The section begins with Janice Witherspoon Neuleib and Maurice Scharton's chapter titled "Many a Slip Twixt the Cup and the Lip: Teaching and Learning with Graduate Instructors," and these two veteran compositionists explain that senior faculty in charge of writing programs can easily assume that rigorous training and patient support of graduate instructors will ensure consistently successful instruction throughout a program. In the case of a large department, such an assumption can lead to exciting and sometimes frustrating results.

Their chapter includes a profile of facts about students at Illinois State University, including a report on Placement Test distribution for incoming freshmen students (4,500 freshmen per year), and an analysis of interview and observational data gleaned from studies of graduate instructors who teach writing in the program. The department has collected data in the form of classroom observation summaries, student evaluations, and self-reporting, all of which will enrich the interview methodology that will inform the study. All graduate instructors in this large department (served by 150 graduate instructors and a small number--less than 10--adjunct instructors) do receive extensive orientation and ongoing support and supervision during their teaching careers. For the most part, the authors explain, these graduate instructors do teach within the guidelines of the department; in fact, the department has consistently been singled out for its expertise in teaching and teacher training.

However, both Neulieb and Scharton note that despite a complex and theoretically informed program, instructors can vary from the standard supposed by the ideals and theories of the graduate professors in charge of graduate instructor training and support. In fact, these graduate instructors often construct pedagogies quite different from those discussed and recommended in graduate classes. The authors investigate the many positive methods outlined in course goal statements, including student-centered classrooms and state-of-the-art computer classrooms, and instructional techniques of classroom instructors. They also investigate how and why these variations occur, what types of teaching result in classrooms, what gaps exist between theoretically ideal approaches and actual instruction, and how undesirable pedagogies affect student performance, as well as recommend solutions to improve teaching and learning.

Moving into more discussion of training of future teachers, Stuart C. Brown's chapter, "Obscured Agendas and Hidden Failures: Teaching Assistants, Graduate Education, and First-Year Writing Courses," examines a number of the implications related to graduate education in English studies as it has bearing on the teaching of composition. He explores the key problematic areas including that the training of graduate students in teaching composition is done primarily at research universities where student populations often do not mirror the students these future teachers actually encounter; that many graduate students rarely receive training beyond an introductory course (at best) or a several day orientation before entering the classroom; that evaluation (and corrective disciplinary action) of graduate teaching assistants in the classroom is particularly difficult; that programs rely on a majority of graduate student teachers who are not pursuing studies in the teaching of writing, but primarily view this teaching as subsidy for their studies; that writing program directors have little say in who teaches in their programs as students are "awarded" teaching assistantships by disciplinary emphasis; that many graduate students either fail to see themselves as writers or fail to provide this insight to their students; that the graduate students themselves may be poorly prepared writers; that trained compositionists, even as graduate students, are likely to spend more professional time as administrators rather than as teachers; and that there is an increasing disjuncture among theorists, practitioners, and historians of writing that is reflected in the graduate education writing specialists receive.

Brown also notes that there are, of course, broader issues that affect writing programs such as the use and abuse of part-time instructors and adjuncts, the difficulties of many entry-level composition faculty in getting tenure recognition for teaching "service" level courses, and the failure of the academy to justify, or at least explain, its use of resources.

It is clear that Brown's intention here is not to anger, although the discussion within questions some of the fundamental assumptions underlying graduate education not only in English studies at large, but in the discipline of rhetoric and composition. Instead, in this chapter he helps initiate a discussion of how graduate studies is formulated, the costs of that formulation to beginning college writers, and some considerations for rectifying the problems.

