This academic year the English department has introduced a new initiative in English 100 classrooms: MA students as mentors. The initiative emerged from four experimental sections in the spring of 2007 that enabled us to secure a three-year commitment from the Chancellor's office, supplemented by a one-semester grant from the National Education Association.

These mentors work closely with faculty in conceptualizing syllabi and writing activities—thus providing the mentors in their turn with mentoring into teaching first-year composition—then attend each class, modeling performances such as note-taking, peer review, and taking part in class discussion. In addition, they schedule regular out-of-class individual conferences to help students make the transition to college-level writing and the academic expectations of UHM. Mentors conduct "intake interviews" with each student during the first two weeks of classes, then follow up with regular meetings aimed at helping students draft and/or revise for particular assignments. These mentors also help students face any other challenges in their first-year experience, directing them to resources on campus and off, aided by our UH Writing Mentors website:   http://www.english.hawaii.edu/mentors/.

Our initiative also figures in research. Mentors complete a detailed standardized log of each individual conference, the better to reflect on their teaching, its progress, and its possibilities. These logs are submitted to Jim Henry, Director of Composition and Rhetoric, and Holly Bruland, Research Assistant to the Director of Composition, to form a growing database to be used in scholarly publications. Our working hypotheses are that this initiative will not only help students succeed in English 100 but also contribute to their overall first-year experience, their integration into our academic community, their subsequent performances in writing intensive courses, and their eventual graduation from UHM. Data collected during students' English 100 work will be linked to follow-up data on their performances more generally to probe these hypotheses.