Monday, February 7, 2011

Faculty and Student Accomplishments for December and January

Here is a little of what we've been up to in EFLJ:

Jeanie Crain was involved in two AQIP/Reaffirmation reviews/recommendations.

Stacia Bensyl presented her paper “Marking Time: Commemorative Literary Magazines in Japanese American Internment Camps” at the 17th annual Japan Studies Association conference in San Francisco. This paper is part of ongoing research into literary magazines in the Japanese American internment camps.

Three students from Bob Bergland's spring 2010 International Journalism Research had their research published in The Convergence Newsletter, which is sent to 1,000 journalists and academics specializing in multimedia journalism.

Austin Jacobs researched multimedia, interactive and distribution features of Mexican newspaper websites, while Todd Fuller conducted similar research with US weeklies and Emily Gummelt worked with the top 100 circulation U.S. magazines. All 11 students from that course had their work presented at national or international conferences.

As part of their study of 17th-century French theater, students in Susan Hennessy’s FRE 422 (Intro to French Civilization and Literature) performed scenes from Molière's "The Doctor in Spite of Himself" for French students at Central High School.

The Mu Iota chapter of Alpha Mu Gamma held an initiation ceremony in December. Alpha Mu Gamma is a national honor society for students in foreign languages. The society sponsors National Foreign Language Week in March and promotes understanding of and interaction with speakers of foreign languages.

The Spanish section has sent its inaugural exchange student to study for the spring semester at the Universidad de Sevilla in Spain. The direct exchange agreement between MWSU and U. Sevilla enables students from each university to study for a semester or a year at the host institution.

Forty area educators--including Western English instructors Jane Frick, Thomas Pankiewicz, Meredith Katchen, Patricia Donaher, Meg Thompson, Steve Frogge, and Patricia Brost scored 2011 Scholastic Writing Contest entries online. The teachers successfully scored over 3500 At-Large and 521 Missouri Region personal essays, poems, senior portfolios, science fiction, short stories, short-short stories, dramatic scripts, journalism, and humor pieces. Sixteen teachers and authors scored Missouri’s top entries again at the University of Missouri – Columbia on January 29, selecting 122 students from throughout the state as Gold Medal, Silver Medal, or Honorable Mention winners. The students and their teachers will be honored at this year’s Write to Learn Conference to be held at Tan-Tar-A in early March. The winning entries will be published in Missouri Youth Write next June—including works by students from St. Joseph Central, Platte County, Maryville, Mid-Buchanan R-V, West Platte R-II, and Parkhill High School. Jane Frick is the Missouri Scholastic Writing Awards Regional Coordinator; Rachel Stancliff, a graduate student in Western’s MAA in Written Communications: Technical Writing Option program, serves as the Missouri Region Contest Submissions Coordinator and Web Developer.

Western’s SNCTE (Student National Council of Teachers of English) Club sponsored a successful “Teacher Job Search” panel at Western. Administrators from Lathrop, Platte County, North Kansas City, and St. Joseph in charge of hiring their district’s new teachers described their hiring protocols and offered how-to-get-a-job-teaching advice. Over 100 Western students attended the two-hour event. Jessica Wilkinson, SNCTE president and senior BSE English major, chaired the panel.

Prairie Lands Writing Project and Western’s SNCTE CLUB sponsored a “Yes you CAN use Copyrighted Materials!” workshop for educators. Participants learned about the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education and why media coordinators and teachers should embrace students’ use of mass media, popular culture and digital media as they re-mix and/or create their own texts. Valorie Stokes, Platte County High School Media Coordinator and National Writing Project Web Presence Retreat Coordinator, facilitated the workshop.

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