International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Volume 5, Number 2, July 2011

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Research Article

Excerpt

Course-Embedded Mentoring for First-Year Students: Melding Academic Subject Support with Role Modeling, Psycho-Social Support, and Goal Setting - TA

This article examines a mentoring initiative that embedded advanced students in first-year composition courses to mentor students to excel to the best of their abilities. Mentors attended all classes along with students and conducted many out-of-class individual conferences, documenting each of them using program-implemented work logs. Four hundred four first-year students provided end-of-term anonymous feedback on standardized forms, which were transcribed, digitized, and tabulated for analysis. Analysis showed that the mentoring was effective in providing...

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Bios

Jim Henry
University of Hawai'i at Mänoa
Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
jim.henry@hawaii.edu

I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990, and I currently serve as Director of the Mänoa Writing Program, which oversees more than 500 writing intensive courses per semester. In addition to analyzing the UH Writing Mentors initiative, my scholarship has recently focused on teaching peer review as intellectual teamwork, hybridizing face-to-face and virtual collaborations between the academy and the workplace, posthumanism and technical writing, and self-representations of professional writers' workplace performances in video logs. I teach courses in composition, technical writing, mentoring, worklife writing, and composition studies. Awards include the Association of Business Communication's Distinguished Publication Award for Writing Workplace Cultures (2001), and the University of Hawaii's Board of Regents Medal for Excellence in Teaching (2009).
Website: http://www.english.hawaii.edu/henry/

Holly Huff Bruland
University of Hawai'i at Mänoa
Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
hbruland@hawaii.edu

I am currently working toward a Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Hawai`i Mnoa (UHM). My dissertation analyzes the work of writing mentors and the possibilities for trinary collaborations in the First-Year Composition classroom. At UHM, I have served as the graduate coordinator for the Writing Mentors Program and have taught First-Year Composition, Argumentative Writing, and the Analysis of Political Speeches. Prior to pursuing my Ph.D., I earned a Master of Arts in Teaching from Duke University and spent three wonderful years teaching secondary English and coaching high school field hockey. In 2009, I was honored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities with the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award.
Website: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~hbruland/

Jennifer Sano-Franchini
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Michigan, USA
sanojenn@msu.edu

I am a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric & Writing at Michigan State University where I teach first-year writing in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures. I am also a graduate fellow with the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative, and in Fall 2011, I will be a graduate fellow in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State. My research interests include theories and rhetorics of time, Asian American rhetoric, composition studies, and the intersection of cultural and digital rhetorics.
Website: http://www.msu.edu/~sanojenn

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International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning is a publication of the Center for Excellence in Teaching at Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, Georgia, USA.