Rachel Ketai

Rachel Ketai has been teaching college writing since 2005, when she began her graduate work at the University of Arizona. She earned her PhD in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English, focusing on how college writing shapes questions of equity and access to higher education.

She went on to teach full-time for nearly a decade at El Camino College in both the Puente and Honors Transfer Programs, where she helped students strengthen their academic literacies while navigating the transition into higher education. During this time, she also trained in reading pedagogy and later facilitated professional learning for community college educators, supporting research-based teaching practices and developmental education reform.

At UCLA, Rachel teaches first-year composition courses such as EC 2 and EC 3D and leads graduate seminars that prepare new instructors to teach writing. Her courses invite students to think critically about the evolving purposes and practices of reading and writing in the age of generative AI and to consider how they can appeal to their ethos (i.e. good character) in both academic and civic conversations. Grounded in virtues of ethical rhetoric like curiosity, accountability, compassion, and courage, her teaching encourages students to make language choices that build rather than erode trust across lines of difference and disagreement in this time of toxic polarization.

Rachel has served as a Faculty Fellow for UCLA’s Dialogue Across Difference initiative and is currently the Coordinator of First-Year Writing.