The Internationalization of US Writing Programs
284
The Internationalization of US Writing Programs
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Overview
The Internationalization of US Writing Programs illuminates the role writing programs and WPAs play in defining goals, curriculum, placement, assessment, faculty development, and instruction for international student populations. The volume offers multiple theoretical approaches to the work of writing programs and illustrates a wide range of well-planned writing program–based empirical research projects.
As of 2016, over 425,000 international students were enrolled as undergraduates in US colleges and universities, part of a decade-long trend of increasing numbers of international students coming to the United States for both undergraduate and graduate degrees. Writing program administrators and writing teachers across the country are beginning to recognize this changing demographic as a useful catalyst for change in writing programs, which are tasked with preparing all students, regardless of initial level of English proficiency, for academic and professional writing.
The Internationalization of US Writing Programs is the first collection to focus specifically on this crucial aspect of the roles and responsibilities of WPAs, who are leading efforts to provide all students on their campuses, regardless of nationality or first language, with competencies in writing that will serve them in the academy and beyond.
Contributors: Jonathan Benda, Michael Dedek, Christiane Donahue, Chris W. Gallagher, Kristi Girdharry, Tarez Samra Graban, Jennifer E. Haan, Paula Harrington, Yu-Kyung Kang, Neal Lerner, David S. Martins, Paul Kei Matsuda, Heidi A. McKee, Libby Miles, Susan Miller-Cochran, Matt Noonan, Katherine Daily O’Meara, Carolina Pelaez-Morales, Stacey Sheriff, Gail Shuck, Christine M. Tardy, Stanley Van Horn, Daniel Wilber, Margaret Willard-Traub
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781607326762 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Utah State University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/02/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 284 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Shirley K Rose is professor of writing, rhetorics, and literacies and former director of writing programs in the Department of English on the Tempe campus of Arizona State University. She has published essays on writing program administrators as archivists and has coedited several collections on studies of writing program administration with Irwin Weiser, including Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement and The Internationalization of US Writing Programs. Professor Rose currently serves as the co-director of the WPA Consultant-Evaluator Service.
Irwin Weiser is professor of English at Purdue University. He has served as department head, director of composition, and director of developmental writing and most recently as dean of the College of Liberal Arts. He is active in the Council of Writing Program Administrators, including serving several terms on the editorial board of WPA: The Journal of the Council of Writing Program Administrators and a term on the executive board.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
WRITING PROGRAM ADMINISTRATORS IN AN INTERNATIONALIZING FUTURE
What's to Know?
Christiane Donahue
INTRODUCTION
There is no doubt that the student population in US higher education is rapidly changing — a change that, it turns out, is shared around the globe. European institutions are seeing high rates of international enrollees, from across Europe (encouraged by the Bologna Process) but also from Asia, South America, and Africa; Korean colleagues report high numbers of students from China seeking to complete their education in Korean universities; and so on. But this change within our classrooms is only part of the picture. The multdirectional movement suggests change in the world in which graduates will do their work, live their lives.
My title asks, for today's WPA, "What's to know?" Put simply, my reply is, "We need to know that while we do great things in US writing programs, and have a rich and strong history, the world is changing. We are sending students out into that world and we want them to be as prepared as possible." We need to know that (1) we are not alone — other work on higher education writing can help us sharply articulate our own strengths and challenges — and (2) all students must grapple with questions of language and English if they are to be truly and fully prepared. We, and our students, are part of a new ecology, a new ground and new air: an overall organic system of relationships among individuals, institutions, and environments that demands interdependence. As Mary Jo Reiff, Anis Bawarshi, Michelle Baliff, and Christian Weisser note in Writing Program Ecologies (Reiff et al. 2015), in an ecology model, "the system provides the site of meaning," (3) and the complex relationships and dynamic connections among participants occur within "a network, a system, a web: an ecology" (3).
New modes of interaction in that ecology entail changes in the way institutions respond to students generally and in how they respond to student writing specifically. This chapter explores what WPAs, and by extension the teachers with whom they work, need to know about these issues in order to think through new demands in the local work of their programs in a global context. In terms of our purposes in higher education overall, I will argue that a metacritical, internationalized awareness of writing research and teaching in higher education is essential to helping our culture, our attitudes, and our self-awareness evolve in new directions. It can inform our programmatic decisions, raise questions about components of writing and writing instruction that we have naturalized, and call us to better understand the role of language in that writing.
In terms of the implications for language, I argue that all students, not only the traditional range of L2 students, will benefit from a differently imagined writing curriculum in our sure-to-be internationalized future. Ultimately, WPAs' understanding of English is at the heart of students' future work in a superdiverse world: English as both not inherently tied to writing and no longer seeable as a single normed entity. I hope WPAs will find this thought piece a provocation and a useful tool. What readers will not find is an article about language diversity in our US classrooms today as a way to improve or broaden our attention to L2 learners, though I will be treating questions of superdiversity, globalization, and mobility that clearly also impact that issue. What I hope to share is a sense of the value of changing our collective consciousness about our enterprise.
