Jhumpa Lahiri video about writing in Italian

This video about Jhumpa Lahiri gets into her experience of writing in Italian; I think I'll suggest it to my first-year writing students. One thing she says that I found interesting and might inspire some conversation is this:

I like being at the beginning again as a reader and as a writer. I like that I'm limited. I like that I only have a certain vocabulary and certain tools, and I can only go so far. That appeals to me.

I wonder what my students might think about that perspective... 

Some quick notes at the beginning of week 3 of the semester

I've gotten through two weeks of the semester already, and I'm not too far behind on my teaching-related work. Amazingly, I have been able to keep them in class and active for the whole 100 minutes so far. (I'm always afraid we will run out of things to do after about 15 minutes, and I'll have to let them go 85 minutes early...) So far we've had some interesting discussions about developing confidence writing in your L2/3/4/n (Maybe it should be called Ln writing...) Also the possible roles of translation in writing in English. For this, I was even able to talk a little about my 2013 (2014?) paper about Google Translate and EFL writing. 

I've also done most of the interviews of undergraduate Fulbright applicants whom I'm trying to help revise their applications. I have a meeting this week with the members of my subcommittee to go over the applications and share our suggestions about them. I hope these students will be able to get a chance to go abroad for a year and do some intercultural exchange. I know it changed my life.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to try to join my virtual writing group. We'll meet (virtually, of course) at 9:00 and share what we plan to work on for the next two hours, then go away and do it. Then come back at 10:55 and share what we did. My plan is to work on an application for the Rhetoric Society of American 2023 Summer Institute. I'm interested in a seminar on "Decolonizing Comparative Global Rhetorics." I think it could be very relevant to a paper I'm working on, but I'm not sure yet because I need to know more about what it means to decolonize comparative global rhetorics and how I might fit (if at all) into such an effort. (That's basically what my application narrative says so far...)

I'm also enjoying finally reading Ming-cheng M. Lo's Doctors Within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (University of California Press, 2002). I've picked around in it before, but now I'm reading it from beginning to end. Lo had two recent interviews (part one, part two) related to this topic that reminded me that I hadn't actually read the book yet!

Night in the American Village

I just finished reading Akemi Johnson's Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa, which I bought in Kindle format after reading John Grant Ross's review of it.

Ross does a good job summarizing the book (without giving away too much!), so I recommend you read his review (and then buy the book!). I just want to mention a few points that I found interesting (which probably will say more about my own particular--or peculiar--interests than about the book itself). A lot of what the book centered around had to do with language, culture, and intercultural relations of various kinds--not surprising, I suppose. One extended example:

Johnson describes a 34-year-old Okinawan woman named Naomi who worked at the U.S. Navy Hospital as an Master Labor Contractor (MLC), a full-time position for "permanent residents of Japan who are unconnected to the U.S. military"; Johnson describes MLCs as forming "the lowest rung of the chain of command, below American active duty and civilian personnel." And not surprisingly, these workers as the lowest rung turn out to be "the continuity that [keep] the place running." One of things that make Naomi essential to the functioning of the base is her language ability and cultural knowledge. Johnson describes how this knowledge works on a typical day:

Over the first four to five years on the job, Naomi had learned a sophisticated system of code-switching to thrive in her multicultural workplace. "Once I go through the fence [between the U.S. base and its surroundings], I become chotto, a little bit, American," she said. On base, she shifted her mindset, ready to say "no" if she meant "no" instead of the "Hmm, let me think about it" she'd use off base. She had to be ready to adjust, depending on whom she was talking to, something she excelled at because of her experience living in both the United States an Okinawa. "I can imagine how they tend to think," she said of Americans and Okinawans. She knew with a local, middle-aged man who worked on base, she had to joke with him, talking to him casually, with an Okinawan accent. When she spoke to her contractor from mainland Japan, she switched to a Tokyo accent, which she'd learned from having Japanese roommates in the States. With her American supervisor, she had to use clear and professional English. If she messed up, the stakes could be high. "If I talk to an Okinawan ojichan [grandpa] with a mainland accent, he'll block me right away. Boom! 'I don't talk to you anymore.'" If she talked to him the correct way, he treated her like family. "That's how I figured out how to survive in that environment. I like it, actually."

