"You could have students who barely speak English with someone who's almost ready to go to comp": Latinx Basic Writers in Iowa Community Colleges

Abstract

Latinx students are a growing demographic in postsecondary English classes, but the majority of research on them and on the faculty who teach them is based in the US Southwest at Hispanic-Serving Institutions. The purpose of this study is to describe some of the pedagogical and extracurricular considerations of faculty who teach Latinx students in two community colleges in the Midwest in order to support these students, especially in developmental courses. This study draws from qualitative data collected at two community colleges, Mann College and Kinsella College (pseudonyms). This exploratory study provides recommendations for the kind of professional development that faculty may need in order to support Latinx students, the importance of understanding students' myriad identities, and the ways political forces may shape students' experiences.

Latinx students are a growing demographic in postsecondary English classes, but the majority of research on them and on the faculty who teach them is based in the US Southwest at Hispanic-Serving Institutions. The purpose of this study is to describe some of the pedagogical and extracurricular considerations of faculty who teach Latinx students in two community colleges in the Midwest in order to support these students, especially in developmental courses. This study draws from qualitative data collected at two community colleges, Mann College and Kinsella College (pseudonyms). This exploratory study provides recommendations for the kind of professional development that faculty may need in order to support Latinx students, the importance of understanding students' myriad identities, and the ways political forces may shape students' experiences.

Prologue

Rosanna was nineteen years old and attending Kinsella College (a pseud- onym) in Iowa as a first-time student. I interviewed her in the fall 2020 semester, and Kinsella's TRIO program advisor was present, who translated most of the interview from English to Spanish. Rosanna attended Kinsella with the hopes of becoming a paramedic. Her intention was to get a degree that will enable her to get a secure job quickly; then she intends to work while pursuing a bachelor's degree. Rosanna worked a second shift job at a local heating and cooling equipment factory, so her weekdays were hectic. She woke up around 8:00 in the morning, showered, and arrived at the Kinsella campus by 9:00. She attended classes in the mornings and returned home for nap. She worked from 3:30 in the afternoon until 1:00 in the morning. If she had homework, she stayed up until 3:00 in the morning working on that or found chunks of time in between classes and work to finish her assignments. She worked to pay her own way through Kinsella so her parents-particularly her mother-did not have to.

Rosanna was enrolled in a lower-level ESL course as well as a leader- ship development course at Kinsella. In many ways, her college experience speaks to trends in the literature on community college students, specifically Latinx students. She spoke to the important support she received from her mother in particular as she goes to college. Rosanna worked full-time or nearly full-time while attending school part-time. She also recognized at- taining English proficiency would be necessary for her college success. In working toward that success, Rosanna named the institutional agents-that is, the sources of support on the Kinsella campus, like the TRIO advisor and her instructors, who provide navigational and moral support through her college experience.

The Exigence of This Research Study

The purpose of this study is to describe some of the instructional and extracurricular considerations that non-Latinx faculty make to support Latinx students in developmental writing at two community colleges in Iowa: Kinsella College and Mann College. In both education and rhetoric and composition scholarship, there is a tendency to study Latinx students in places where they constitute a sizable proportion of the student popu- lation, typically in places like California, Texas, and Florida (see Ruecker, Transiciones; Ruiz). This is also where Excelencia in Education found that Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) tend to be concentrated ("Hispanic Serving Institutions"). Also, while the focus on HSIs is important and needed, HSIs are not the only institutions Latinx students attend, especially outside of the areas with large concentrations of Latinx communities like the US Southwest.

Latinx Community College Students and Basic Writing

Between 2000 and 2018, the enrollment of Latinx students in postsecond- ary education increased by 148 percent to 3.4 million students (Hussar et al.). Of the estimated 3.4 million Latinx students enrolled in postsecondary education, the plurality of these students (41 percent) are enrolled in public, two-year institutions (" Latinos in Higher Education" 6). Community colleges are where Latinx students are more likely to begin their college experience, a trend motivated by a number of factors including lower costs, proximity to home, less access to rigorous high school courses (i.e., AP courses), and even past experiences with racism and discrimination that effectively track students away from four-year institutions to two-year colleges (Kurlaender 10-12; Taggart and Crisp 23). Latinx students also constitute the largest proportion of linguistic minority students in US postsecondary educa- tion (Núñez and Sparks 111). While English proficiency among US Latinxs appears to be growing (Krogstad par. 1), there can be no doubt that the relationship between English language proficiency and Latinx students' col- lege readiness is incredibly complex. A pitfall of many community college ESL programs is that they teach English as an essential life skill