PART ONE: HIGHER EDUCATION: INTERNATIONAL, GLOBAL, MOBILE, SUPERDIVERSE ...?
The terms international and global are sometimes used interchangeably. Perspectives from fields as diverse as sociology, economics, education, and international politics suggest that internationalizing is built from the starting point of nations and then imagines inter-nation interactions. Internationalizing higher education tends toward the idea that US colleges might expand their reach, establish campuses overseas, or draw additional students in from other countries. Globalization generally draws on questions concerning, for example, increasing economic interdependence, the "shrinking" of the world stage, driven in part by social media and the Internet, lower travel costs, and the rehierarchizing of multinational corporations over nation-states. With no nation in its root, it focuses our attention on common experiences driven by something other than nation-state configurations.
Globalization and internationalization affect higher education in overlapping ways. The global and international aspects can in fact take quite different shapes, despite the shared terminology. Higher education's internationalization has been defined by Jane Knight in "Internationalisation of Higher Education: A Conceptual Framework" (cited inNinnes and Hellsten 2005), as "the process of integrating international and intercultural dimensions into the teaching, research, and service functions of higher education institutions" (215). The globalization of higher education engages with commodification of brands of teaching and pedagogy and with market forces (215) driving, for example, competition for student populations, a phenomenon intensified by the evolution of MOOCs or distance-learning models or even the opening of US campuses abroad.
Social geography, a human geography that serves to make sense of the geographical nature of being-in-the-world (Verstraete and Cresswell 2002, 12), deepens our understanding of internationalization and globalization by offering mobility as the framing concept for twenty-first-century societal dynamics. Ginette Verstraete and Tim Cresswell note that the concepts of place and roots were long valued over mobility; we've had a humanistic engagement with place as a site of authentic roots (11). A mobility perspective considers place as radically open and permeable (12), and the stability we seem to have counted on becomes less foundational, replaced by an expectation that people will move, travel, engage, whether virtually or in person, whether in real time or asynchronously, in every lived context. Mobility is more focused on the individual in relation to these broader phenomena, exploring how and why people move, in what ways, with what contours and consequences.
A related term more recently taken up by writing scholars is transnationalism, a frame grounded in anthropology, sociology, economics, and geography. It emphasizes trans activity but still works from a nations starting point, while indicating a fluid relationship among those nations. The social scholarship defines transnationalism as "immigrants who stay connected with the source country and use current modes of communication to do so," much like what is described in social network theory more broadly (Vertovec 2007, 1044); migrants, through daily-life activity, create social fields that cross nation-state boundaries (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 1994; Gonzalez 2013). Transnational contexts are often driven by a tension between integration into the new culture or country and maintaining ties to a home context. For student populations, this "anchored mobility" influences how they prioritize their learning choices. For our purposes, the new social fields and interconnections created transnationally deeply influence communication and text construction.
This is a new moving world, moving into, out of, across, or within countries. StevenVertovec (2007) suggests that while "managing multiculturalism" isn't new, we have entered an era of "superdiversity" in which it isn't that the variables and the correlations are new, it's the sheer scale of things, the "coalescence of factors which condition people's lives" (1025). He suggests the key to superdiversity is not only the increased international mobility of peoples for an increasing range of reasons but also the internal diversity within populations on the move — workers, students, new citizens, spouses and families, refugees, illegal or undocumented workers — which means that country of origin is simply a less relevant variable (1030, 1039). Of course, schools in particular are sites of these diversities.
In terms of language, writing, and higher education, the idea of superdiversity helps us see the language-specific ways globalization and mobility can impact US writing classrooms, writing instruction, writing research, and our choices about what to value, what to teach, and how to support writing faculty. Certainly L2 teaching and scholarship have worked long and hard to highlight these challenges and to support multilingual students in these ranges of populations. WPAs cannot avoid encountering multilingual writing questions in their work, and language diversity has been increasingly broadly acknowledged, though these questions can look quite different in different institutions. But the writing question is not only about multilingual student needs and repertoires.
Writing Research and Instruction Internationally
Attention to writing outside US contexts offers insight into the prioritization of writing as a construction of meaning in diverse disciplinary contexts. The myths that there is no writing instruction outside our known US contexts and that there has been no research about higher education writing until recently are patent examples of our misreading of the world through a US lens, one that can be refocused via growth in our awareness of other traditions. I believe this awareness does unsettle our clean narratives about world dominance in this development, but that unsettling is not a negative.
Our US narrative is our own, after all. We have, from the 1960s on, established a unique path with our situated approaches to pedagogy, our institutional and programmatic trends, and our own traditions of research, all with clear strengths and clear limitations that are themselves often the subject of intense debate within the field. We can point to the early work in the City University of New York system, often cited as the birthplace of composition. The "constellation of people and ideas" (Brereton 2011) at that time in that system set a path via the attention to ordinary student writing as something worth reading as carefully as literature (Trimbur 2011). The Dartmouth Seminar of 1966, whose work with personal growth and expressive writing controlled the field for quite some time afterwards, established the focus on writing as a process that has remained one of the single most important elements of writing instruction today.
