After a successful first run at Give Green Day, 2021, the MSU Office of China Programs (OCP) has decided to hold another fundraising campaign. Last year, OCP raised $12,843 to go towards its China Endowment. This fund supports educational programming about China, as well as events and programs that benefit students, staff, and faculty from China. Thanks to the incredible success of the 2021 Give Green Day campaign, the endowment is now activated, and OCP can take advantage of the interest it generates moving forward to fund our programming.

The 2022 campaign will have a more specific focus. In November of 2021, OCP was awarded a Creating Inclusive Excellence Grant from the MSU Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion to fund a 1 credit, intensive academic writing course for Chinese speaking students. This DEI-focused pilot course is designed to help Chinese speaking students with their academic writing in a proactive way to help students succeed at MSU – and to prepare them for successful employment after graduation. This course is fully funded for its debut in Fall 2022 to support 15 students, but OCP will need additional funds to make the course available for more students. OCP’s goal, therefore, is to raise $10,000 to support four (4) more students for this impactful coursework.

Currently, undergraduate students from China account for more than 55% of the total international students at

MSU. As they transition to a new culture and new academic structures and expectations, students from China often face challenges in English. Writing, like many other aspects of academic life, is heavily influenced by the cultural context in which students are educated. Undergraduate students from China often struggle with navigating differences between what is considered good, clear rhetoric and research writing at MSU and the styles they learned when writing in Chinese. This course is designed to help bridge writing styles and buttress student success at MSU. Navigating cultural differences in writing is an important part of helping international students at MSU feel welcome and included. Rather than being judged for differences in their English writing style and knowledge, OCP wants students to have the opportunity refine skills and to orient themselves to US standards for academic writing.  OCP hopes this course can be a pilot, and that similar classes can be offered for students who speak other languages as well.

This experimental course will feature Mandarin-speaking mentors working with students – a unique part of this course that will contribute to its success. The course will last for 10 weeks and consists of two parts: 1) academic writing curriculum designed to teach skills that will help students with current assignments, giving them real-time practice for their rhetoric and research writing, and 2) 1:1 tutoring with Chinese-speaking professors or graduate students, again working on real assignments in a way that moves beyond a single tutoring session. The mentoring sessions will build on each other to help students master English writing structure, syntax, diction, citations, tone, and more.  

OCP interns, Amy Yang and Molly Mao, weigh in on the new course. “Academic writing is incredibly important,” Amy, an undergraduate student from China in MSU’s College of Education, explains. “From academic papers and coursework to daily email communication with professors, writing is inseparable from academic life at MSU. This special writing course is set up at an important time and must be supported.” Indeed, the Office of China Programs knows that many students have been taking classes online from China during the pandemic and may not have been able to take advantage of office hours, writing center hours, and other resources at MSU. As students transition to in-person at MSU, this course is needed now more than ever. Molly is an undergraduate student from China at MSU’s Business School. She adds that writing is important beyond academic life at MSU and “runs through every stage of a students’ career, including finding internships on campus to job hunting after graduation to future career development. Writing is often the first impression we present to others, and it is the stepping stone to obtain various opportunities and resources.”

OCP is already planning for a systematic evaluation of the pilot course and developing a plan to make the course sustainable at MSU. The success of and lessons learned from this innovative course can be replicated for students who speak other languages, too, helping to pave the way for offering in-depth writing assistance to all international students at MSU.

OCP is incredibly grateful to all of the donors from 2021 Give Green Day campaign and for the future donors who will help make this new course reach more students, contributing to the success of MSU Spartans from China. Check out OCP’s Make a Gift page to help support this course.