The processes of learning and doing writing in macrosocial spaces: understanding how international STEM graduate students deploy spatial repertoires

ABSTRACT

Analyzing a segment of data from a larger study, this article discusses how international graduate students in the STEM fields deploy macrosocial spatial repertoires as they go about learning and doing graduate-level writing. Using a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach to theme-building analysis of interviews and drawing on relevant scholarship from Applied Linguistics and Writing Studies, it illustrates how the process of learning and doing graduate-level writing required these multilingual students an increasing ability to traverse and engage myriad physical, disciplinary/intellectual, and social and cultural spaces. It concludes by highlighting the benefits of understanding how these students utilize many and expansive spatial repertoires for enhancing writing and communication support for the students.

KEYWORDS:

• Writing process
• spatial repertoire
• macrosocial spaces
• STEM
• international graduate students

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All interviewee names are pseudonyms.

2 A group of GPS-tracked eagles flew from Kazakhstan to eastern Sudan and back during a year, flying up to 355 kilometers a day, while spending nearly a third of the year in wintering areas, forty plus days for breeding and about a month total for flying (Frederick 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shyam Sharma

Shyam Sharma is associate professor and Director of Graduate Programs in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University (State University of New York). He studies and teaches academic communication at the intersection of the arts and sciences. His research, which has been published in a variety of venues within and beyond his primary field, focuses on language policy and politics, international students and education, cross-cultural rhetoric, writing in and across the disciplines, and new media in education.