Within the field of composition, Severino noted "the embarrassing paucity of research on Latino students" (W137). As she continued, "The lack of audible Latino and HSI voices harms our profession, our students, and our teachers, as HSI regional and community college teachers together with their Latino students have a wealth of strategies, theories, curricula, and educational action programs to offer" (W137).

In the last fifteen years, the voices of Latinx scholars in rhetoric and composition have grown in number and volume. More monographs and edited volumes focused on Latinx students have appeared (Baca et al.; Kirklighter et al.; Ruecker; Ruiz; Ruiz and Sánchez). While perspectives from two-year colleges are present (e.g., Millward et al.), these monographs largely present research focused on/at four-year institutions. What is more, the scholarship on Latinx issues tends to focus on college-level composition, ignoring these students' experiences in basic writing. For those who are interested in equity issues in higher education and the success of historically minoritized populations (including Latinx students), it is imperative that attention be paid to basic writing. While Nora and Crisp noted that more than half (57 percent) of Latinx students enrolled in community colleges were placed in developmental mathematics, the placement rates for writing (16 percent) and reading (25 percent) were not insignificant.

A number of writing scholars have drawn attention to the lack of research on Latinx students in basic writing. In his work on the cultural dissonance of basic writing, Raul Ybarra (2001) argued there is almost no research on how students engage with and overcome basic writing courses that were never designed for them (38-39). Stein further highlighted the need for research on Latinx students in developmental English, stating, "We can no longer work off the false paradigm of believing that by researching what works for the White student or for the African American student will by some sort of default work for Latino students because they are 'minorities'" (84). Other scholars have pointed out the uneasy position of Latinx students and col- lege writing, particularly in how conventions of composition may stamp out the epistemologies or conventions of students' cultural backgrounds (Enríquez-Loya and Leon; Mejía; Ruiz).

The Iowa Context for This Study Iowa has an increasing dependence on its Latinx residents. Much of Iowa's white, younger, and college-educated population is leaving the state after their college graduation, while the rest of the population continues to age, a phenomenon referred to as "brain drain" (Carr and Kefalas). Considering the relative youth of the Latinx population compared with the rest of the state (the median age of Latinxs in Iowa in 2015 was 23.7 versus 38.5 of the general population, per the State Data Center of Iowa 1), this population holds tremendous potential for economic contributions, especially if more Latinx high school graduates go to college. However, only 13.8 percent of the Latinx population over age twenty-five holds a bachelor's degree, compared to 29.3 percent of the general population of the state (State Data Center of Iowa 2). Mexicans are the largest origin group in Iowa by far, at approximately 75 percent (State Data Center of Iowa 1), compared to about 62 percent nationally (Noe-Bustamante par. 3). Iowa is also a fascinating place to study Latinx students because of the state's (arguably the region's) tendency to rely on their labor while also minimizing or erasing their his- tories and contributions to the state (Valerio-Jiménez). The pace of Latinx migration into Iowa in contemporary times has increased so much so that Vasilogrambos (2014) referred to it as the "Latino revolution" (par. 7). As Trabalzi and Sandoval noted, "The future of Iowa's multicultural society is thus complex and contradictory" (7). It is under this contradictory context that this research was undertaken to understand the instructional practices of faculty who teach Latinx students in basic writing courses at two Iowa community colleges.

Research Methods

This basic qualitative study (Merriam and Tisdell 23) received funding from the CCCC Research Grant. The grant was received in March 2018, and I submitted an institutional review board (IRB) application to begin data collection in the fall 2018 semester. Interviews were done with three faculty members (one from Kinsella, two from Mann, respectively). To help supplement the interviews, I analyzed information from the colleges' web- sites, especially their Fact Books, and websites that provided information specifically for Latinx students to provide more description and context. To preserve the confidentiality of the participants, pseudonyms are used for both the participants and the colleges.

