Collaborating to Support International-Student Writers

Picciotto and Bauer discuss collaborations between academic and non-academic units at a large public university experiencing rapid growth in its population of international undergraduates. Focusing specifically on the writing component of a summer transition program for first-year international students, the authors discuss efforts to bridge the gap between academic affairs and student affairs in order to effectively introduce students to the conventions of American academic discourse. Picciotto and Bauer detail the successes that emerged as a result of cross-campus collaborations; they demonstrate that such collaborations, while sometimes challenging, can promote intellectual growth of students as well as of the collaborators themselves. However, they also point to the need for meaningful institutional commitment in order to sustain the positive effects of collaboration in the long term.