This article reports on a qualitative assessment of intercultural competence (IC) in U.S. first-year writing (FYW) courses designed to increase intercultural exposure and interaction among domestic and international students. To measure students’ intercultural development via a series of reflective writings, we designed two innovative qualitative analysis tools: a grounded-theory coding scheme and a mapping procedure aligned to the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity. Our results show that qualitative assessment of reflective writing reveals dynamic, complex IC development trajectories, displaying nonlinearity, nondiscrete phases, and development within phases. Specifically, we noted that reflective writing helped students engage with and become attuned to aspects of cultural difference. Affordances of the FYW context indicated that students strongly engaged the cognitive domain of IC, and that this domain appears to be activated by reflective writing.

This article explores illuminative evaluation as a method to reflectively assess a pilot implementation of an intercultural-competence-focused first-year writing curriculum at a US large public university. The goal of this curriculum is to promote integration of diverse student populations on our university campus, while developing all students’ intercultural competence and writing skills. In this article, we present practitioner reflections on classroom experiences and collaborative design of our approach to data analysis. These reflections show how an illuminative, context-rich approach to an early phase of a writing pedagogy research project shapes a holistic curricular evaluation. Illuminative evaluation drew our attention to the interaction between teaching and curriculum evaluation as well as to how this approach promotes an invitational and exploratory approach to teacher research.