The semi-structured interviews with faculty members used an inter- view protocol that covered a few basic themes: their teaching backgrounds (e.g., how long they taught at the community college, what classes they taught), their experience in teaching Latinx students in developmental classes, what support services were provided to Latinx students, and their perceptions of how well their campus did (or did not) serve Latinx students. There was also room for open-ended follow-up questions so that faculty members could speak to experiences they felt were important. The interviews were transcribed using a transcription service and compared with the raw audio data for accuracy. For the first round of analysis, I used an inductive coding schema called initial coding (Saldaña 115) to scan the transcripts for what topics emerged from each of them. In a second round of coding, I utilized axial coding to further refine the codes and to generate themes for this study (Saldaña 244).

Limitations of the Study

A challenge with any sort of empirical research is in recruiting enough participants, whether for a survey or for interviews. In many ways, this study shows how much the COVID-19 pandemic impeded data collection, especially in terms of the relationship-building that qualitative research- ers like me need in order to fully explore a research site. This relationship building was very difficult through email and Zoom. As such, this study remains highly exploratory in nature, but hopefully the beginning of a fuller investigation into the journeys of Latinx students through developmental education at Iowa's community colleges. Any future study should absolutely include more student voices. In line with Grubb and Gabriner's (2013) work, there is also a critical need for more classroom-based research on devel- opmental education. Future research should incorporate observations of teaching and classroom interactions to deepen contextual descriptions.

Basic Writing in Two Community Colleges in Iowa

Following other writing-focused research in postsecondary contexts (Ihara and Del Principe; Ruecker, "Here They Do This"), this present study is also situated within a specific local context. Therefore, in addition to presenting data from the interviews with three faculty members, I also describe the institutional contexts of Kinsella and Mann Colleges in which these faculty members teach and support Latinx students.

Kinsella College

Kinsella College is classified as a rural, fringe college with an estimated headcount of just under two thousand students ("College Navigator"). It is one campus within the Meskwaki College District, which has one other comprehensive community college and various learning centers and remote campuses within it. The Kinsella College campus is located in one of Iowa's prominent Latinx enclaves-a rural town that others told me I had to visit upon my arrival in Iowa because it is "the Mexican town." Unlike many other small towns in Iowa, the community in which Kinsella is located is dotted with Mexican restaurants, a large Mexican-owned grocery store, and panaderías (bakeries). As of 2019, the United States Census Bureau reported that the city where Kinsella is located is about 30 percent Hispanic.

Kinsella College has been recognized as an emerging Hispanic-serving institution by Excelencia in Education, defined as an institution with a student body that is 15 to 24.9 percent Latinx ("Emerging Hispanic-Serving Institutions" 1) whose enrollment trends show that it could potentially reach the 25 percent threshold needed to qualify as a federally designated HSI. As of the 2019-2020 year, there were 362 emerging HSIs, three of which were located in Iowa ("Emerging Hispanic-Serving Institutions" 1). On its homepage, Kinsella touts its "Hispanic Initiative," part of its work dedicated to "providing opportunities that are unique to our Hispanic/Latino commu- nity" (Kinsella College, "Hispanic Initiative" par. 1). As part of that, Kinsella launched the campaign "Kinsella es para mi" (Kinsella is for me) with a focus on programs and services to boost Latinx student outcomes, to build community partnerships, to strengthen ties with Latinx students and their families, and to increase upward mobility through education (Kinsella Col- lege, "Hispanic Initiative" par. 2). The Hispanic Initiative page also explains the meaning of emerging HSI (Kinsella College, "Hispanic Initiative" par. 3). Other links for the Hispanic Initiative connect users with information about a Latino family college night, Latinx leadership, a student chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and financial aid information that includes resources for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and undocumented students.

