer for our students and limit excess units.  We are looking at an American Ethnic and Regional Writers course that would articulate with a core lower division requirement for CSU,Chico English degrees.  We would replace our Latino Literature Course with this course and hope to be able to offer it in Fall of 2020.

Fall 2018, we again offered an athletes-only section of English 2, which was again very successful, but presents some particular pedagogical challenges, and we're currently discussing whether or not we want to offer the course in the future.  We are revisiting the idea of an athletes only English 3 for fall of 2019.
 
We also have two "Introduction to Literature" courses as well as two English 2 courses offered at the Willows High School.  This allows mostly UC or out of state college bound high school students to fulfill their entire first year college English requirement while still in high school, and these courses have been very successful.

In Fall 2012, we began offering an AA-T degree in English and were one of the first departments on campus to offer an AA-T. We also offer an AA-T in Journalism, and our courses are part of the Language Arts degree as well. 

As of fall 2018, 278 students declared intent to work toward the AA-T in English, 82 for the AA in Language Arts, and 23 for the AA-T in Journalism. These numbers have all increased significantly from last year, and the increased interest in Journalism is prompting us to focus on rebuilding our journalism program with new leadership, but we need the funding to double the stipend we offer for associate faculty to fulfill the additional out of class duties needed from the journalism advisor.  We are asking to increase the stipend to $4000 for the year to help support our journalism instructor in advising students, overseeing advertisement and outreach in ethical ways, and getting back on track to begin publishing our college newspaper, The Roadrunner, again.  We're also asking for a full-time hire in journalism, and if we get that we wouldn't need the increased stipend, and this option would be far better for the long-term health of the program, but we're asking for both in case the full-time position isn't feasible for the college at this time.
 
Besides course offerings in support of our three degrees and supporting students meeting their transfer-level college English requirements, the English Department supports and promotes the literary arts by making provocative, diverse, and renowned writers available to students and the community at least twice per year. Our creative writing conference, WordSpring, is the second largest campus event that brings community members together with Butte College students, faculty and staff, supporting the college's strategic initiative to reach out to the community. 
 

Student Learning/Administrative Unit Outcomes (Optional)

Standards/Goals for Student Achievement (Instruction Departments) (Optional)

Standards/Goals for Student Achievement (All Other Departments) (Optional)

Strategic Direction (Optional)

Program Review (Optional)

Recommendation #1: Hire more full-time instructors
With the addition of two new full-time instructors that we’re getting, in fall 2017, we will have 11 full-time and 38 associate faculty; this is a disproportionately high number of associate faculty, which creates substantial challenges for staffing, training, and maintaining consistency among sections and represents an unprecedented imbalance compared to other disciplines. It is the preeminent issue for the English and Journalism department, though with two new hires for fall, we are certainly making more progress toward this goal. We will again have 3 more faculty than we did at the time of our last program review, and three were recommended.
Recommendation #2: Offer more professional development for consistency.
The success rates among our many sections of English 2 vary greatly, and we are still working to get all instructors in our department consistent access to professional development and fostering discussions about how we’re interpreting our SLOs for English 2 and measuring student success in those courses.  Though, since our last program review, many of our teachers have participated in the following:

English 118 training program, which has produced good results in terms of creating more consistent pedagogy across multiple sections, with methods that carry over into English 2.
English 3 Co-requisite Community of Practice, which began as just the four instructors teaching the course in the fall and is now up to 13 participants
We have continued to fund or procured funding for associate faculty to attend conferences (CCCC, ECCTYC, NADE).
 We have our 8 online instructors participating in an Online Teaching Community of Practice, which we are seeing is having an effect on our success rates in those courses.
We invited Asao Inoue and Betsy Burris to facilitate workshops with our instructors last year and this year.  We are inviting Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, the first undocumented person to receive an MFA to speak as part of our English and Journalism Majors Day, and we’re also trying to procure funding for Sarah Polluck, an award winning journalist and speaker to that event or to a separate one this spring if we can get the funding.
Ongoing SLO work is also targeting the inconsistencies. For example, we have developed a departmental best practices statement regarding assignment descriptions and a workshop on building community in the classroom and replacing deficit model pedagogy with strengths-building models.  We are also trying to devote at least one hour of each department meeting to professional development, so we had Betsy Burris during Institute Week, we are discussing Teaching Men of Color in the Community College, in March and April, and in May, we’re going to discuss what we mean by academic writing, and look at how we’re interpreting our SLOs for English 2 and measuring student success in meeting them.

