| Despite the increase of historical projects in the field of rhetoric and composition, we still know very little about how marginalized students have gained rhetorical expertise in times when the traditional academy has been hostile or indifferent to them. In this study, I survey marginalized student communities of women at Smith College, African-Americans at Wilberforce University, and labor workers at Brookwood Labor College. In these settings, progressive educators politicized the classroom in terms of the lived oppression of their students and urged them, through writing and speaking, to come to terms with the racism, sexism, and economic exploitation in their lives. This dissertation contributes to historical scholarship that has helped us to understand the history of rhetoric in U.S. colleges and universities and demonstrates the ways that history can help us to re-envision theories of critical pedagogy so that revised theories might serve better in practice. Because there are so few published narratives of critical pedagogy in action, we know little about how critical pedagogy functions outside of theoretical discourse. Those accounts that do exist (Freire; Fiore and Elasser) present tales of liberatory education as oversimplified "success" narratives. They contain no acknowledgement of other issues of difference that can potentially challenge or threaten the successful enactment of critical pedagogy despite the shared oppression of any group of students. |