Shuttling among languages and cultures (as Suresh Canagarajah might put it), Naomi demonstrates a sophisticated rhetorical awareness of what it takes to get done with different people in different contexts. She is almost a different person depending on who she is talking to. To Johnson, Naomi points out the implications of this in terms of her self-identity:

Looking back on her experience, Naomi thought it was easy to label the different roles she had played: Okinawan, international student, adult professional. But those labels didn't adequately describe her. "The inside is more difficult," she said. "I'm a blend of so many factor: Okinawa, United States, California, and on the base. ... It's hard to categorize me right now." ... She valued this flexible self she had cultivated. "My perspective changes almost every day," she said. "I'm creating my own style."

I'm not sure if Naomi is her real name because Johnson notes that she changed some interviewees' names (but on the other hand, she mentions a "Naomi Noiri" in her acknowledgments). I've been discussing with some colleagues the issue of international students' names, in particular the international students who choose to be called by "English" names. Naomi's experience and her awareness of moving in and out of identities adds an interesting twist to the question of what it might mean to take on a name that is not the one you were born with (or rather, that your parents gave you) in intercultural contexts.

Anyway, read the whole book! It's a great read.

Position: Northeastern University Assistant or Associate Teaching Professor of Multilingual Writing

You can apply through the NU HR portal: https://neu.peopleadmin.com/postings/59696

The English Department Writing Program of Northeastern University seeks to fill one benefits-eligible, full-time, non-tenure track position for Assistant or Associate Teaching Professor of Multilingual Writing, beginning in the 2019 fall semester. The Northeastern Writing Program, recipient of the CCCC Certificate of Writing Program Excellence, serves multilingual undergraduates and graduate students through coursework, the Northeastern Writing Center, writing groups, and various workshops and outreach efforts. The Teaching Professor of Multilingual Writing will teach two courses per semester aimed at speakers of other languages, work for the equivalent of one course per semester in the Northeastern University Writing Center, and lead program-wide efforts to support Northeastern’s large multilingual undergraduate and graduate student population. Reporting to the Director of the Writing Program and working closely with writing program administration, the successful candidate will work with both students and faculty to coordinate and enhance existing multilingual writing support resources, and build writing faculty capacity around multilingual writing pedagogy. The ideal candidate is an innovative, dedicated teacher who is knowledgeable of teaching and assessment strategies for supporting multilingual writers. There is an established promotion ladder from Assistant to Associate to Full Teaching Professor and opportunity for multi-year contracts. The standard appointment for teaching professors is six courses per year (80%), with service (10%) and professional development (10%) responsibilities.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

● Work individually in the Writing Center with undergraduate and graduate multilingual students across the curriculum on academic and professionally oriented writing tasks.

● Plan and conduct training around multilingual writing pedagogy and support for NU Writing Center consultants and Writing Program instructors, whether through workshops, online modules and materials, or presentations.

● Work individually with NU Writing Center consultants and Writing Program instructors in support of individual students and multilingual pedagogies.

● Work closely with the NU Writing Program Director and Writing Program administrators (Writing Center Director, Director of First-Year Writing, Director of Advanced Writing in the Disciplines), supporting ongoing programs and helping to create new initiatives to support multilingual writers.

● Serve on the Writing Program Committee (policy body for the NU Writing Program)

● Participate in writing-related assessment initiatives.

● Perform additional duties as assigned.

Qualifications 

● Ph.D. or Ed.D degree in relevant discipline (e.g., Rhetoric and/or Composition Studies, English, Applied Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, Language and Literacy) required.

● Teaching experience with emphasis on college-level writing in English required.

● Experience teaching writing and/or advanced language acquisition in English to students one-on-one and/or classroom settings recommended.

● Experience facilitating student and faculty workshops.

● Interest or experience working collaboratively with staff, such as advisors, student affairs or admissions professionals, in support of multilingual students.

● Ability to work as a member of a diverse community.

Additional Information   

The College of Social Sciences and Humanities is a leader in the Experiential Liberal Arts (www.northeastern.edu/cssh/about/deans-welcome). Founded in 1898, Northeastern University is a dynamic and highly selective urban research university in the center of Boston. Grounded in its signature co-op program, Northeastern provides unprecedented global experiential learning opportunities. The College is strongly committed to fostering excellence through diversity and enthusiastically welcomes nominations and applications from members of groups that have been, and continue to be, underrepresented in academia.

Review of applications begins immediately and will continue until the position is filled.

For information about the Writing Program, please see http://www.northeastern.edu/writing/. For information about employment at Northeastern University, see http://www.northeastern.edu/hrm/. To apply, go to the Faculty Positions site at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities website: http://www.northeastern.edu/cssh/faculty-positions/. Northeastern University is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Educational Institution and Employer and a Title IX University. We encourage applications from women and underrepresented groups. Northeastern University is an E-Verify Employer.