These and other important events should not lead us to feeling first but simply to contextualizing our work within the specificities of US higher education, just as other countries do for their contexts. Certainly, worldwide, teachers and scholars have thought about students' needs, studied writing in a population beyond grammar school, and developed support programs. Some US work is helpful to these contexts, some is not, just as some work outside US contexts is helpful to the United States and some is not. I think the contact with other traditions, much like the contact described in superdiversity studies, offers alternative ways of growing writing studies and multiple opportunities for WPAs to broaden their knowledge and understanding.
The work on writing in higher education around the world is rich and deep: writing centers, writing programs, publications, conferences drawing on writing research and how it works, develops, is best taught and learned, is situated — across all levels, in a variety of cultural and institutional contexts, sometimes focused on students learning academic English but more often focused on writing in languages of the countries in question as students move through higher education. We must be open to radically different grounds and approaches across international lines that do constitute writing program work (see for example Martins 2015), even as shared motivations and approaches also emerge. New frames of writing research from around the globe also interrogate our assumptions.
I offer two cases that can highlight these issues. I draw a very broad-brush overview to give a sense of both intersections and divergences with US priorities, as well as histories of and possible misperceptions about the work in and through these cases: Australia and the francophone cluster of France, Belgium, and Canada. I hope to show the degree to which writing instruction and research have a history we will recognize and different insights from which we can benefit.
Australia
Australia's forty-some-year history with writing in higher education, starting in the early 1980s, has evolved in key domains: identifying challenges for students in higher education writing; supporting writing instruction through the disciplines; eschewing "generic" writing education; grounding the theory of writing education through diverse fields including education and applied linguistics; developing support for students in higher education writing. I spend some time developing what has happened in Australia because it serves well the question of what has developed outside the United States more generally and because it offers intriguing, useful insights in comparison to US developments. In addition, Australia's history avoids treating the complicated question of whether writing instruction outside the United States has been attached to writing in English or writing in languages of particular countries or regions, a question I'll take up separately. Here I am particularly indebted to Australian scholars like Kate Chanock for their recent historical overviews of these developments on which I am drawing. Chanock, in "Academic Writing Instruction in Australian Tertiary Education: The Early Years" (Chanock 2012), notes, "I read every publication in this field that I could obtain from the eighties, often in the form of non-refereed conference papers" (7), thus offering a comprehensive overview not available to every reader.
Chanock notes that early development of attention to higher education writing was in part in response to the politics of "wider participation in higher education," a phenomenon that has been called "massification" by scholars and journalists in Australian and European contexts since the 1980s, with its accompanying worry about underprepared students (7; see also Skillen 2006). She suggests that these concerns predated the "wider participation" era of the late 1980s but were highlighted by it (9). One response in the 1980s to this perceived need was the development of "learning centers" staffed by learning advisors (Ballard 1984; Beasley 1988; Skillen 2006). The learning advisors, who worked largely one on one with students, believed students' challenges grew out of encountering new communities of practice and new (academic) dialects, not deficiencies in their abilities (Chanock 2012, 10).
These challenges have also been described by Iris Vardi (2000), citing research from the 1990s, as difficulty working out "the hidden rules governing what could be said and how it needed to be said" (2), as if academic discourse were a new language with new underlying understandings, both in students' transition from secondary to higher education and in their moves across disciplines. Jan Maree Maher and Jennifer Mitchell later explored this transition from students' points of view. They gathered student perceptions in the humanities and the social sciences, via focus groups, and identified key student uncertainties as well as mismatches between student and faculty perspectives in the areas of purpose ("what am I doing here?"), reading strategy ("what and how much should I be reading?"), and writing assessments as students were faced with complex new tasks and genres (Maher and Mitchell 2010).
The learning advisors of the 1980s and 1990s, whose roles were not limited to writing, demonstrated that student writers could in fact succeed in most contexts if they responded to the assignment and used strong conventional argument techniques, regardless of factors such as error (Chanock 2012, 10). In a study of peer-review effectiveness, Vardi (2009) identified the challenges students face as primarily in terms of "voice in relation to authorities" and being able to evaluate textual materials in discipline-appropriate ways (350), noting that disciplines themselves are internally diverse with respect to discursive and rhetorical patterns.
These concerns had been evident in the 1970s and 80s in Australia's history and resulted in the development, by the 1980s, first of "remedial" writing classes or "generic" approaches and then of writing attention embedded in disciplinary contexts. The generic approaches — approaches that try to teach writing as skill, separate from disciplinary context — were fairly quickly deemed inadequate, a determination we find echoed across various national contexts and time periods outside the United States. BrigidBallard (1984), for example, "found instruction in grammar or ideal structures of essays ... to be of marginal value ... if [students] are approaching their materials in a manner inappropriate to the academic culture of which they are a part" (52).
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