A growing number of researchers claim that diverse students with potentially diverse literacies are unable to take up the necessary literate practices to be successful in the university and upon leaving they are unable to master these literate practices, specifically the need to address critical thinking, problem-solving, and writing and to develop methods for assessing said skills. Yet, there has been little empirical research conducted to examine what counts as a general education course within the institutional frame and the purposes it serves institutionally and for the professor. This study examines a Research One University general education Black Studies History of Jazz course that meets writing, ethnicity, and art requirements, using ethnographically grounded discourse analysis to understand what faculty face when teaching general education courses for diverse students.

Further, with the impact of globalization and new technologies, bringing more diverse people together, it has become more difficult to engage students in the process of questioning and problematizing issues of cross-cultural understanding in our global society, processes that are a goal of many general education diversity courses. This dissertation was designed to address the current conflicts facing twenty-first century students with diverse ethnicities, diverse literacies, diverse educational backgrounds, and experiences as they engage with the curriculum, focusing on critical thinking or "criticality" as proposed by the instructor of a general education diversity course. Specifically, by having race as a topic, it can be an affordance for "criticality", and in turn, "criticality" as a mode of thinking can be an affordance of studying issues of diversity. Through this process, students engage in "performing criticality" for the purpose of achieving the state of "embodied criticality" or "knowledge production". Thus, this dissertation seeks to provide empirical research that can be used to support initiatives that seek to reframe general education courses to best serve the needs of diverse students entering colleges and universities with diverse literacies in order to prepare them to live and work well in a global society.