Brainstorm: Working With International Students

When working with international students, it is important to remember the significant contributions these students make to our classrooms by enhancing the diversity of perspectives and writing methods during each session. As instructors, we remember that there are many cultural differences when it come to rhetoric. It helps to hear these tendencies and observations about differences between cultures from the student writers themselves instead of basing our approaches on generalizations or assumptions.

One-on-one sessions are helped along by having students brainstorm aloud or discuss their story/thesis/ideas openly. When we do this, we skip the challenges of reorganizing or reworking what the student has already written to format it for a more "American" reader. We can dialogue about the best way to present the information in a coherent and academic way. 

I acknowledge the subjectivity of reader response with my students and the difficulty in tailoring the way we present information towards a new audience. I agree with the instructor in the video who tells us that just as we are comfortable with international students' accents in classroom discussion, we should embrace the differences in their writing while working towards greater meaning and clarity of thought.