Disrupting Despair: Faculty Reflection, Institutional Intervention, and the Transformation of Writing Pedagogies in Community College Composition

J. Indigo Eriksen

Advisor: Michelle LaFrance, PhD, Department of English

Committee Members: E. Shelley Reid, Susan Lawrence, Kendra Mitchell

Horizon Hall, #4225
November 22, 2024, 01:00 PM to 03:00 PM

Abstract:

In 2019, Asao B. Inoue called for white faculty in Writing Studies to examine the ways in which their teaching upheld white supremacy and then do something about it. This dissertation study is a first move toward antiracist action.
 
This dissertation presents a feminist ethnography examining community college faculty attitudes toward student languaging and understandings of white supremacy. The first phase of the study involved semi-structured interviews with full-time community college composition faculty. The second phase of the study examines preliminary effects following college-wide comprehensive faculty professional development focused on reducing equity gaps in college composition. Data gathered in the pre-intervention interviews reflect a profound love for students paired with a desire to engage in social justice pedagogy. However, interview data also suggests the lack of a shared vision or set of practices that supported social justice pedagogy in conjunction with an underdeveloped understanding of white supremacy as a system embedded in the institution. Preliminary data following the college-wide faculty development interventions reveal that faculty teaching practices began to shift toward social justice pedagogies. 
 
This dissertation shows that transformation toward social justice pedagogies may be possible when a small group of internal disruptors work together to shape institutional interventions grounded in antiracist pedagogies. Therefore, it is the work of antiracist faculty to be strategic and get themselves into positions of leadership to create spaces for transformation. White faculty in particular need to create good trouble from within and attend to the labor-intensive work necessary for antiracist teaching.