This study was conducted in the Intensive English Program (IEP) of a large, public uni- versity. Considering that one of the goals of my study is to enact social justice, an IEP may seem like an odd choice of context because IEPs are often populated by learners who are privileged to extremely privileged in all ways within the context of their own countries. Many learners in IEPs are able to be in a U.S. IEP precisely because they are members of the social and economic elite in their own countries. This is not true in all cases, but in general, IEP learners are formally educated, financially stable, and socially normed to the cultural values of the controlling class in their countries.
However, the IEP is only a temporary stopping point for these learners as many of them want to gain admission to U.S. universities. In a U.S. university, the privileges that may have insulated IEP learners from feeling oppressed may be overshadowed by their otherness, and they
may suddenly become aware of themselves as different and have to cope with feelings of inferi- ority and acts of discrimination. In other words, in U.S. universities, even the most privileged of IEP learners will have to face some or many situations in which they are intentionally or uninten- tionally excluded or otherized by virtue of their linguistic and cultural background. Thus, IEP learners as much as any others need to develop an awareness of privilege and how it operates because it will definitively operate against them in some cases.
The choice of this particular IEP context had several advantages for this type of study. To begin, part of the central purpose of this study was to increase social justice in broad and nar- row educational contexts. Investigating critical and feminist pedagogical practices in relation to a gate-keeping topic like academic writing, a course that is offered in this IEP and is populated primarily by learners who have the explicit desire to become matriculated students of U.S. uni- versities, afforded me the opportunity to work on broader social justice issues like helping these learners to feel a greater sense of legitimacy about their own identities as academic writers in English in future U.S. university classroom CoPs as well as narrower social justice issues like increasing these learners’ understandings of the practices and tools common to most large U.S. universities.
In addition to the opportunities for a wide range of social justice impacts, this IEP context is host to learners with a wide range of national, ethnic, language and educational backgrounds. Thus, the diversity of the learner population enhanced the development of the critical pedagogi- cal teaching approach because it ensured that the feelings, strengths, and needs of the learners will be more heterogeneous. This IEP context also offered me access to some resources like the ability to teach the EAP writing course in a computer lab and access to a web-based educational platform that all learners could use that are extremely useful for both teaching academic writing
and conducting research on writing. Finally, this IEP context offered me significant autonomy for selecting materials and designing curriculum as well as allowing me the opportunity to work with many of the same learners in both their academic writing and academic reading courses, which offered the potential to explore and use reading-writing connections.
This IEP operates as a separate entity on campus (i.e., it is not part of an academic de- partment). This program divides the curriculum of the IEP into seven levels (with Level 700 as the highest level) and within each level, the students focus on skills in the areas of grammar, writing, reading, speaking, and listening. Sessions last eight weeks and classes meet for 50 minutes five days per week. Most of the courses are taught in a single, self-contained building on the university campus. The classrooms offer basic resources (e.g., whiteboard, desks, a teacher computer) with some having computers for all students and others having a docucam and a projector attached to the teacher’s computer. Although the IEP is not part of an academic de- partment, the students do have access to most of the resources of the campus including the edu- cational platform LMS and the library.
In recent sessions, the average number of students in the IEP had been about 300 for each session. The student population is very diverse in terms of nationality, ethnic background, edu- cational background, religion, and age. Although at times a single language group may be domi- nant in one class, at other times, all students in one class may be from different language groups. Students are by and large block scheduled, which means that they have most or all of their clas- ses for a specific level with the same group of students. This means that over time, the students do know one another quite well. In addition, most students spend multiple sessions in the IEP, so they establish close friendships with other students.
The IEP is not marketed as a program that is specifically designed to focus on improving U.S. academic skills at all levels. Levels 100-400 are predominantly focused on general, com- municative skill development in English for life purposes. Levels 500-700 are more focused on U.S. academic skill development for attending U.S. universities. Level 700, which is the level that was addressed in this study, is more focused on U.S. academic skill development than other levels. Most students in Level 700 either have specific goals to attend a graduate program in the U.S. or an undergraduate program in the U.S. Many have received sponsorship from their coun- tries to do so and are pressured to gain acceptance into a U.S. university as quickly as possible. Because of the particular reputation of the university, many students are interested in topics like engineering, science, and technology.
The Level 700 academic writing course that was the focus of this study was taught as a paired course. That is, many of the students in this academic writing course also took the aca- demic reading course, which was taught by the same teacher (in this case, me). Although many students in Level 700 courses are preoccupied with passing the TOEFL, Level 700 does not fo- cus on timed writing (Level 600 does). Rather, Level 700 purports to focus on the type of aca- demic writing that students will need to do after they are accepted into a U.S. university.