Celeste: Streamlining Basic Writing and ESL

Celeste is the only full-time ESL and basic writing instructor at Kinsella College, and when I interviewed her, she had been at Kinsella for about four years. She was also the instructor of the ESL class that Rosanna was taking. Celeste completed her master's degree in teaching English as a sec- ond language/applied linguistics, but she took courses in composition as a teaching assistant so she could teach some of the first-year writing courses at her master's institution. She was drawn to the position at Kinsella because she knew she wanted to work specifically with students of college age. In her first three years at the college, she taught all ESL courses; at the time of our interview, she started to teach basic writing courses as well. Kinsella College offers both self-contained basic writing courses (two sections of College Preparatory Writing) as well as a five credit corequisite sequence (Integrated Composition that must be taken with Composition I). Kinsella also offers lower-level ESL courses focused on basic communication as well as writing courses aimed at preparing ESL students specifically for academic writing (Academic Writing Transitions III and IV). Finally, the college offers an Introduction to U.S. Culture course, which helps students "better acclimate to life in the US while simultaneously improving their English language skills" (Kinsella College, "ESL 076 Course Description").

Celeste was an anomaly because she is dually appointed in both the English and Spanish departments, and she was the only full-time ESL in- structor. She noted that before her hiring, the ESL teaching was done by adjuncts. As she settled into her position, she found how disorganized the ESL curriculum was:

I came in and said, "What is the content of these classes? What is the cur- riculum?" And they said, "Whatever you want." And I said, "Oh well, what level are the students?" "Oh, all sorts of levels." And the thing is, I'm used to being in my field and my terminology. . . . So that first year, I was trying to figure out what was going on, who are these students?

Celeste spent several years restructuring the ESL curriculum and trying to establish specific levels between the courses, especially considering that she said before, "You could have students who barely speak English with someone who's almost ready to go to comp" in the same class.

A perspective that Celeste offered because of her background in ESL was a nuanced understanding of what factors lead to students arriving at Kinsella's campus needing ESL courses in particular:

There's a lot of homes where Spanish is the primary language and I know that a lot of the families here, the parents may not even have a high school education.

. . . So that can have an influence on the kids, like whether you grow up with parents who can read you bedtime stories and help you with your homework and have books around. Some of the students might not have had that, or if they did maybe it was all in Spanish.

She went on to say,

The "developmental" implies . . . there's something that these students didn't reach or didn't get in high school in order to be prepared for college. There might also be some interference from Spanish for them, but I think it's also just generally they might have received the support. And I'm not penalizing anybody in any way, it's just the situation that happened that they might not have had that support growing up to read and write in English.

In the course of our interview, Celeste mentioned Kinsella's recent mile- stone of the 15 percent Latinx student enrollment threshold needed to be recognized as an emerging HSI. Kinsella hosted a series of events to celebrate the milestone, and she pointed out that the team that the col- lege convened to plan these events was composed of mostly white faculty and staff with only one Latina. This is indicative of emerging HSIs and HSIs generally-that despite increases in student enrollments that enable institutions to reach these milestones, emerging HSIs and HSIs continue to be predominantly white spaces where non-Latinxs dominate the faculty and staff (Vargas et al. 40). What was also interesting about Celeste's posi- tion was how intertwined ESL and basic writing were for her in particular. During our conversation, it was hard for me to tell which course she was describing. Celeste's descriptions of her teaching and her students intimated that Latinx students at Kinsella were often translingual who required ESL courses and basic writing, suggesting that these students often had multiple semesters of non-credit-bearing courses to complete before they would get to Freshman Composition.

Mann College

Mann College is a multicampus community college district located in a metropolitan area. Six distinct campuses and seven remote learning cen- ters make up the whole of Mann College District. According to Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the district-wide headcount of Mann College is approximately twenty-three thousand students, about two thousand and seven hundred of whom are Latinx and make up the largest minoritized group at the college (Mann College, "Annual Report" 2). It is notable that the downtown campus of Mann College, where Annie and Leah teach, was named Iowa's first majority-minority postsecondary campus in the state (Mann College, "Annual Report" 3). Yet the flagship cam- pus of Mann College is located in a suburb about fifteen miles north of its downtown campus in a community that is 90 percent white, non-Hispanic (United States Census Bureau).

For students in developmental education, there are various options for how they may complete these requirements. Interestingly, Mann College offers six levels of noncredit ESL courses, and students who score higher on the placement test may qualify to take two four-credit-hour courses that may count as electives in their degree plans. Given that students whose first language is not English take the English Language Learner (ELL) ACCUPLACER placement test to determine their English proficiency and college readiness, it is unclear if students would be required to take devel- opmental reading and writing courses after completing an ESL sequence. For students whose first language is English and who are placed in develop- mental reading and writing, they may enroll in stand-alone developmental courses or a corequisite Strategies for Composition course taken alongside Freshman Composition.

