UC Irvine

This project explains how the extracurricular and curricular function together: We know that the interaction of informal and formal rhetorical learning determines how college students write their way into communal and civic life. I investigate how this learning happens on and near campus but outside the college writing classroom, in sites created out of students’ desires to feel like they belong. These sites provide students the opportunity to extend and respond to their curricular work in ways attuned to the social and political dimensions of their learning. Students shape extracurricular spaces that envision and model communities in which those who have been historically marginalized can meaningfully participate. I argue that their collaborative efforts define both their identities as writing/speaking subjects and the spheres of their rhetorical participation.

Specifically, I look at students’ group-sponsored literate activities at the University of California, Irvine and UC Davis in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I examine student newspapers that were produced during the late 1980s and early 90s: the alternative media at UCI and the Third World Forum at UCD. I further analyze my ethnographic research, conducted between 2018 and 2020, with Asian American student organizations at UCI. These archival materials and participant observations demonstrate how students engage counterpublics, as they critique dominant narratives and draw energy from activist legacies. In this way, I flesh out the relationships among the curricular, extracurricular, and co-curricular, affirming the notion that the latter terms’ prefixes do not indicate their subordinate status. “Extracurriculars” are not exclusively resumé fodder or ways to fill time outside of class. The intellectual work that occurs in these nominally recreational spaces in fact marks the urgency of the “extra” and “co” for both students and rhetoric/composition researchers. I deem much of the student activity I examine “countercurricular”: providing an alternative or oppositional view of curricular learning.