UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation examines the challenges academic writing programs in higher education have faced in serving students of color and low-income students. Although there is a growing recognition in the field of writing studies that the disciplinary frameworks and ideologies that structure academic writing classes have historically disenfranchised students of color, the field continues to struggle to find ways to address this problem effectively. Efforts to adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have focused largely on curricular and pedagogical change, but these add-on approaches still rely on using disciplinary standards and frameworks that reproduce racial inequities. This study challenges the assumption that change in academic writing programs must begin with classroom pedagogy and argues that pedagogical change cannot be understood or implemented apart from critical analysis of the institutional and ideological contexts that structure both universities and academic writing programs. This study examines the specific institutional, ideological, and disciplinary contexts in which composition programs’ relationship with racial inequities must be understood. It specifically focuses on the roles that neoliberalism, the merit and “teaching excellence” review process, stratified labor structures, and the ongoing standardization of learning outcomes play in reproducing inequities in academic writing classes along racial and economic lines. Taking the University of California (UC) as a case study, this dissertation analyzes how the UC writing programs in particular have worked within these institutional, economic, disciplinary, and ideological constraints. The chapters in this dissertation demonstrate that while the field of writing studies has struggled to break free of these dominant frameworks, there is a long history of instructors and students who have directly challenged the racial power structures that shape university writing programs and the larger field of writing studies. Many of these histories, however, have been left out of or rewritten in the field’s dominant narratives. This dissertation recovers the forgotten history of the key role that ethnic studies programs have played in redefining and reenvisioning the work and politics of academic writing, with particular attention to the long fight in the UC Berkeley Asian American Studies program to build and teach its own writing classes. These stories of instructor and student resistance, both past and present, offer alternative models, pedagogies, and methodologies for academic writing instruction. By recovering these histories and instructors’ structural analysis of the disciplinary and institutional frameworks that reproduce racial inequities in academic writing classes, this dissertation reveals that the analytical tools, methodologies, and visions needed to bring new possibilities for the field into being have always existed.