EML Board Report

EML Board Report—March and April

Kaye Adkins

Students in the Technical Documentation course completed a project for the Pony Express Museum. The project included digitizing, editing, and cataloging 700 slides of the Pony Express Trail; creating documentation to support the project; and using the images to create multimedia projects to accompany current Museum exhibits. With the materials created by the students, the Pony Express Museum staff will be able to locate images in their collection to use in future publications and exhibits. With the documentation created by the students, Museum staff and volunteers will be able to digitize, edit, and catalog slides to add to the collection. The course is taught by Dr. Kaye Adkins.

Dana Andrews

Dana Andrews attended the College Composition and Communications Conference (4C’s) in Portland, Oregon from March 15-18.  He attended sessions on ESL and International Student Composition.

Liz Canon

Liz Canon’s article, "Blurred Lines: Does Religious Polarity Create Problematic Heroes in the Poem, Beowulf?", was accepted for publication by Interdisciplinary Humanities, the journal of the Humanities Education and Research Association. It will appear in their spring volume.

Bill Church

Dr. Bill Church, in cooperation with the St. Joseph Museum, has published In Their Own Words: An Oral History of African Americans in St. Joseph Missouri.  The book grew out of a summer PORTAL grant that provided an Applied Learning opportunity for Missouri Western students Jeremy Lyons, Ashley Snyder, and Alexis Mosley. An abridged version of the filmed interviews is available for viewing on the Museum web site. The book is available for purchase now, and the Museum is planning a public reception.

Marianne Kunkel

Dr. Marianne Kunkel organized a campus-wide poetry reading featuring the acclaimed writer Nikki Giovanni. The event, titled "The Mochila Review Presents: In the Shadow of Nikki Giovanni," took place on April 6 at 7 p.m. in Potter Hall Theatre. Co-organizers comprised her Mochila staff and donors comprised the President's and Provost's Offices, the EML department, the CME, and the St. Joseph Public Library.

Susan Martens

On March 2, the Prairie Lands Writing Project hosted High School Writing Day, an event which brought approximately 200 area high school students and teachers to MWSU for a day of writing workshops, lunch activities, and an open mic reading.  PLWP Co-Director and EML Instructor Amy Miller coordinated this event, while PLWP Teacher Consultant Terrance Sanders (Frontier STEM High School, KC) served as emcee.  Several MWSU faculty members and PLWP Teacher Consultants led workshops, while secondary English education students served as event volunteers.  PLWP would like to thank all of the MWSU faculty, staff, and students who contributed their time and energy to making this annual event so successful.

In March, the Prairie Lands Writing Project was awarded a $15,000 Supporting Effective Educator Development grant through the National Writing Project to support its Invitational Summer Institute program.  PLWP Director Susan Martens and Co-Director Amy Miller authored the grant proposal

Susan Martens gave a presentation titled "Leveraging the Writing Marathon for Community Connections" at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Portland, Oregon, on March 18.  

Miguel Rivera-Taupier
Last month, Miguel Rivera-Taupier published his article "Aspectos goticos y policiales de Estrella Distante" in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 94.2.

Dawn Terrick

On April 13, 2017, Dawn Terrick presented her paper, “Show Me How To Live: The Role of the Mother and Father in Monster/Horror Genre from Frankenstein to Dexter,” at the 47^th Annual Popular Culture Association (PCA) Conference in San Diego, California.

On Wednesday, April 19, 2017, Dawn Terrick, Director of Developmental Writing (ENG100), held a reception to honor those students whose essays were chosen to be in cluded in the 11^th edition of the ENG100 student publication Discovering the Student, Discovering the Self.  Students were in attendance to receive their awards and read from their published works.  The student essays reflect the struggle and the joy, the hard work and the rewards that these students have experienced both in their lives and in the classroom.  After the reading, students reconnected with their ENG100 Instructors and introduced their family and friends to their professors.  Faculty, staff, students, friends, and family were in attendance to enjoy the reading, food and camaraderie and conversation that carried over into the afternoon.