Initial applications should consist of a letter of interest; a curriculum vita; and a brief (1-2 page) statement of teaching philosophy, including a description of training and experience in teaching writing. Please note any background or training with ESL students, writing in the disciplines, online teaching, community engagement, or digital media. Applications received by March 22 can be assured the fullest review.

Mya Poe, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English

Director of the Writing Program

415 Holmes Hall

Northeastern University 

Boston, MA 02115

m.poe@northeastern.edu

Drafting a disciplinary linguistic landscape assignment (Was, Work on a new assignment for my summer interdisciplinary writing class

As I might have mentioned, I'm teaching a summer course in interdisciplinary writing, beginning in June. I've taught this course before, with what I'd consider to be mixed success. The course was inaugurated in the fall of 2014, and as I mentioned back then, in my experience it's ideally (though not necessarily in practice) populated by students from a variety of academic disciplines. At this point, though, it looks like I'm going to have a lot of engineering students in my section, which will make the "interdisciplinary" part of this a bit challenging. One thing that I've found, though, is that there are some interesting differences among the fields (sub-fields?) of industrial engineering, civil engineering, computer engineering, etc. (I see that I've mentioned this before.) So I might try to take advantage of those differences to have students look into the interdisciplinarity of engineering.

In the past, I've had students start out by reading up on discourse communities and thinking about the implications of seeing their own disciplines as discourse communities, perhaps stretching the common definitions. For this class, though, I'm going to try to start off with a specific focus on the writing that goes on in their disciplines, in particular by asking students to look at their departments as physical, institutional, and textual spaces. I'm going to ask them to work in pairs (I want to put them in groups comprising students from different disciplines, which will be a challenge) and preparing a PPT presentation in which they'll describe, compare, and analyze the spaces occupied by their departments. Depending on how their departments are physically situated in the school, part of this would involve observing (and photographing) the buildings/hallways in which their departments are located. The other areas might be classrooms, laboratories, lounges, etc., that "belong" to their departments. I want them to pay special attention to the kinds of written texts that are displayed around those spaces and what those texts might tell them about how the department is trying to represent itself to insiders and outsiders. By texts, I'm thinking about not only displays of scholarly work (books, papers, poster presentations), but also signs, postings on bulletin boards, postings on faculty members' office doors, etc. I'm asking students to think about what these texts (including images) might say about what their discipline is "about"--what kinds of activities are valued in the department and how these activities help distinguish the department from or connect it to other departments or parts of the university.

I showed a draft of the assignment to Neal Lerner and Laurie Edwards, the director of the Writing Program and the director of the Advanced Writing in the Disciplines (AWD) program at my school. They kindly provided advice on revising the assignment; in particular, they warned that I should make sure that the students' products don't end up simply listing features and similarities and differences, but that these observed features also need to be analyzed in a theoretical context. So I'm working on revising the assignment to put more emphasis on analysis, and I'm trying to bring in some theoretical perspectives that will be accessible to the students without overwhelming them in the first week of the course.

In writing up this assignment, I've been drawing on several different (and probably incompatible!) sources: the field of linguistic landscape studies, John Swales' concept of "textography" (here's a re-review of Swales' book) and Latour & Woolgar's discussion of the anthropology of the laboratory life, as presented in "An Anthropologist Visits the Laboratory." Most of this material is relatively new to me (thanks to Neal Lerner for introducing me to Latour & Woolgar), but I'm doing my best to cobble it together in a way that will be accessible to students (particularly second-language learners).

I've found the slide presentation below from Dave Malinowski to be useful to me in framing the assignment from a linguistic landscape perspective. In particular, slides 18-20, 22, and 25-33 have been helpful.

Linguistic Landscape for Language Study from Dave Malinowski

One interdisciplinary aspect of this assignment is, of course, that I am asking students to view their own disciplines (or departments--and I know I'm "problematically" equating the two) from the perspective of another discipline (or disciplines! I'm not even sure!). That is, I'm asking them to look at their disciplines from a linguistic perspective, with the values of a linguist (or social scientist, more generally). I'll probably include a question about that in the reflection assignment that goes along with the general assignment.

I'll add more to this post (or add another post) later as I refine the assignment...

