Critical pedagogy and genre theory: Interrogating the politics of respect in writing across the curriculum

Writing Across the Curriculum's banner call of writing to learn has helped students, faculty, and administrators pay attention not only to the importance of effective writing skills in all disciplines but also to the efficacy of process pedagogy in training effective learners and writers within the academy. The WAC movement has succeeded in that it generates some inter-disciplinary and even cross-disciplinary conversations among faculty about how writing works for them, in their teaching as well as in their own professional development. However, WAC has yet to self-consciously engage or interrogate the dialectical space it has succeeded in creating.; This dissertation suggests that WAC could move beyond its current politics of respect---a hands-off politics in which academic discourses are not rigorously interrogated---by incorporating critical pedagogy. Recontextualizing the work of critical pedagogue Paulo Freire for the writing classroom in the U.S. provides a way in which higher education in the U.S. might examine the various discourses that make up academic discourse. Freire points out that learning and thinking are ongoing. Similarly, writing is an ongoing process: this approach is particularly pertinent in an examination of writing in the disciplines at the U.S. university, even though Freire was decidedly not concerned with higher education in the U.S. but rather with basic literacy skills in his local population. Although Freire's language suggests mere dialogue, his theory reflects the more ordered dialectical process, so that to extend Freire's approach to the university context accomplishes the important task of acknowledging writing to learn as a dialectical process that requires attention to its own context, to the quotidian tools and tasks of the university classroom.; This dissertation posits that, genre theory, as it being practiced in Australia, provides a method for carrying out such interrogation, using critical pedagogy, in WAC. As successful as WAC has been, it has not yet successfully incorporated a critical pedagogy that would further its project of making academic discourses not only more accessible to a wider group of students, but also more relevant to more students' real lives at school and beyond.