Uplifting education: A history of writing instruction at two historically Black colleges and universities

Composition courses serve as a venue for teaching students to think and write critically and be able to effectively create and disseminate knowledge. As David Bartholomae has observed, students learning to write in first year writing courses are learning to appropriately invoke the codes of college-level discourse as a demonstration of membership in academic culture. In my dissertation I argue that the concept of "inventing the university" is inadequate to describe the teaching of writing to students of color. Specifically, I argue that African American students who learn to appropriately invoke the codes of college level discourse are reconstructing the university. By reconstructing the university, by learning to think critically and then to disseminate the knowledge that they have created, students of color are not only "inventing" the university, they are reconstructing the university for others.; This project involves both the consideration of the seminal works of educational theory and evidence of the institutionalization of "racial uplift" that can be observed in the history of the pedagogical theories of historical black colleges and universities (HBCUs).; I also examine how traditional Composition theory has influenced the theories that were used at HBCUs. I argue that while mainstream ideals had some influence over DuBois and Washington's ideas about education, White pedagogues did not have a large scale effect on the teaching of students of color until the late 1960's when African American people became an issue as a part of the mainstream because of large scale integration and the dawning of the Civil Rights Movement. It is at this point that Composition theorists attempt to remove race from the education equation and work toward a pedagogy that could be aligned with America's sentiment of the "melting pot."; After the examination of the intersection between historical pedagogical theories and practices of HBCUs and mainstream compositionists I propose classroom practices that takes into consideration the cultural difference and difficulties of minority students when attempting to give them the ability to demonstrate that they are deserving of membership in academic culture. It is these liberatory practices that are the product of my dissertation.