Kenneth Wagner and Tony Magistrale’s Writing Across Culture: An Introduciton to Study Abroad and the Writing Process

Abstract

In their slim volume Writing Across Culture, Ken Wagner and Tony Magistrale suggest writing as a tool to make cultural learning a more conscious, tangible, and productive dimension of study abroad. They advocate that students keep an "analytical notebook" throughout their stay in the host country. Through regular entries submitted to a program director or teacher for feedback, students keep a candid, self-conscious record of events and situations they have observed, how they feel about them, and, most important, how they explain them given their current knowledge of their new cultural setting. By writing about the day-to-day events that so often seem awkward to newcomers, students can deepen their understanding of the underlying cultural system that gives sense to those events. And by charting the early days of culture shock, the mishaps of language learning, and the growing mastery of day-to-day routines, students will construct a record of the cross-cultural experience more authentic than photographs, postcards, or letters home, because the notebook will reveal through personal anecdotes the process of coming to terms with the host culture.