Annie: Providing Out-of-Class Support

At the time of our interview, Annie was the developmental studies coor- dinator for the downtown campus of Mann College. A former elementary school teacher, Annie came to Mann as a midlife change in her decades-long career in education. She started teaching community college students at nearly the age of fifty and fell in love with it-so much so that she returned to a nearby university for a master's degree in English that enabled her to teach Freshman Composition in addition to the developmental reading and writing courses she was already teaching at Mann. She also completed a fellowship through the Kellogg Institute, part of the National Center for Developmental Education at Appalachian State University. There, Annie im- mersed herself in the best practices of developmental reading and writing.

From the outset of the interview, Annie pointed out that Mann Col- lege experienced a downturn in its Latinx enrollment even prior to the pandemic. Since 2016, she noticed that the number of Latinx students in her classes shrunk. When asked if she thought that this trend was related to the election of Donald Trump, she responded, "Yeah, I was going to say I don't want to be political, but I'm afraid it was political." Annie elaborated:

the last time I spoke to a Hispanic student, who was a student at the time, she expressed apprehension about members of her community coming back to college. Even if they were in the country legally, they did not want to draw attention to themselves and their families because family members might not be. And as soon as they filled out an application, a college application with an address on it, they had a concern that they were going to be on the radar of some kind. So they just didn't come to school. They just didn't register for classes for the time being. And I mean, it went from a third of the class would have been Hispanic students to nobody just overnight.

Annie's observation is striking, considering that Latinx student enrollment in community colleges nearly doubled between 2001 and 2017 (Field par. 14-15). Annie continued,

And this particular student, we had talked about the fact that she was a Dreamer. She was beginning to feel unsure of her own place, just from the press. It just made me really sad. And she was a student [who] was literally ready to graduate and move on to a university and was really having serious thoughts about continuing her degree at the time.

Surprisingly, Mann College's website offered more guidance than Kinsella College in terms of supports for students who are DACA recipients or those who are undocumented. The resources for DACA students at Kinsella mostly referred to a list of community-based scholarships or other resources outside the institution (e.g., a frequently asked questions sheet regarding DACA). The Mann College website offered information on the restoration of DACA in December 2020 as well as information on academic programs, admission, and tuition payment questions for students who may not want to participate in student loan programs.

When asked about the available supports for Latinx students at Mann College, Annie talked about a number of extracurricular resources, includ- ing Latinx-focused recruitment activities, various student clubs, and ESL support. In the last five years, Mann College's advisors helped run evening recruitment events that targeted specific prospective populations, includ- ing one for African American students and Native students. During their Latinx night, the college expected students and their families to show up:

We planned for the younger kids [presumably younger siblings] to be doing something while the parent and, hopefully, prospective student met with advi- sors about financial aid folks. And then we had support. And then at the end of the evening, students that were there, we drew their names for two schol- arships. So we tried to make it appealing. And we know that, particularly in that group, education decisions are made as a family and not as an individual.

Annie pointed out that with the COVID-19 pandemic, these types of events were much harder to hold virtually. In addition to these nights, the college did recruitment and outreach to local churches to encourage prospective students to consider Mann College. Annie also shared her support of the international student club, which held various on-campus multicultural events during the year prior to the pandemic. A web search for more infor- mation on this club did not yield any results, but a listing for a downtown campus Latino Club was found on the list of approved clubs and organiza- tions. The group's mission is "building strong and healthy relationships

"I'm kind of amazed at how sophisticated the upper-level ELL assignments are for students."

between club members and all communities in central Iowa" (Mann College, "Downtown Campus Activities") as well as to hold events that include mock naturalization interviews and college nights with local high school youth.