"English and Me" assignment revisited

For FYW this time, I'm going back to the "English and Me" assignment for the first writing project of the semester. I wrote about the "English and Me" essay before, but I've made some small changes to the actual assignment that I hope better emphasize the "English learning doesn't take place in a vacuum" part of the assignment from the first draft. I was having trouble in the past getting some students to go from relatively individual(istic) stories in the first draft to second drafts that brought in more of the familial, social, and political contexts of their stories. So in addition to reading Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue" and Gloria Anzaldúa's "How to Tame a Wild Tongue," we read an interview with José Orduña about his new book, The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration and Displacement. (I haven't read the book yet, but I just received a copy.) I like how in the interview, Orduña says he wanted to emphasize in his book that "'my story' didn't begin and end with me." I think that's a good place to start with for students when you're asking them to write a literacy narrative/autobiography.

Here's the latest version of this assignment, which I've renamed (problematically, perhaps), a "literacy narrative":

So far this semester, we have written in the guided self-placement essays about our experiences learning languages and learning to read and write in English. We have also have read two essays and an interview that present different approaches to the question of how multilingual writers relate to English. Despite their differences, authors Gloria Anzaldúa and Amy Tan (and interviewed author José Orduña) share such themes as the multiple varieties of language that they use and how those varieties relate to their sense of identity; the roles of formal education in their language use and identity; and the ways in which they “shuttle” among languages and identities.

They also share some narrative techniques, such as code-switching (some would call it “code-mixing”) among languages and language varieties, mixing short descriptive anecdotes and more explanatory or argumentative prose, using dialogue (remembered or imagined) to bring the other people in their essays to life, etc.

In this first essay, I would like you to describe your own previous experiences with the English language, particularly as they have led you to study in the United States and at Northeastern University. Consider, too, José Orduña’s argument that our stories don’t begin and end with us—that they start with the stories of those who have come before us and extend beyond our own lives. As your previous writings for this class (including the placement essays) have shown, English use and learning doesn’t take place in a linguistic or social/cultural vacuum. Explore the connections among your encounters with English and the larger social and cultural contexts which you have experienced.

Also, like Anzaldúa and Tan, don’t feel limited to writing in one language variety or writing only about (standard) English. Consider in one of your drafts (perhaps the first draft) trying some of the techniques used by Anzaldúa and Tan. You can always get rid of them if you don’t like them or they don’t work for your audience.

Some possible areas to help you brainstorm (but don’t feel limited by these suggestions):[1]

• Misunderstandings based on English language differences (and your attempts to work out them out orally, through writing, or through other channels like texting, body language, etc.)

• Being corrected or correcting others

• Emotional dimensions of everyday language use/learning (like impatience or frustration, fear, a feeling of accomplishment or success, connection to family, etc.)

• Locations of English use/learning (schools, workplaces, airports, etc.)

• English dialects or accents experienced or used in different contexts or environments

Your essay should eventually have a thesis that is supported by what you say, but for the first draft, which we will share in class, what you write might be more “loose.” Think of your first draft as exploratory—a place where you can think about what you want to say, rather than worrying so much about how to say it. (We’ll worry enough about how to say it later on in the writing process.)

Process

Remember to post your drafts on time to Digication. Late drafts will hurt your “process” grade for the assignment and will make it harder for your partners and me to read and respond to your writing.

• First draft: Write a short (about 750+ words) narrative of a particular moment in your life as a learner/user of English. Describe it in detail and make sure that through the use of your detail you make it clear to your readers (us) what is so memorable and/or important about that particular moment. Don’t ignore this experience’s connections to the lives of others (family members, etc.)—try to bring those into your story, as relevant. If you don’t have one particular moment that stands out in your mind, you might describe two or three moments and narrate how they reflect whatever changes you went through in your relationship to English on the way to NU. Due: before class on 1/23

• Second draft: This is the first draft that I’ll be directly commenting on. Develop your essay beyond that one experience that you described in the first draft. You might bring in other experiences, or you might write more about the contexts or implications of that experience. Consider what those experiences mean—not just to you, but to a larger community or group. Think about your responses to your classmates’ first drafts (and theirs to yours) and how those responses might point you to new or different perspectives on your relationship to English. This draft should be at least 1000 words. Be ready to talk to me in your conference about your essay and your partners’ feedback. Due: before class on 1/30

• Proofreading draft: This is the next-to-last draft—the one we’ll be proofreading before you turn it in. Revise based on your partners’ and my comments about your second draft. Due: before class on 2/6

[1] Adapted from Jay Jordan, Redesigning Composition for Multilingual Realities. Urbana, IL: CCCC/ NCTE, 2012.

We'll see how it goes--first drafts are due tomorrow.

