This article theorizes the potential contours and impacts of faculty “resilience” within increasingly corporatized contexts by examining the strategies for resilience and persistence among international, multilingual, and nontraditional students who maneuver among various academic and cultural contexts.

The University of Michigan-Dearborn Writing Program and Writing Center serve an increasingly large number of recent immigrants, international students, and students who as children immigrated to the United States. The Writing Program and Writing Center have for a decade developed curriculum and support services geared specifically toward meeting the needs of this increasingly heterogeneous student body, while at the same time highlighting students’ rich contributions to the learning and rhetorical contexts of the university and surrounding communities. Owing in part to the university’s proximity to Detroit and in part to Dearborn’s own particular history and demographics—a city with the highest proportion of Arab Americans in the U.S.—UM-Dearborn comprises a truly cross-cultural and transnational space. Within this rhetorical context, Writing Program curricula with “cross-cultural” and transnational emphases afford students unique opportunities to learn to write for public audiences with backgrounds, experiences and socio-political affiliations very different from their own.

The author considers faculty development and its potential relationship to the ethos of collaborative practice modeled both by critical (Freirean) pedagogy and by interdisciplinary research. As a primary concern for any academic administrator, faculty development is not only a teaching moment but also an opportunity for reciprocal exchange, learning, and knowledge production, allowing participants to challenge the received wisdom of their fields and to come to a more rhetorical understanding of their identities. The collaborative construction of new knowledge and an emerging understanding of identities are examined in the context of two professional development and administrative contexts: the assessment by faculty of the writing of entering, first-year students and a collegewide, first-year experience (learning-community) initiative.

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