Inventing the World Grant University ─ Chinese International Students' Mobilities, Literacies, and Identities

Through an exploration of the literacy practices of undergraduate Chinese international students in the United States and China, Inventing the World Grant University demonstrates the ways in which writing, public speaking, disciplinary literacies, and humanities-based curricula are constructed and enacted across institutional and geographic borders.

Steven Fraiberg, Xiqiao Wang, and Xiaoye You develop culturally responsive pedagogies for undergraduate Chinese international students enrolling at Western institutions, whose numbers have increased in recent years. Focusing on the literacy practices of these students at Michigan State University and at Sinoway International Education Summer School in China, Fraiberg, Wang, and You draw on translingual theory and methodology to map the travel of languages, identities, ideologies, pedagogies, and literacy practices across continents. Case studies of administrators’, teachers’, and students’ everyday literacy practices provide insight into the material and social structures shaping and shaped by the traversals of those practices within and across the higher educational landscape.

Advocating an expansion of focus from translingualism to transliteracy and from single-site analyses to multi-site approaches, this volume situates local classroom practices in the context of the world grant university. Inventing the World Grant University contributes to scholarship in mobility studies, literacy, transnationalism, and disciplinary enculturation.

Steven Fraiberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University.

Xiqiao Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University.

Xiaoye You is an associate professor of English and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University.