Some thoughts on Chi-ming Wang's "Writing across the Pacific: Chinese Student Writing, Reflexive Poetics, and Transpacific Modernity"

Wang, Chi-ming. "Writing across the Pacific: Chinese Student Writing, Reflexive Poetics, and Transpacific Modernity." Amerasia Journal 38:2 (2012): 136-154.

 I just came across this article when I was looking up Chi-ming Wang after having read his article on The Jing Affair, a 1965 suspense novel about a U.S.-backed overthrow of the KMT government on Taiwan. (That book is an interesting read, by the way, as is the article.) I was attracted by the phrase "Chinese student writing" in the title because, of course, as a writing teacher who works a lot with Chinese students, I'm very well acquainted with (some) Chinese students' English writing. I should note from the outset that Wang's definition of "Chinese student writing" is somewhat broad--he characterizes it as "the literary and cultural discourses produced by 'Chinese' diasporic intellectuals who initially came to America as students" (139).

I've also been interested in how scholars like Xiaoye You and Wen-hsin Yeh have discussed the role of Chinese students' English and Chinese writing in the formation of modern Chinese identities. Like You and Yeh, Wang takes a historical perspective, ranging from the 1880s to the present in his discussion. He begins "Writing across the Pacific" with a reproduction of an open letter to President Nixon and Congress that was published in The New York Times in 1971 and calls for the U.S. to recognize Chinese sovereignty over the Diaoyutai (written as "Tiao Yu Tai," 鯛魚台) islands. By "Chinese sovereignty," they mean the Republic of China, since the people who wrote and signed this letter are apparently primarily students and scholars from Taiwan. Wang argues that the "Baodiao" movement ("Baodiao," [保鯛] means "protect the Diaoyutai Islands") "symbolized a moment of political awakening and critical reflection" among Chinese students-cum-immigrants in the United States (144). 

Wang gets back to this movement (though he doesn't mention the "student writing" exemplified by the open letter--something I would have been interested in reading more about), but first he gives some background about the writings of Chinese students in the U.S. since the late nineteenth century. He introduces us (me, anyway) to several early English-language publications produced by and for Chinese American audiences, such as The Chinese Students' Monthly (originally The Chinese Students' Bulletin) that was published between 1905 and 1931 by the Chinese Students' Alliance of America (I'm oversimplifying this a bit--see Wang 139-140 for more details and for citations). Wang points out the emphasis on a modern sense of Chinese patriotism that was exemplified by students who wrote about their experiences and perspectives living in a racist and imperialist United States (140-142). The selections he chooses from various works such as "Shadow Shapes," an anonymously written novella published in The Chinese Students' Monthly in serial form, are fascinating, and I find myself wanting to look up this magazine. (It looks like it's available through Brill, for only $4800.)

Wang moves on to discuss the Chinese student writing of the Baodiao Movement era, arguing that for the writers in that movement, "literature was a social platform for reflection and action which must begin with the self-critique of the intellectuals" (144). He argues that although the movement failed to change the U.S. viewpoint on the status of the Diaoyutai islands, the experience led Chinese writers like Zhang Xiguo and Zhang Beihai to examine more critically the deceptive American dream that many Chinese student/immigrants were pursuing (146).

Interesting for its general absence in Wang's article is how Taiwan itself is reflected in the lives and writings of the Chinese ("Chinese" in quotation marks, as Wang sometimes writes it) students/immigrants in the U.S. Most (if not all) of the Cold War era writers that he discusses, like Zhang Beihai, Zhang Xiguo, and Bai Xianyong, were Mainlanders raised in Taiwan. (One exception is the poet Yang Mu.) Wang does gesture at this fact in his discussion of Zhang Xiguo's (張系國) Rage of Yesteryear (昨日之怒, 1978), in which the character Shi Ping "defiant[ly] return[s] to Taiwan" from the U.S. (146). Wang quotes Shi Ping as "'wanting to be a Chinese rather than an overseas Chinese'" and remarks that "[t]hough it may seem odd that a student from Taiwan should wish to be 'Chinese,' Shi’s thinking was not strange in the political context of the 1960s and 1970s, when it was believed that China would one day be reunited and when Taiwanese national consciousness was still nascent" (146-147). I would argue that here Wang ignores the fact that Shi Ping is a Mainlander (as is Zhang Xiguo), a status that colors his sense of identity and leads him to equate Taiwan with China. Shi's status as a Mainlander also brings up the interesting factor in this whole discussion of identity and the sense of displacement that Chinese (Mainlander) students/immigrants in the U.S. felt: that they cannot simply be viewed as displaced in terms of being in the U.S., but that they were displaced in the first place, when they retreated to Taiwan or were born to parents who retreated to Taiwan in 1949. Perhaps Wang doesn't address this because the writers themselves don't dwell on it; this is something I might explore in the future.