Finally, Annie spoke at length about how the pandemic changed the way ESL services were provided to students as a result of the pandemic. English faculty members are required to volunteer a certain number of hours in the academic success center on campus, and a separate space is provided to ESL faculty for students seeking assistance in that area. The COVID-19 pandemic requires academic support services to be moved online, and as a result, the writing and ESL faculty were offered in the same virtual space where students could receive assistance from faculty in both areas at the same time. Because of this, Annie was exposed to ESL students with much more regularity than before. As Annie put it,

And so we [the writing instructor and ESL instructor] work a lot not only with readers who are having struggles with their Russian history textbook and don't get it, [all the way] down to basic ELL classes. And it really works real well by working together, by working with somebody who is an ELL instructor. Us plain old English folks are learning a lot about how to work with ELL students.

As she thought about the future of tutoring services postpandemic, Annie speculated that while many services would return in person, there would likely still be a continuation of offering expanded ELL services online as well to meet the needs of students.

Given that Annie had a bachelor's degree in education with a reading endorsement and a master's degree in English and had completed a fel- lowship focused on the best practices within developmental education, I asked Annie if she had ever received any formal training in working with linguistic minority students. She responded, "Oh, definitely not. That's why I love it when I'm partnered with an ELL professor because we're both live at the same time . . . I'm kind of amazed at how sophisticated the upper-level ELL assignments are for students. They're doing pretty much transfer-level work, and a lot of the time, it's just simply the assignment they [students] need clarification about."

In reviewing the transcripts of the interview, it became apparent throughout the conversation that Annie tended to conflate being Latinx with being an international student. She mentioned the international student club when talking about campus life and support services for students. In talking about the writing assessments and placement procedures at Mann that were suspended during the 2020-2021 academic year because of the pandemic, Annie shared how students were effectively placing themselves into ESL or developmental courses. She added,

I have had extremely skilled Hispanic students that probably didn't even need developmental, that took it because they wanted the personal reinforcement before they went into comp, and I've had Latinx students who have very low skill levels. That being said, there would be no way for me to know (and it's not a question I would ask a student), unless they volunteered it, what their skills were in their native country. I'm sure there are many students who had not had access to education, particularly, and were probably not skilled in their native language. So then of course, it'll make it a little more difficult to take on a whole brand-new language.

No institutional data from Mann could be located that disaggregated Latinx students, especially data that distinguished domestic students from international students. However, it is worth reiterating that statewide, about 30 percent of Iowa's Latinx population are foreign-born (State Data Center of Iowa 4).

Leah: Asking Critical Questions about "Serving" Latinx Students Leah had been a full-time English instructor at Mann College for about ten years. She has a master's degree in English with a traditional focus in literature. Since arriving at Mann, she completed the same training at the Kellogg Institute as Annie. She was also a doctoral candidate in a program focused on developmental education. There were a limited number of Mann instructors who participated in the training to deliver the Accelerated Learn- ing Program (ALP) out of the Community College of Baltimore County's program that was a forerunner to the corequisite movement (Cho et al.).

From the beginning of the interview, Leah identified clear areas of opportunity for Mann College to improve its practice for Latinx students: "I don't think there is enough outreach to Dreamers or to students who are from a Latino background. We tend to look at our students more as the immigrant population or certain ethnic populations, but we haven't really dug in deep quite yet at [Mann] to do more targeted interventions." What Leah suggested here is that the conflation of Latinx identities with immigrant or foreign-born status, as illustrated by Annie, tends to be prevalent around the Mann campus. She spoke about the different recruitment events for specific populations that Annie described, but Leah added, "They've [advisors in particular] done all these things with the outreach and the food and the celebration aspect, but have we integrated it into our actual student support or academic support? Not as well as we could."

Interestingly, as I went through the Mann College website for initiatives focused on the Latinx community, I found a list of diversity initiatives. Under examples of di- versity initiatives and practices, the website listed approximately seventy items including campus conversations, Upward Bound, and a Black Male Symposium. The list also includes some somewhat confusing items, including Juneteenth, events held outside the college (e.g., an annual international food festival hosted by the city), and community-based organizations. The list also names coursework offered by the college, including courses on race, ethnicity, and gender. When I searched the course catalog for any courses with the words "Latino" or "Hispanic" in the descriptions that were not Spanish language courses, only two courses popped up: a women's history course and a sociol- ogy course focused on minority groups. Among the course competencies of the course are "Describe the barriers to Hispanic assimilation" (Mann College, "2021-2022 Course Catalog"). This competency is problematic in how it suggests that Latinx cannot or do not assimilate to American soci- ety-reinforcing the persistent perception that they are "foreign" (Valerio- Jiménez 3). Regardless of what happens outside of the classroom, this kind of competency paired with Leah's concerns about the integration of support suggests that the classroom may unintentionally be a hostile environment for Latinx students.