From the other side of the desk comes Beth Maxfield "The Preparation of Graduate Writing Teachers: Creating Substance Out of Shadows" offers a fresh perspective on graduate writing teacher preparation. She notes that a cursory literature review of the recent history of composition studies will reveal that much has been written about the writing competence (or the lack thereof) of freshmen, and even more has been written about the best ways to teach freshman composition. Maxfield claims that those of us who have devoted our professional lives to researching and teaching composition have articulated our diverse views with increasing vigor and conspicuity. However, our theories about writing instruction have not reached the right audience to the extent that they might be practiced by the vast majority of freshman composition teachers--graduate teaching assistants. Furthermore, too little of our time--both as practitioners and as theoreticians--has been dedicated to preparing these future teachers of writing for the realities of teaching such a subjective and personal course as is the writing course. She agrees with others in this collection that a part of this problem rests with the derisive attitude toward teaching of writing within the microcosm of the English department (i.e., the literature specialists) and within the academic community in general; however, a more disturbing aspect is the blasé attitude toward freshman composition teaching by composition teachers themselves. She claims this combination of these attitudes creates a no-win situation for the new TA as well as the freshman writer.

Maxfield continues by noting that despite the rising visibility of composition as a discipline and increasing political pressure to substantiate effectiveness, the practice of placing ill-prepared (and, often, uninterested) graduate teaching assistants in freshman composition classes continues; in fact, at some schools, the only writing teachers freshmen writers see are TAs. While we have professed, through orientation workshops, course requirements, mentorships, practica, and the like, to prepare TAs to enter the freshman composition classroom, we have been doing nothing so much as casting a smokescreen; the training most often provided for TAs is much more abstract and theoretical than it is concrete and practical. She is quick to note that while these new teachers need a philosophical grounding, their more pressing need is practical: how to apply theory in the classroom.

Professor Maxfield, herself not long graduated from a composition program, notes that if we aim to produce better writers, we must first produce better writing teachers. She suggests that in order to do so, we must alter our own attitudes toward the teaching of freshman composition; our enthusiastic teaching of it is necessary for us to teach others how to teach it. We must also be willing to make changes in the status quo and in the process step on some academic toes; some of the changes may be perceived as territorial invasion by members of other disciplines. In her chapter, she explores the merits and faults of some current practices in TA training as seen in survey results; her goal in this chapter is to broach this subject as an opening of discussion and an impetus for initiating action among my fellow composition specialists.

Alan Jackson broaches a different subject, cognition, but with the same goal, to show others its importance to teaching writing, and to initiate discussion and action. In his chapter, "Cognition and Culture: Addressing the Needs of StudentWriters," Jackson considers the failure of composition studies to address the growing diversity of age and experience, a failure that reflects composition's abandonment of cognitive theories. He discusses advances in cognitive science, especially the idea of emergents, that can lead to better, more individualized, college composition teaching methods and classroom dynamics that incorporate the distinct needs and cognitive levels of students. He discusses how most readers are promoted as introducing students to the world around them, which ignores the nontraditional student who lives and works in that world, who has gone past issues of personal growth and awareness thought common to the traditional firstyear composition student.

Furthermore, he discusses other areas where this gulf can create problems if not recognized and incorporated in the college composition classroom. For example, most incoming first-year college students are full-time and quickly acculturate to college life, and they also are comfortable with the academic standards and expectations inherent in many classrooms. However, for many other students, college life is not their primary culture and they have lost contact with academic norms. But cognitive and cultural differences also require in assigning group work and in handling class discussions, among other activities. Jackson claims that composition professionals need to recognize that many student-writers have gained, from work and life experiences, a broader range of skills and knowledge, as well as a different way of approaching learning. In addition, these students have a greater need for the immediate assistance in adapting their writing to the workplace. Jackson notes our fascination with academic discourse, but also reminds us that for his type of student, the concern is not in developing skills relevant to a future work environment, but in possessing skills for immediate workplace success.

As a framing technique, Jackson examines the current state of cognitive theory as it is reflected in composition journals, a state that has seen little advancement since the work of Linda Flowers. He contends that new developments in cognitive science, of cutting-edge researchers such as Duane Rumbaugh and Michael Cole, will force composition professionals to rethink their understanding of learning. In addition, he explores how these developments might lead to changes in the way we teach writing to individual student-writers: first, by recognizing that cognitive differences require instructional differences and; second, by understanding how experience alters one's cognitive capacity for learning.

