DECOLONIZ[ER]ING THE MIND: A CRITICAL RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION FRAMEWORK AND DE-LINKING CURRICULUM FOR PROFESSORS OF FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS

College writing teachers (called “compositionists”) are in a unique position vis à vis society and the future. We teach nearly everyone who goes to college, and we traffic in ideas—researching them, reading them, talking about them, and writing about them. This Dissertation of Practice speaks to the college writing professor’s positionality in addressing the problems of neo-patriotic mandates in K–12 social studies and English classrooms, post-truth rhetoric in public discourse, and high school graduates’ frequent difficulty critically thinking about any of it. I take the position that compositionists are well situated and well suited to interrupt these problematic trends through teaching rhetorical analysis of culturally biased materials. I argue that critical pedagogy with an emphasis on critical reading enhances the process pedagogies engaged by most compositionists and can help us to better support student growth in criticality and inclusive understanding. I explore obstacles to the appeal of critical pedagogies in first-year writing classes and argue for more widespread adaptation of general critical pedagogy (per hooks, Freire, et al.) to the college composition context.Through the critical race methodology of autoethnography, I describe a process of addressing the concerns of the post-truth, anti-critical, epicolonial era, with a particular focus on critical reading (per Adams, Altick, Carillo, Apple, et al.) and decolonial de-linking (per Mignolo, Ruiz, Walsh et al.) as sound writing pedagogy. I then use social justice design methodology to shape a Critical Rhetoric and Composition Framework and Decolonizing Curriculum (F&C) for open use among interested writing professors. My findings discuss the degree to which focus group participants in my digital design project found iterations of the F&C valuable for use in their classrooms. I end by exploring future directions and potential new uses for the F&C.