Recommendation #3: Develop additional support strategies, particularly for students of color where data indicate lower achievement

Our English 3 pilot, though less than ideal, has proven to be successful, though we have yet to disaggregate the data for students of color, since it was just last semester.
We requested laptop carts to support digital literacy in English 2—digital literacy has been identified as a barrier for OUHSD students in particular and would allow us to continue the kinds of pedagogical practices in English 2 that students in developmental courses and in most high school English courses have become accustomed to.
We brought Asao Inoue, an expert in anti-racist writing assessment, for a full-day workshop in April 2017, funded by Student Equity. We also distributed copies of Dr. Inoue’s book before the workshop. Several more instructors adopted contract grading and other practices as a result of this workshop that will help to increase success for students of color.
We piloted a section of English 2 for athletes only, and every student in that class passed.  Coaches have informed us that a more significant number of athletes, especially students of color, have been assessing at one level below transfer, and we need to better support those students.  We continue to reach out to the coaches about the possibility of English 3 as a better model for their athletes’ academic success, but so far the fast track pilot model is clearly not appealing to them.
We are also reading Teaching Men of Color in the Community College, which came out of several members of our department participating in Luke Woods’ course, Black Minds Matter.  We will be discussing the book at two department meetings.
We are committed to diversity in hiring and incorporating CUE research throughout our process to better achieve equity in hiring for our department and in communication with HR and other departments on campus.
We have developed an English 12 course, Critical Thinking Through Literature, that can take care of two requirements with one course for many of our athletes transferring out of state.  This course is currently in the curriculum review process.

Recommendation #4: Explore strategies to ensure optimal placement of students in composition

Beginning fall 17, we moved as a college to multiple measures placement.  Though this did lead to increased enrollment in English 2, success rates did not decrease significantly as evidenced in the data above. 
Success rates for our one-level below transfer students completing the Co-req pilot increased by 13 percent, and we anticipate that number to be on par with success rates for English 2 once we move to our actual English 3 course. 
We still have a significant number of one-level below transfer students taking English 118, which means they will take two semesters and one additional unit to complete their transfer level requirement, and if the Butte College data is consistent with the state data, only 13 percent will complete their transfer level requirement within a year.  It isn’t clear how informed students are about making the choice to take either the 119/2 fast track pilot or English 118, but the department chair attended a counselors’ meeting in December and we distributed signed add cards for the English 2 portion of the fast track, since students worried about their financial aid needed to register for both courses at the same time.  This was just one obstacle, along with the increased hour commitment and cost, that may be preventing more of our students from taking advantage of this option, even if it would mean a significant increase in their chances for successfully completing their transfer-level English.

Recommendation #5 and Response: All composition instructors should emphasize the development of critical reading skills in their courses

We’ve conducted three semesters of SLO work on this topic.
Another of our instructors has done work in Reading Apprenticeship. She continues to bring RA strategies to our department meetings, and cross-campus workshops for all faculty.
Our English 3 and Online Teaching Communities of Practice include a significant focus on how we teach students to read critically
Our curriculum alignment project with Oroville Union High School District includes discussion of best practices in critical reading instruction.  
Our end of semester SLO reflections will include specific focus on critical reading and how we measure student success with this objective in our composition courses.

Recommendation #6: Share student work.

Students share their work in our literary journal Inky Squib and our journal devoted to academic writing, Dill Pickle, which is published by our newly formed editing and publishing club under Jen White’s leadership.
Some of our instructors have their students share their work in the Rough Cut film festival put on by one of our associate faculty at Chico State. 
One of our faculty members does a poster project sharing student work in the Campus Center and invites all English faculty to attend each fall.
Another instructor holds a Shakespearean feast and parade across campus as a final activity in her Shakespeare course each fall.
We’re hoping to invite student contributors to our literary magazines and to the student newspaper to share some of their best work as part of our English and Journalism Majors Day celebration.

Recommendation #7: More technology

We are requesting four mobile laptop carts for use in our English 2 courses.  Our request last year was denied.
As a result of our curriculum alignment project with local high schools, we have discovered that the lack of digital literacy is a major obstacle for students from OUHSD in particular.
Currently, our developmentally placed students and students in most high school English classes do a great deal if not all of their work on reading and writing through digital technology.  We face great challenges teaching the “now student” coming from high school and developmental Butte College English courses where literacy skills were practiced with the support of technology to English courses where students don’t have access to this technology.  The English 2 courses feel outdated and less relevant to these students as a result, especially because students fully realize that most reading and written exchange is happening via digital modalities in our current world.
If we want to prepare students for a future, global work force, we absolutely need them to access digital technologies in class to teach analysis, critical thinking, and problem solving.  We need access to computers to teach them about appealing to contemporary and future audiences for their written communication, the kinds of researching and presentation of research practices they will use in the work place, the kinds of collaborative work that will take place in digital and virtual platforms.  Again, we must do these things for our English courses to feel relevant to our students.  Otherwise, their college English course feels like something they do in college and never again.  This is a major problem affecting higher education and needs to be addressed.  Our department can do our part to start addressing it, but we need the resources in terms of access to computers for all students in all of our English courses.  The sooner the college realizes this and starts working toward this, the better.   
We need two new computers for two new full-time hires and one more for a full-time instructor on their ninth year with their computer.

Recommendation #8: Resources such as a full-time hire or a stipend for the newspaper advisor would aid the program in meeting longer-term expectations.  Of paramount need is for the Roadrunner to be published on a regular schedule.