I would also question the assertion that "Taiwanese national consciousness was still nascent" in the 1960s and 1970s. Wang observes in an endnote that "in the 1960s and 1970s, [Taiwan's] national ideology was more Chinese than Taiwanese" (153, n. 43), which is true to an extent. A post by Michael Turton cites an article from 1963 that discusses "Chiang Kai-shek's Silent Enemies," which would suggest that the Taiwanese/Mainlander divide was strong then.

This divide is also neglected earlier in Wang's article when he writes of the motivations that students from Taiwan had to stay in the U.S. after graduation: "At a time when another war was a real fear in Taiwan, many students came to America not only to study, but also to stay, seeking permanent residency and U.S. citizenship at the end of their studies" (142). This explanation ignores the experiences of Taiwanese students in the U.S. who stayed as a result of their pro-Taiwan independence work in the U.S. Some, like the uncle of Wang Benhu, were blacklisted from returning to Taiwan (see the video linked to in my previous post).  

I have written briefly before about the Taiwanese students at Kansas State University who worked for the Taiwan independence movement. Will Tiao, as I mention in that post, came from Manhattan, Kansas, and has observed that KSU was known as the "military school for Taiwan independence" (台獨軍校). I have written elsewhere about the "student writing" (to use the phrase in Wang's sense of it) that went on among Taiwanese and Mainlander students at KSU regarding Taiwan's identity. This conflict is relevant to Wang's discussion because it illustrates the complexity of "Chinese" modernity and "Chinese" students. As Wang notes early on in his article, "Due to the complicated history of modern China, Chinese student writers arrived in America at different historical junctures, bearing imprints of their origins" (139). The Taiwanese students at KSU who engaged in a "battle of the pens" in the KSU newspaper with their Mainlander schoolmates in the mid-1960s could also be said to be engaged in a battle over what it meant to be (seen as) a Chinese person in the United States. (See the oral history, 一門留美學生的建國故事, for reproductions of the letters published in the KSU paper.) Both through their words and through their requests to have their names withheld out of fear of reprisals, the Taiwanese students called into question the dominant depictions of Taiwan as "Free China."

FYW Assignment: Responding to the university's academic plan

I've been writing about the assignments that I tried out this past semester in ENGW 1102, our writing program's first year writing course for multilingual students. In my first post, I briefly described the "English and Me" (English and I?) assignment, in which students wrote about their relationships to the English language(s). In my second post, I discussed an assignment for which students defined the concept "international students." In this post, I'll describe the third assignment, which was a collaborative response to our school's academic plan for 2025.

As I was preparing this semester's syllabus, I saw that the university was in the planning stages for an academic plan that included emphases on "the global university" and "diversity and inclusion," among other "strategic themes." I was interested in how I could give students the opportunity to be involved in that conversation, given their positions as multilingual and/or international students who were also mostly first-year students. After thinking about various options, I decided that the best choice would be to ask them to join the discussions on the "strategic theme" page of their choice. I assumed (correctly) that most students would choose to participate in the "global university" or the "diversity and inclusion" discussions. So that those discussion boards wouldn't be overwhelmed by the comments of 30 students, I decided to have them work in groups on their responses. I also left open the possibility that groups' responses would be combined if they were very similar in content or emphasis.

My assignment consisted of two parts, which I'll quote from here:

1) You will write a response that you will post on the appropriate section of the Academic Plan website, and 2) You will write a longer discussion of your post and the Academic Plan that you will post on Digication (along with a copy of the response that you posted to the website).

The posted response could vary in length depending on what you decide to do, but it should be an original contribution to the discussion (in other words, it shouldn’t be a repetition of others’ posts or an “I agree” statement). ...

The longer discussion could be written as a memo to the class that explains the context of your response (what aspects of the Academic Plan or what comments others had posted that you felt called for your input) and describes how you developed your response.

By requiring the longer discussion, I asked students to make sure that they had read the previous comments carefully to determine how their own ideas might fit into that discussion. For the first draft of the assignment, I asked them focus primarily on the "longer discussion" and to "summarize and quote from--and respond to--what [their] sources say." By "sources" I primarily meant the other comments on the Academic Plan website, but I also encouraged them to bring in other relevant sources. Once they had laid out the context for their responses, for the second draft I asked them to write out those shorter responses along with the longer discussions.

