THE ROLE OF WRITING IN INTERNATIONAL UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION STUDENTS’ LEARNING EXPERIENCE
Open Access
- Author:
- Zhang, Junxian
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 10, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Andrea Vujan Mccloskey, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Suresh Canagarajah, Outside Unit & Field Member
Anne Whitney, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Charlotte Land, Major Field Member
Jamie Myers, Major Field Member - Keywords:
- the role of writing
international undergraduate education students
learning experiences - Abstract:
- The present study explores the role of writing in undergraduate education students’ learning experiences in the United States. It focuses on how writing about previously significant experiences in the forms of narratives and journal entries transforms international education students’ perceptions and identities and provides them with the space for changed course of actions through imagined future teaching. The participants in this study are three female undergraduate students from the College of Education in a large university in the Northeastern United States who are majoring in either early childhood education or educational policy. Two of the participants are from South Korea, and one is from China. All of them completed their K–12 education in their home countries where English-language writing is mostly exam-oriented and fundamentally different from the extensive writing they have experienced in their undergraduate academic programs. The most significant finding is that transformative learning mainly happens when writing stimulated the writers to critically reflect on significant past experiences and allowed them space to imagine changed course of actions in their future teaching. Another important finding is that writing assignments, particularly those that led to negative feedback from instructors, had a traumatic effect on the writers. While the writers publicly identified these writing assignments as “difficult,” the writers lost confidence in their writing, erose their hidden wish for changed, and eventually they might reflect such desire for change in their imagined future teaching.