The paper is being published regularly—four times per semester, since our last program review.
Enrollment in the journalism courses continues to hover around 20 for Journalism 2 and 8 to 10 in Journalism 10 and 12, and there are only 8 people declaring an AA-T in Journalism.
Journalism has been added to English Majors Day, which is now English and Journalism Majors Day, and we are asking for funding to bring more diverse speakers including journalists to participate in the event.  It looks like additional funding to bring a journalist speaker this spring will not be possible, so we’re looking to next year to get the support we need to better promote and build this program.

Recommendation #9: Completing all needed assessment cycles as planned over the course of the next six years

We are doing this and have had to adjust our deep dives a bit as determined by the SLO brief reflections, which we are also constantly updating and streamlining in terms of the suggestions we provide faculty before they write their reflections at the end of each semester.

Recommendation #10: The department should review the variety of courses within its curriculum and consider streamlining or combining courses where appropriate.

We are hoping to complete an outline for American Ethnic and Regional Writers, which would articulate with CSU, Chico’s course of the same name that fulfills both their US Diversity requirement and functions as a lower division elective for many of their degrees in English.  We will offer this course alternately with Native American Literature, which also articulates and covers the same area at Chico State.
We have removed Mythology and Latino Literature from our schedule since they don’t articulate with any of our transfer institutions and we have many other courses that fulfill the same area of GE or diversity requirement at our primary transfer institutions.
We have created a transfer-level composition course with additional support that should better meet the needs for all students traditionally placing below transfer-level if we get the departmental and college support we need to make this a reality.
We have mapped out a guided pathway for students transferring to CSU, Chico, which has helped us better see which literature courses we need to add to and which we need to cut back on and the best semesters to offer each of these for student pathway options. We’re in contact with the English Department at CSU, Chico about pending changes to their lower division requirements and also with CSU, Sacramento to get our English 53H course to articulate with their World Literatures in English course.  We plan to stay informed with changes at CSUs and UCs and maximize our offerings to better support students transferring to these institutions.

Recommendation #11: The department should pursue pedagogical cap adjustments where research demonstrates a need for such change.

Despite our best efforts, the pedagogical cap for our co-requisite course was set at 30.  We will continue to pursue a lower ped. cap in that course and IA support, especially if it ends up replacing all below-transfer options as suggested in the language of AB 705.
We continue our attempts to communicate why, especially in transfer-level composition, getting thirty students to meet the objectives for that course in one semester of a 3 unit course is not possible.  The recommended pedagogical cap for all composition courses, put forth by the WPA is 17.  Maintaining a cap of 30 sets students and teachers up for failure, even with the additional grading load, which might help us accommodate a third more or about 23 students, but not nearly double the recommended number for only a 3.33 percent increase in load, which doesn’t make sense.  As evidenced in a recent department poll, English department faculty are spending about 15 additional hours grading that are uncompensated per semester per course, and that’s with the additional load factor.  Because feedback in a composition course has to be consistent, formative, and in-depth for students to truly improve, this requires a great deal of additional work per student in these courses and should be taken into account when approving ped. caps for these courses, especially for those student populations who might need additional support.

Recommendation #12: Professional development opportunities are fundamental to many initiatives . . . . The department should pursue and the college should consider increased institutional support for the professional development of associate and full-time faculty

A significant amount of our English budget goes to professional development and curriculum sharing work, and we have had some success getting support from Diversity and Equity for some of our projects, and the Transformation Grant money has supported most of our continued work on developing our co-requisite transfer-level course, English 3.  However, given the size of our department and the number of associate faculty, a great deal of our budget just goes to mandatory meeting pay and stipends for doing some of the committee work that our full-timers lack the spare time to do.  We definitely need help to do the kind of professional development we think we’ll need to do to prepare for impact of AB 705.

Recommendation #13: The English and journalism department secretary should be restored to a full 12-month contract

Done!

 
 

Department Goals

Our primary goals for 2019/20 are as follows.
1. Transition to being in compliance with AB705 while maintaining our student success and completion rates or, preferably, increasing them.
2. Working more effectively with student services to better support all students taking transfer-level English.  
3. Ensuring that students have equitable support at all of our satellite campuses, and when we identify inequities such as recently with mental health and DSPS support at the Glenn Center and Chico Center, we advocate for getting students that support.
4. Continuing to reduce our equity gaps.
5. Working on professional development and attaining the necessary resources to help increase digital literacy for all students taking our composition courses.
6. Updating our pedagogy to focus on increasing student metacognitive awareness of multiple literacy practices and transferability/adaptibility between them as well as practices that work against various forms of institutional trauma faced by our most vulnerable student populations, including classroom management and approaches to grading that empower students and feel relevant to them. 
7. Increasing embedded support in all of our classes and supporting faculty in maximizing the benefits of embedded support.
8. Increasing the culture of inclusiveness, collegiality and collaboration in our department.
9. More effectively supporting the success of our journalism program.
10. Closely tracking and using data to continue measuring the success of our English 3 course and comparing the retention, success, and persitence rates for courses with embedded support and those without. 
11. Comparing average success rates of associate faculty taught composition courses with compensated office hours to success rates without them.
Basically, this next year will be all about finding out what works best and scaling up those practices and finding out what doesn't work and trying new approaches.
 

Future Development Strategies

Requested Non-Financial Resources

Current Financial Resources

Augmentation Requests