Students seemed enthusiastic about the opportunity to have a say in the direction that the university would be taking during the next ten years, though there was the expected amount of skepticism regarding how much effect their responses would actually have. One thing that came out of the process was that we all learned more about what services and programs the university had in a number of areas, such as study abroad programs, international internships and co-ops, services for diverse students, etc. We also debated how well these programs and services were publicized and what could be done to publicize them better. (Some students, for instance, felt that sending out more emails about particular study abroad opportunities would be good, while others felt that the school sends out too many emails already.) Some students felt that the university was doing a good job already with the programs and services it provides, and that the problem was that students weren't taking advantage of those opportunities.

One problem with this kind of assignment, of course, is that it's not really that repeatable. Since the Academic Plan is supposed to be finalized in the fall of this year, it's not likely that students in my future classes will have the opportunity to take part in this kind of university-wide discussion about the school's future. Perhaps, however, other similar opportunities will come up for future students.

FYW assignment: Asking international students to define "international students"

A while back, I started writing about my approach this (past) semester to a first-year writing class for multilingual (mostly international) students. I described my rationale for asking students to write about their experiences as English learners and users and then mentioned that in a second class project, students would be writing about the concept of "international students." Now that the semester is over, I'm going to discuss and reflect on that assignment in more detail.

To prepare for the second assignment, we read a 2009 World Education News and Reviews article by Nick Clark entitled "What Defines an International Student? A Look Behind the Numbers." Clark discusses how different countries and organizations define "international students" and "foreign students" and how those different definitions affect how they count their student populations. This has implications for how the mobility of students around the world is tracked by national and non-governmental educational organizations.

After we read and briefly discussed this article, we got into a conversation about other ways in which international students are defined or characterized, including the kinds of words that we (or, rather, the students in my classes) often experience as being used in relation to international students. Words such as "diversity," "tolerance" (vs. "acceptance"--one student said, "I don't want to be tolerated!") came up, as well as concepts like respect for different cultures' ways of doing and being, universal vs. local knowledge and values, and stereotypes about international students (one big stereotype at my school is that international students are all rich). Then we talked about the assignment, which asks students to develop and convey their own understanding of "international students." As I wrote in the assignment sheet,

The first thing I’d recommend that you do is develop a plan for gathering sources that define, describe, or otherwise discuss international students. You might, for instance, survey or interview classmates (both “international” and domestic) to see what they think the term means or what images come to mind. You might consider why the term “international” is used and “foreign” isn’t. You could look for what comes up when you Google the term “international students.” You might look at the images used on university websites when you Google “international students” (vs. “foreigners,” perhaps). You might look at how the university’s website discusses international students or how it introduces services for international students. These aren’t the only types of sources you might go to, and you might not want to use all of them, but they’re a start. Think about where else you might find discussions of international students.

The next step, after gathering various perspectives, is to consider what meaning you want to convey about international students. Your task in writing this essay is not simply to echo others’ perspectives; you need to provide and support your own understanding of the term. You should include what others say, but you’ll need to respond to those arguments (see They Say / I Say for templates that will help you do that). Develop your argument, weaving in and responding to the other perspectives that your sources have provided.

I was trying to avoid two extremes with this assignment: one is the essay that defines something in a vacuum, ignoring both how the term is defined by others and (perhaps more important) the whole purpose or purposes for definitions; the other was the essay that simply repeats others' definitions without developing the writer's own perspective on the topic. We made some use of Graff & Birkenstein's They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, particularly the sections that discuss how the writer can respond to other texts and how the writer can emphasize the importance, the "so what?," of his or her argument. I wanted students to see definitions as arguments, and I think this assignment did do a good job, mostly, in getting them to think in this way (if they hadn't already thought in this way).

There were a couple of challenges with the assignment as I envisioned it and/or with how students interpreted it. One was that I asked students

to go beyond a traditional essay; you should use, where appropriate, visual elements (charts, graphs, images) to enhance your written discussion; you might also make use of some of the affordances of Digication and compose a multimodal text in which you include visual and perhaps even audiovisual (video) elements and even more interactive elements.

This suggestion/recommendation was an attempt to get students to write multimodally using our school's Digication e-portfolio platform. It wasn't entirely successful, partly because we were having enough trouble working out what we thought we could say about the concept of "international students" and the importance of defining the term anew. Most students who tried to do something with multimodal composing basically inserted images as examples of how universities "pictured" international students. Some inserted statistical tables or graphs. I think only one student tried including videos from YouTube, though that wasn't entirely successful, either, because he didn't really do anything with those videos. I'll have to rethink how much emphasis I want to put on the multimodal element if I use this assignment again.

