Rhetorics of being: Discourses of dominance and difference in the writing classroom

This dissertation provides a description and analysis of critical multicultural pedagogy as it was practiced in a lower-division college writing classroom. It focuses in particular on how such pedagogy is understood by students who consider themselves to be part of the "mainstream," "dominant" culture. The study examines such students' responses to and interpretations of texts and classroom talk oriented around critical and multicultural issues. It situates these responses and interpretations in the contexts of the classroom and the university, as well as in the disciplinary factors shaping the practice of critical multicultural pedagogy. The study is qualitative, based on ethnographic observations of the classroom, interviews with students and teacher, and analysis of student writing.; It ultimately argues that more attention is needed to the ways that mainstream students respond to pedagogies oriented toward social change. The findings reported here indicate that these approaches to teaching are at best only partially successful. The discursive formations students used to interpret and understand critical and multicultural perspectives often upheld, even unintentionally, dominant cultural constructions of difference. Ironically, they forwarded ideological positions that critical pedagogy was itself designed to challenge and deconstruct. At the same time, these discursive formations had a more hidden, private dimension. They were part of the rhetoric that structured students' identities. Without attention to this private dimension of discourse---the hidden personal labor of rhetoric in the construction of self---the teacher in this study struggled to enact the goals of critical pedagogy.; This dissertation also interrogates the rhetoric undergirding critical and multicultural pedagogics, and argues for the need to rethink this rhetoric, especially regarding the ways it positions dominant cultural values and beliefs.