To address these issues, Leah made a number of suggestions to address the gaps in support. To start, she offered,

I would start by researching, by looking at what predominantly white schools and HSIs have in common and what they're missing in elements of support. A lot of the issues are issues of poverty that we could support better that will go into every single ethnicity, but to be able to target culturally, we can pull from a lot of our instructors who teach Spanish, who teach in areas that are related to more diverse elements. Our human services faculty do know a lot. I would bring those folks together, as well as dig into the research of best practices first and foremost.

Leah was clear that this type of work could not take place in a single meet- ing; it would be ongoing work ("we need a three-year plan") that could be continually revised for improvement.

A key component to addressing students' needs, in Leah's view, was to ask students what they need: "We do [ask] in some areas, but we don't have ongoing focus groups that help us understand the problems that they have." To further explain this, Leah gave the example of her experience the day after the election of Donald Trump:

My Latino students were just like, "What's going to happen now?" My refu- gee students and immigrant students were like, "Am I going to get deported tomorrow?" We started hearing that in a lot of different classrooms. And so we brought in some folks to do some "Know Your Rights" kind of campaign but they were so stretched because everybody else was asking for it too. That calmed a lot of students' concerns, but you know as well as anybody else how long-term and ongoing that was. I haven't seen as many Latino students in my classes as I did prior to the Trump era.

This example echoes the observations Annie made about the drop in Latinx enrollment.

While Celeste talked about the commonalities she shares with her Latinx students and the understanding of their culture (i.e., she is fluent in Spanish, attends a local church with services in Spanish, and spent signifi- cant time in Latin American countries), Leah was the only participant who directly confronted her identity as a white woman and how that impacts students' perceptions:

I really do believe that it [academic success] just comes down to confidence. Their [Latinx students'] issues with confidence begin with the fact that they're coming into a very uptight, white instructor's room. And they probably expe- rienced a lot of white women in school already, and so you get another one. [They ask themselves] "Okay, how is she going to treat me?"

Leah's acknowledgment of her white identity and how students likely already had white, female teachers before is also a tacit acknowledgment of white- stream schools where students from racially and minoritized communities are often educated but not nurtured (Urrieta 155, 181).

Finally, Leah suggested the need for different types of support that could benefit students both in and out of the classroom. She recommended the creation of peer mentoring and professional networks that could help students connect with their local communities (e.g., through businesses, nonprofits, and local leadership). Beyond campus clubs, Leah envisioned the ways that networking and community-engaged work could be incorporated into class assignments so that students could identify ways to connect their college experience with their postgraduation life. She elaborated that a class assignment could incorporate the following:

You [a student] need to find a campus club and a community organization, and through your resume or through your job search materials, write a paper that shows how you can connect to these different groups, how they could benefit from your knowledge and you could benefit from their knowledge. So tap into what resources we currently have to get into the community as well, but help them see how their current stages in life actually already are valuable to them, that experiential learning part and have them connect so that they have some networks.

While Annie spoke about the need for more culturally relevant texts to be incorporated into her classes, Leah shared her desire to see more holistic supports and educational experiences for students enrolled at Mann.

Discussion

While this study ended up being more exploratory in nature, the narratives from these instructors offer some insights for how to serve and support Latinx basic writers. This study highlights how political forces can shape Latinx students' sense of safety influences, whether or not students enroll in their local community college. As Annie and Leah noted, their hunches about why enrollment dropped was based on limited conversations with stu- dents and assumptions about current events. While this data was collected in 2020, the instructors did not note the COVID-19 pandemic's influence on their college's enrollment, especially for Latinx students.

