The Student Scholar Project

Alum turned EHS teacher, Dr. Matthew Kim’97 attended his first academic conference in 2003. It was the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New York City. The event proved to be life changing as he networked his way through conference presentations, dinner parties, and after party events. It was at that conference over dinner that he was invited by Cynthia Selfe, an innovative literacy scholar, to apply to Michigan Technological University for a master’s degree in Rhetoric and Technical Communication.  Had I not attended that conference, Kim recalls, “I would not have ended up at Michigan Tech. I did not even know that university existed. I was at the right place at the right time. In the discipline of rhetoric, that is called a kairotic moment.”

In the last ten years, Matthew has given academic papers as close as Boston and as far away as Ghent, Belgium, and Waikiki Beach, Hawaii where he received the 2004 National Council of Teachers of English Assembly of Computers in English award for his research on students with learning disabilities and their digital literacies practices.

At Eagle Hill School, Matthew desires for his students to have the same opportunities—and hopefully a kairotic moment—that he has been offered. Kim has created a program he calls The Student Scholar Project. The project aims to mentor juniors and seniors at our school to research and write academically competitive papers and present them at national and international academic conferences. “When you provide students with opportunities to research and write intellectually competitive work, students will rise to the occasion and impress their audiences,” says Kim. One reason our students leave our school ready for college, Kim writes, is because we respect them from the time they arrive here and treat them as colleagues as they become more mature and ready to take on new challenges. In 2013, Matthew and Michael Riendeau took Gonzalo Chavez ‘13, Justin Itzkowtiz ‘13 and Caroline Curtis ‘14 to Ghent Belgium to present their rhetorical analyses on gun control at the Rhetoric as Equipment for Living conference. That conference was an excellent experience for our students. After our presentation, they were approached by a professor from Notre Dame University who told them he would be honored to have each of them in one of his composition courses and offered them his business card. Also in 2013, Matthew and Danny Feinblatt ‘14 presented their rhetorical analyses on gun control at the Weapons of Mass Seduction conference held in Middleburg, Netherlands and Ghent Belgium. This year, Matthew, Frieda Myers ‘14, and Jahmeelah Nash-Fuller ‘15 will attend the 3^rd International Conference on Play in Prague, Czech Republic. At this conference, the presenters will discuss the importance of teaching transformative storytelling as a method of opening up dialogue among students and teachers about bullying.