In the fall of 2006, the English Department piloted two mentored sections of English 100, researched by PhD student Holly Bruland and depicted in her subsequent article "'Accomplishing Intellectual Work': An Investigation of the Re-Locations Enacted Through On-Location Tutoring." Spring 2007 witnessed four mentored sections, and in their article "Mentoring First-Year Students in Composition: Tapping Role Construction to Teach," Jim Henry, Holly Bruland, and Ryan Omizo present the ways in which roles for mentors emerged interdependently with those of students, offering suggestions to faculty across the curriculum for tapping some of these roles even in the absence of a mentor.  Fall 2007 marked our first full-blown mentoring implementation, supported by both the UHM Chancellor's Office and the National Education Association through its Learning and Leadership grant. Nineteen mentors assisted instructors during that semester, and 88% of the students who were mentored evaluated their experience as "satisfied" or "very satisfied," while 86% of the instructors working with mentors evaluated their experience as "very satisfied." By the end of the spring term, mentors in first-year composition had held over 1800 individual conferences with students, and evaluations by faculty and students closely mirrored those of the fall semester.  In a manuscript under review, Henry, Bruland, and Sano analyze student evaluations for the entire year to discern ways in which "tutoring" and "mentoring" overlap when helping students write better.

In Fall 2008 we again offered 19 sections of mentored English 100, and we enhanced our mentor training to include workshops led by librarians on research tools to be taught to students, e-portfolio design, workshops on writing-across-the-curriculum, and mentoring as informed by place-based theory in first year writing--a vital part of the first year experience. Spring 2009 witnessed 14 sections of mentored English 100.

Please visit the links below to see workshops and colloquia that have figured in our initiative's evolution. At the end of the page we provide links to scholarly publications tracking the history and praxis of our initiative--another mo'olelo of composition mentoring at UHM.

Bruland, Holly.  "'Accomplishing Intellectual Work': An Investigation of the Re-Locations Enacted Through On-Location Tutoring." Praxis: A Writing Center Journal.  Spring 2007.

Henry, Jim, Holly Bruland, and Ryan Omizo.  "Mentoring First-Year Students in Composition: Tapping Role Construction to Teach." Currents in Teaching and Learning. Fall 2008.

Henry, Jim, Holly Huff Bruland, and Jennifer Lee Sano. Disciplinary epistemologies meet alternative mentoring: Reconfiguring agencies in first-year composition. Manuscript under review.

The 12th Annual LLL Student Conference of the College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature,
Honolulu, April 2008

• Presentations by Holly Bruland, Chelsey Kojima, Phillip Drake, Annette Priesmann, Tracey Williams, Alicia Maedo, Tanya Torres, and Jennifer Sano

Conference on College Composition and Communication, San Francisco, March 2009.  Holly Bruland, "On Location: Adding Writing Mentors to the First-Year Composition Curriculum"