This study highlights the language needs for some Latinx community college students like Rosanna, who are placed in ESL courses and may also ultimately need basic writing courses as well. From Celeste's narrative, it is evident that community colleges like Kinsella College may require instruc- tors with professional training in both ESL and writing pedagogies. As a reminder, Celeste majored in applied linguistics as a master's student, but she took composition courses so she could work for her department as a Freshman Composition instructor. Further, she was hired as a full-time ESL instructor, and Celeste was learning how to teach basic writing as her role with Kinsella evolved. Annie, on the other hand, had a master's degree in English and participated in professional development related to the teaching of basic writing and working with students in developmental education. Annie noted that she had no formal training in working with ESL students, and she was learning on the spot from her ESL instructor colleague through virtual tutoring hours at Mann College. As the 2016 TYCA Guidelines for Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-Year College noted, "Two-year college English faculty are often expected to be English studies generalists; they may teach courses in literature, creative writing, film, general humanities, and other relevant areas" (Calhoon et al. 4). These guidelines suggest that graduate programs in English should include "linguistic education for culturally and linguistically diverse student populations" (7); however, it does not explicitly mention ESL training. For smaller and rural community colleges that serve sizable Latinx communities, this study sug- gests that the students who enroll in ESL courses and basic writing courses are not separate categories. Instead, there may be students who require both. Considering that development education reforms have broadly pushed for combining or consolidating course sequences to reduce students' time in developmental courses (i.e., integrated reading and writing, corequisite courses), it may also be important for community colleges to consider how ESL content may be folded into developmental courses. Corcoran and Wilkinson offer an example of how translingualism was incorporated into the ALP model at New Jersey City University that may be helpful.

Leah brought up critical questions about how much her college re- ally knows about its students as a starting point for understanding how to best serve them. Annie and Celeste tended to talk about Latinx students in terms of being immigrants or international students. Considering that Iowa has older, multigenerational Latinx communities, it is unlikely that every Latinx student they have encountered is an immigrant or an international student. Marcos del Hierro reminds us that immigration status is extremely complex and that broad assumptions cannot be made. It also serves as a powerful reminder of the heterogeneity of Latinx students and the myriad identities they hold.

Related to identity, Leah is the only instructor who was clear about her own racial identity (white) in relation to the diverse students she teaches at Mann and how her students may perceive her. Based on fall 2016, over three-quarters of full-time community college faculty identified as white and only 6.7 percent identified as Latinx (Espinosa et al. 252). As the TYCA Guidelines for Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-Year College sug- gested, community college faculty should be prepared to work with a culturally and linguistically diverse student body (Calhoon et al. 7), even when they do not hold racially minoritized identities themselves. More should be explored about the perceptions Latinx students hold of their faculty members; how authentic, supportive relationships are built; and, overall, how non-Latinx faculty learn to teach Latinx students in culturally sustaining ways.

Finally, this study highlights ways that Latinx students can be supported both in and out of the classroom. Leah suggested ways that writing classes at Mann College could connect students with the communities to encourage them to get involved or to prepare to seek em- ployment with local businesses and/or nonprofits. This description was reminiscent of the service learning projects incorporated in a technical writing program in South Texas as described by Cárdenas and Loudermilk Garza. This type of approach may help better prepare students for college- level and/or professional writing while also helping them see how writing skills are applied in real-world contexts. Next, Annie spent time describing the campus events and supports available to help students on campus. Numerous studies have related community college students' sense of belong- ing to increased outcomes like higher rates of persistence, transfer, and so forth (Garza et al.; Lau et al.; Martinez and Munsch). More research might look at how a sense of belonging is fostered, specifically in basic writing.

This study addressed several critical needs in the extant literature- specifically, the need for more work focused on Latinx student writers in community colleges and in contexts outside the US Southwest. Drawing on data from three faculty members at two community colleges in Iowa, this study described some of the instructional and extracurricular practices used to teach and support Latinx students on these campuses. A crucial next step for understanding Latinx student needs is in hearing from the students themselves what opportunities and challenges they face and how their institutions can best support them, especially as they navigate the hurdles like ESL courses and basic writing that they encounter on their path toward attaining their academic goals.

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Erin E. Doran

Erin E. Doran is an associate professor of Educational Leadership and Foun- dations at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research centers on Latinx students in community colleges, the faculty who teach them, and Hispanic- Serving Institutions (HSIs). Her work has been published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, and Com- munity College Review.