The Transculturation in Introductory Composition research team seeks to increase undergraduate students’ intercultural competence by designing and implementing first-year writing courses that encourage meaningful intercultural interaction among international and domestic students.
Our innovative model links mainstream and second-language-focused first-year writing sections to expose students to diverse texts, structured intercultural interactions, and sequenced writing assignments supported by team-taught pedagogical interventions.
We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach using mixed-methods research. With the Miville-Guzman Universality-Diversity Scale Short Form instrument, student interviews, and analysis of writing, we measure students’ intercultural competence. What we learn helps us modify our curricular interventions to enhance the linked course model and share what we learn for other classroom and extra-curricular contexts.
Our work has been supported by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the Center for Intercultural Learning, Mentorship, Assessment, and Research, and the Department of English at Purdue University. The current phase of our work is supported by funding from the University of Massachusetts-Boston College of Liberal Arts.