Developing intercultural competence in first-year writing

In this presentation and facilitated dynamic discussion, we report the preliminary findings of a CWPA-funded multi-year study on an approach to first-year writing designed to increase undergraduate students’ intercultural competence via meaningful intercultural interaction among international and domestic students. We link mainstream and second-language-focused FYW sections to expose students to culturally diverse texts, structured intercultural interactions, and sequenced writing assignments supported by team-taught pedagogical interventions. We analyze student reflective texts via a grounded-theory coding scheme and Bennett’s (1986) developmental model of intercultural sensitivity, administer a pre- and post-course standardized measure of intercultural competence, and complete follow-up interviews. The results from our pilot semester (the first of three semesters of implementation) showed that most students — six of eight — demonstrate significant intercultural development. Students who completed the follow-up interviews reported transfer of both writing and intercultural skills to other contexts.

We designed this project to address an exigent need in our own context: our university has one of the highest populations of international students in the United States, as well as many domestic minority students, but lacks interventions to support collaboration. Thus, students often have Chinese or Midwestern experiences, rather than international experiences at a diverse university. Our project is one of only a few curricular interventions dedicated to mentoring students how to work with peers from different cultures effectively. We seek not only to offer both international and domestic students seats at the table, but to equip them to collaborate effectively among diversity. We share and invite discussion of a model for internationalizing writing programs with inexpensive curricula and infrastructure that can achieve the following: (1) integrating international components in curriculum design, (2) developing intercultural competence and tolerance to difference, and (3) transfer of skills and knowledge to other spaces in the academy and workplace.