The other challenge, as I've alluded to above, was working out what we (they) wanted to say about the concept of "international students" and how they wanted to answer the "so what?" question about defining "international students." One challenge related to this was getting them to see (and express in writing) the idea that different definitions might be more or less applicable or appropriate to different situations. While, for instance, the definitions in Clark's article might be applicable for people who want to compile statistics about student mobility, they might not be appropriate for other situations. That doesn't make them "wrong," necessarily (this was something that came up in early drafts when some students characterized the definitions as incorrect), just not useful for all situations.  I think most students seemed to be able to see and express this distinction by the end. The other part to this challenge was helping students to express their own purpose for (re)defining the term. Meeting this challenge required getting them to envision a different audience--going beyond seeing this as an assignment where I was the only audience (or at least the only one that counted). I think They Say / I Say helped with this, though I probably need to emphasize it more in class next time around.

There were a few interesting points that came out of the students' writing, and I'm just going to list some of them to end this (already too long) post:

• A number of students (probably more than I've had in previous multilingual sections of FYW) were either U.S. citizens or long-term residents. A couple were U.S. citizens, but because they had lived abroad for most of their lives, they were classed by my school as "international students" (something that might not have happened at other schools, as they discovered). I had mixed feelings about asking them to define "international students" because I was afraid that they would think I saw them all as international students (or worse, "foreigners"). But I think, on the other hand, that there's a value to asking them to do this because whether they think about themselves in this way or not, there are probably other people (such as domestic students, faculty, administration, etc.) who would view them as "international" in some way or another.
• The students took some interesting approaches to defining the term. Quite a few focused at least in part on the distinction between "international" and "foreign," mostly because Clark's article does that. I didn't require them to focus on that distinction, though I think some students mistakenly assumed that it was part of the assignment. There were varying degrees of success in their attempts to make original distinctions between these terms, but a few did a very good job on this. One, in particular, looked at other collocations of the term "international" vs. "foreign" and pointed out the differences between characterizing a language as a "foreign" language and characterizing it as an "international" language, then extending that distinction to how students might be characterized as "foreign" or "international." 
• We discovered that not everyone uses the terms "international students" and "foreign students" in the same way. (Surprise!) We found an article in the Boston Globe, for instance, in which the author uses the terms interchangeably, even referring, at one point, to "foreign international students." One of my students actually wrote to the article's author about this, getting her response that she wasn't distinguishing between "foreign" and "international."

I'll write later about the final assignment for this class, in which I asked students to contribute to public online discussion of our university's long-term academic plan.

Back to teaching first-year writing after a long break

Before this semester, the last time I taught a section of first-year writing was in the summer of 2014 (hmmm... not that long ago...). I'm doing some things this semester that are similar to the projects we did back then, but I've made some changes due to some interesting developments at Northeastern (more on that, perhaps, in another post).

I should mention that I primarily teach multilingual students (mostly international students), so the activities that we do in class are primarily focused on their experiences as multilingual (and possibly international) students. I take some of my rationale for this focus from Ilona Leki's 2007 book, Undergraduates in a Second Language: Challenges and Complexities of Academic Literacy Development (I've written a brief review about this book). Leki argues that L2 writing classes "can be used to make space and time for students to explore the world into which they have stepped by, for example, examining and making a start at responding to the literacy demands across the curriculum" (284). She also recommends that L2 writing teachers give students an opportunity to address the challenges they face as L2 students, such as when their cultures are "essentialized by professors" or when they are "not selected for group work." Leki suggests that

[u]sing their developing L2 literacy skills as tools to work toward analyzing such situations, including their hidden ideological dimensions, and developing possible solutions communally not only honors their intellect and experience but also might make L2 writing classes be remembered for more than only the use of the comma. (285)

So we start off introducing ourselves to each other by writing my old standby, "English and Me," in which they describe experiences that exemplify important aspects of their relationship to English. I should mention that "English and Me" often grows into something more than just "English and Me"--for one thing, students' English learning doesn't take place in a vacuum, so often their discussions of their learning experiences encompass such things as educational cultures; family relationships; politics; first (and second and sometimes third) languages in addition to English; culture shock; and emotions like frustration, loneliness, feelings of accomplishment, and pride. I see this essay as not only a way for me to get to know them, but also as a way for them to reflect on what has ultimately brought them here as part of the flow of "transnational citizens" back and forth across borders.

In the second project, we'll be working on defining the concept "international students," which should be interesting... More on that later.