101 (Spring 1992): 31-33 To the Editor Search

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MISSOURI educators frequently refer to Missouri as the forty-something state, because in comparisons of the public tax dollars that each of the fifty states expends for education, Missouri ranks near the bottom no matter which set of statistics are used. The open admissions policy at Missouri Western State College, mandated by legislation, means that qualified and motivated teachers of developmental writing are always needed here, and because the state has restricted the college to undergraduate status, there is no slave-labor pool of graduate students to teach these sections and the other freshman composition classes. At a recent Board of Regents study session addressing the open admissions policy and ways to serve the ever-increasing population of students requiring work in developmental writing one of the board members suggested that we in the Department of English, Foreign Languages, and Journalism canvass the community for volunteers to teach freshman composition. The reticence of state legislators and of prominent citizens like this Board of Regents member to fund public education keeps English department chairs like me scrambling to maintain and enhance programs. In fact, gathering resources is a large part of my day-to-day job as chair.

One way that we have maintained and improved our instructional delivery system has been by using undergraduates. In the nine years that I have been head of our department, our student labor allocation has grown from $750 a year to slightly over $20,000. In 1982, we employed 3 or 4 work-study students to assist our departmental secretary; between 1988 and 1991, we hired 55­60 students to complete tasks within the department.

Of course, we still use work-study students to aid our secretary in meeting the everyday needs of our 19 full-time and 15 or so part-time faculty members. During the school year, we have a student on duty at the department's main counter from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. two evenings a week. These students keyboard, duplicate, and collate instructional materials, answer telephones and deliver messages, meet guests as key come into the department, and generally serve as gofers for the staff. Creation of a computer laboratory and programmatic changes in our developmental writing class, however, account for the bulk of the increase in student workers and in the money budgeted for them.

Beginning in 1984, we have built a fully equipped word-processing laboratory for our department. This facility for computer-aided instruction now has 20 Apple IIe computers, 26 networked Macintoshes, 10 Imagewriter printers, 2 Apple laser printers, and a larger-screen projector. One of our faculty members receives a six-hour teaching-load reduction for supervising the lab; most of her duties include hiring and training student workers—up to 20 individuals who keep the lab open 60 hours a week.

The story of how we acquired our computer equipment and funding for faculty released time and student labor is too long to recount in detail. Some of our strategies included forming a computer-lab “consortium” with the other academic departments in our building and charging each a portion of the operating costs based on its students' usage; inviting the college president to a class on writing and editing with computers in which twenty students were sharing seven machines; teaching one-day seminars in desktop publishing and taking our pay in the form of Macintosh computers for the lab; charging students a $5 semester usage fee; hiring consultants to conduct word-processing workshops for members of our faculty; petitioning for a $2,500 allocation for a student intern for the computer lab; writing grant proposals to the college foundation for computer hardware and labor; arranging for free training for our students from the local Apple dealer so that they could complete routine maintenance and repair work on our computers; writing a plan for acquiring hardware and software and for compiling lab use and operations procedures; and, very important, encouraging a dean who supported the development of the lab.

Our workers now assist teachers and students with technical details when writing classes are held in the lab. The workers turn equipment on, handle snafus, and provide backup support so that class time is devoted to writing, rewriting, analyzing, and publishing. They provide help in using computers to students completing writing assignments in the lab (our developmental writing students are required, for example, to use Microsoft Word for all their work). They provide faculty and staff members with technical support in the production of fliers and brochures; they assist our secretary in setting up our budget spreadsheets and our various databases. The print mail labels, certificates, form letters. They become experts in desktop publishing. The longer students work for us in the lab, the more they learn and the more valuable they become to us and to their future employers. Indeed, two of our former workers report that they landed their first professional jobs in computer science—and they are probably now making more money than I am—because of their experiences in working with people and in modifying software in our computer lab.

Since 1987, we have also hired English majors to work in the lab. Each year we select one of these students to design and lay out the college's creative writing magazine. Using the Macintosh and desktop-publishing software, our students produce camera-ready copy, saving the department typesetting costs. Encouraging our majors to enroll in our desktop-publishing class and to take advantage of the equipment in the lab has created a plethora of chapbooks and literary magazines written and published by students. Last year I was a member of a teacher-accreditation team at a university in southern Missouri. The head of the English department told me he had recently had two of his poems printed in a literary magazine my colleague Mike Swope edited and published. I delicately explained that Mike was a student in my American literature class who also worked in the lab and who put out Soundings in his spare time.

English majors and journalism minors, some of whom have worked in the computer laboratory and all of whom have taken our department's desktop-publishing course, find that there is a large demand for their services. We regularly receive requests from the community and from other departments on campus offering to pay student interns to set up, design, write, or handle production of newsletters. The local corporate branch of Friskies Petcare sponsors ongoing internships. It pays a semester's tuition for two student, who put out the Friskies Petcare newsletter. Last semester one of our student interns agreed to initiate, design, write, and publish a corporate newsletter for MNX Trucking.

