Later this week, we will present our work & its implications for writing programs at the Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference in Baltimore, MD. The conference theme this year is “More Seats at the Table,” and we are very excited to engage in conversation with other writing programs about our approach — a concrete way for WPAs to implement inclusion in their programs.
We’ll be presenting at 9:20am on Saturday, July 27, 2019 in the Galena Room, Session H3.
In addition to a brief project overview and a detailed discussion of the results, we’ll be spending some time sharing what we’ve learned as teacher-researchers, and the implications of our work for writing programs and administrators.
Teacher-Researcher Findings:
Through our experience teaching the curriculum, we learned that the following characteristics are key to successful implementation of the curriculum:
- Maintain transparency with students and seek open communication
- Gradually deliver interventions and share instructor reflections with students
- Create sustained dialogue through systematic reflective writing
- Leverage student-instructor dialogue to clarify misunderstandings and invite shy or quiet students to express their thoughts
- Dialogic feedback situates students better and engages them in their classroom community
Implications
Curricular
- Multiple levels of cultural exposure and interactions optimize opportunities for intercultural competence development.
- Reflection and reflective writing need to be meaningfully integrated into the curriculum at every point.
Assessment
- IC development — like writing development! — is often non-linear. At times, it is recursive. Linear assessment will therefore miss a lot of the nuances in IC development.
- Mixed-methods assessment offers the best chance to understand how and why students’ IC develops (or remains static) in response to curricular interventions.
Programmatic
- Linked courses offer a low-impact, easily implemented method for targeting intercultural competence for both domestic and international students
- Our project operationalizes the CWPA Framework for Success, as it emphasizes curiosity, openness, responsibility, metacognition, and engagement.
- Targeting international competence for all students has appeal across the university, offering us receptive audiences across Purdue.
You can see our presentation slides here: