A rondo is best interpreted in music as a round, revolving around a principal theme or refrain that bounces between one or more contrasting themes. Usually fast-paced with an Allegro marking, the rondo typically appears in the final movements of musical compositions (which is oftentimes the third movement). The rondo appears as the penultimate movement of this symphonic portfolio due to the nature of the artifact presented in this echo chamber—my final paper from Dr. Lathan’s “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) course. While explorations of race and racism act as the principal refrain in my paper, the work I aim to do with them is overshadowed by the contrasting theme of writing transfer, a previous site of learning I discussed in the second movement that had come to permeate throughout my pedagogy. The seemingly dichotomous nature of these two multifaceted concepts should have moved me towards a place of multivocal attunement, which I advocate for within the seminar paper of my fourth movement; however, reflecting on my final paper reveals that while I have an understanding of the many elements circulating in critical race theory and writing transfer, I do not have a wholesome understanding of how the two concepts work in conjunction with each other. In essence, I resonate with these two concepts separately, but remain unattuned to how they operate simultaneously.

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I initially found myself taking an interest in Dr. Lathan’s CRT course due to my prior work on multiculturalism, which was the driving research interest of my undergraduate capstone project. Although I was previously aware that many scholars had moved away from discussions of multiculturalism, it was not until I started exploring CRT that I began to get a clearer picture of why. CRT scholar Iris D. Ruiz (2016) talks about modern-day notions of race and racism as an “absent presence,” point out the common social practice to replace the terms with less-threatening euphemisms like diversity, underrepresentation, inclusion, and social justice. These terms, Ruiz argues, dilutes discussions about race and reinforced a hegemonic standard of colorblindness. Given my multiracial identity, it felt like what I was really trying to discuss in both my undergraduate capstone project and my first FSU teaching philosophy was race and racism, not multiculturalism. From this revelation, I found myself wandering back to the same question as I continued to read CRT scholarship and discuss CRT: How do we broach topics of race and racism and raise a sense of racialized awareness in our classrooms? It was a question that was deeply bothersome to me, and my concerns were further exacerbated by minor details I began to notice as the course progressed. Despite the inherently contentious nature of race and racism, the space we [the class] discussed CRT in felt eerily similar to an echo chamber insulated from rebuttal. I postulate two reasons for this observation. First, given its position in the university as a graduate course, only graduate students (and possibly some upper-level undergraduates with special permission) can access the space and its content. Second, it felt based on our discussions that the class (myself included) brought with them the underlying assumption that racism exists and is a problem that needs addressing, both in society and the classroom. And, with this shared foundation, I felt that the class was more readily able to accept the arguments being made in both class discussions and course scholarship. However, those same discussions and scholarship around CRT seemed ill-suited for the classes [ENC 2135] that I taught. Both race and racism are already uncomfortable topics to discuss under normal circumstances due to their societal label as “taboo.” I was near certain that I would be met with blank stares and confused looks if I attempted to talk about CRT concepts like Tim Engles’ racialized slacktivism (2017) or Annette Harris Powell’s postracism (2017) in ENC 2135. Nothing made this more apparent to me than we were asked to complete a group activity during one of our CRT classes where we drafted a mock assignment that we could issue a class that related to a specific CRT concept. After some discussion with my group, I was surprised to find that my groupmates had envisioned another graduate class as the students for this mock assignment. It would seem, then, that there was an underlying assumption that much of the CRT scholarship we were exploring was not accessible for a wider audience.

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Fortunately, this was not entirely the case. The goal of my final paper for CRT—the main artifact of this movement—was to enable ENC 2135 students to broach the thorny subject of race and racism in an accessible and productive way using the idea of counterstory from Aja Martinez’s Counterstory (2020). Martinez sees counterstories as a way for minoritized groups to intervene in the “master narratives” set forth by research methods based in dominant ideologies. Both a strength and weakness of Martinez’s counterstory that makes it digestible, yet difficult for students to contend with is the flexibility of counterstory’s definition: it can be an allegory/fantasy; a narrated dialogue; an autobiographic reflection; even a methodology. The strength this tool is that it enables students to choose from a wide variety of methods to effectively convey counterstory. However, this openness of choice is simultaneously an unfamiliar concept for many first-year composition students, and can leave them paralyzed with indecision on how to approach the project. To further compound the problem, I needed to find a way to integrate counterstory into the current ENC 2135 curriculum. And here is where the problem came in: I saw the entirety of the ENC 2135 curriculum as one building towards the development of writing transfer, with every unit building on the prior ones in a meaningful and new way. Eventually, I settled on implementing counterstory into the third unit of the course: the Multigenre Persuasive Campaign (prompt provided in Appendix). I reasoned that the call-to-action the project requires would work well as an opening for students to begin exploring the privileges and marginalization that existed in their discourse communities. Unfortunately, as I wrote the paper, I found myself becoming increasingly entangled in a web of writing transfer scholarship to justify why I believed the current ENC 2135 curriculum was one rooted in transfer and how CRT fit into the vision. This, I believe, is what ultimately leads me to see this paper as a site of frustration and a space I did not successfully dwell in. Martinez’s voice became lost in a crowd of disparate ideas and arguments, creating less of a synthesis between two substantial topics in rhetoric and composition and more of a rearticulation of familiar concepts that I have previously written on.