I also hire our majors to assist me in issuing our departmental newsletter, JEM Notes . Students write many of the feature stories, take all the photos, and help with layout and design. The masthead, for example, was designed by three of them. We print 1,000 copies of the 12-page, two-color newsletter and send them as bulk mail; the total cost of each issue is approximately $750. JEM Notes goes to our majors, to students we are recruiting, to alums, to professional associations, to VIPs on campus, to members of our Alumni and Foundation Board. The newsletter is an important departmental resource; we use it as a recruiting, fund-raising, and communications tool. Each of the three issues (Summer, Spring, Fall) contains an update on our graduates, course descriptions for the coming term, a listing of the professional achievements of our faculty, and several features extolling the virtues and accomplishments of our students, alums, and faculty. We have told the success stories of our major in graduate school, written about the major who won $1,000 for his fiction, and printed pictures and features describing our summer study programs in Mexico and France. Since we initiated the newsletter, our alums have significantly increased their contributions to our English and journalism scholarships, and several have designated that their annual donations be applied to the department's operating budget, particularly to cover the cost of putting out JEM Notes .

Programmatic changes in English 100, our developmental writing class, account for another chunk of the large increase in our student labor budget. Six years ago a group of senior English faculty members totally restructured the course and created an in-house text grounded in writing-process theory and practice. (At the same time, we also changed our composition placement procedures, switching from the use of English ACT scores to a timed writing administered during freshman orientation and holistically scored before students register for their classes.) Eventually, English 100 evolved into its present form. Students go to class three days a week with their instructors and attend writers' workshops two days a week with four or five other English 100 students. The workshops are led by student assistants and include activities in critical thinking, prewriting, and writing that amplify the class assignments. The student assistants meet weekly for training with the faculty member who designs the workshop assignments and activities. As department chair I am responsible for recruiting enough qualified students to lead the writer's workshops (we have between 55 and 60 workshops every year) and for finding the money to pay the student assistants minimum wage for their training time and for conducting the workshops—a projected cost of $9,500 in 1991­92.

Every summer we mail a form letter to our 100 or so returning majors and to every elementary education major at Missouri Western who has completed 60 hours and who has a grade point average above 2.5. We invite them to apply to work as student assistants, and for the last three years we have had 35­40 more applicants than we needed. We give preference in hiring to English majors, and then we hire students whose schedules fit the workshop times and who are eligible for work study, the last criterion reducing our costs for an assistant's wage from $4.25 to $1.28 an hour. Initially, we had to be creative to find the funds to pay our student workers. One year we applied for and received a grant from the Alumni Foundation to cover about a third of the costs. In 1989, to augment the student labor budget we added a $5 surcharge to the notebook texts we sell in the campus bookstores. Our dean has been the best administrative supporter of the English 100 program, and he has boosted the student labor budget every year.

Major employed as assistants in the writer's workshops also have the option of writing a final paper and receiving internship credit. Many of these students tell us that their own writing improved dramatically as a result of leading the workshops. Our teaching majors frequently state that conducting workshops provide them with more theory and practice in teaching writing than any of their education courses and practicums except for student teaching. Former student assistants believe that their workshop experience not only helped them obtain teaching assistantships in graduate school but also supplied them with resources for taking on their first sections of freshman composition.

We consider our majors an important resource, whether they are paid for their contributions or not. Our students have twice received chapter designations of “outstanding” for their participation in our Sigma Tau Delta English honorary. Majors work with faculty members in commenting on the writing of high school students during High School Writing and Communications Day, part of our annual recruiting activities.

We are proud of our students' achievements, especially since our institution's admissions policy is open-door and many of our graduates are from the first generation in their families to attend college. By the summer of 1991, one-third of the English majors who graduated the previous spring had landed teaching assistantships and planned to continue their English studies at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, at Central Missouri State University, at Emporia State University, at Wichita State University, and at Bowling Green University. Other recent graduate were completing advanced degrees at Oregon State University, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Missouri, the University of Nebraska, and Kansas State University. We expected that two nontraditional students (women in their late thirties with families) would finish their PhD requirements in English within the year.

Perhaps the constant scramble for resources to cover instructional needs in Missouri has some benefits. Hiring students as workers in our computer lab and as assistants in developmental writing seems to have converted several of them to English majors. Our increase in student labor monies parallels our increase in majors in the department—from 37 in 1982 to 128 in the spring of 1991. Enrollment at Missouri Western during that time grew a mere 28%, compared with a 345% increase in our majors.

The author is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Foreign Languages, and Journalism at Missouri Western State College. This paper was presented at the 1991 ADE Midwestern Summer Seminar at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

© 1992 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.

ADE Bulletin 101 (Spring 1992): 31-33

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