In the final essay in this section, "Breaking the Learning Monopoly: Acknowledging and Accommodating Students' Diverse Learning Styles," Eric H. Hobson continues Jackson's premise on the need for individuality in instruction when reports that the past decade has been particularly boisterous within composition studies as any number of "correctives" to the traditional paradigm of the first-year writing program have been championed. Proponents of cultural studies have argued that writing courses benefit from having a critical center. This position links their corrective plan to similar calls for reform that would have first-year writing courses center around critical thinking/ problem-solving foci. Responding to writing-across-the-curriculum's success, others see a remedy to the traditional paradigm in a distinctly disciplinary writing sequence, often spread over several years of study. Other remedies would have the first-year writing sequence focus on such issues as race, power, and economics.

He notes that regardless of the extent to which each of these proposals rests on logical, even meritorious, foundations consistent with the best intentions of the liberal arts, they all exhibit a fundamental flaw, one seemingly endemic to American higher education. These reform models are linked to an uncritical and unrealistic understanding of their clientele--ironically, so too is the traditional paradigm they would replace. For the most part, the correctives presented in the past decade paint students taking the first-year writing sequence with a too broad brush; these plans fail to consider the variety of learning styles and preferences that students bring to the composition classroom, learning algorithms through which students make sense both of the world at large and of immediate classroom instruction.

Hobson, drawing from a number of disparate studies of learning styles/preferences found in school populations, suggests that for any fix-it plan to successfully reform the first-year writing sequence, it must make a fundamental, even paradigmatic shift in perspective from viewing students as composite groups--often assumed to share their instructors' learning preferences--to viewing these students on a more individualized basis, recognizing the variety and diversity of learning systems on which students rely in any given classroom. Hobson claims that this recognition, however, although intuitively appealing, is not without profound implications--many of them hard to champion in an era of budget slashing for direct instruction. As such, this chapter not only presents data on the learning styles among the students taking the typical first-year writing course, it compares this data to similar data on instructor learning styles and the teaching practices they employ. The dissimilarities apparent in this comparison raise any number of disturbing issues, including the possibility that the very structure of the course, as it reflects the instructor's biases about what learning style are academically valuable, may, in large part, determine levels of student success in the course.

As editors of this collection, we feel quite fortunate in how this volume has developed. The contributors did not exchange their chapters as they prepared them for this collection, yet in final form they share some important common threads. Consider how many of the authors comment on our theoretical excesses in composition. Consider how many of them question our students' reading skills, and our inability as professionals to integrate reading instruction into writing classrooms. Consider how many suggest that we step back for a moment to revise our vision of the discipline of composition and its boundaries. Consider how many comment on our "place" in the academy, and how we have been underappreciated by our colleagues in other areas of English. Consider how many comment on the need for more individualized instructional methods that explore and acknowledge students' learning styles. Consider how many ask for more concrete evidence as to the successes of our own approaches. Consider how many comment on the problem of composition theorists who don't teach composition.

Of course there are areas in which the authors disagree, but it is these common threads that perhaps offer more hope for the future of our discipline. It has been said that confession is good for the soul, and this is our hope for this volume. By writing our wrongs, we are beginning to draw some of the initial boundaries for our revised discipline. We are coming together here to say that not everything we have tried or claimed has worked, but we have come together here to explore these promises and claims in order not to repeat them. Our failures are acknowledged and seeds for the reconciliation between the discipline as it stands now and the discipline we hope for have been planted in this volume.

We must thank several people who have helped bring this book to completion. Obviously without contributors, a volume such as this is a nonstarter from the onset. Our contributors have been wonderful to work with and continue much of our discussion through e-mail. George Butler and Heidi Straight of Greenwood were with us at all stages of the publication process, and their professional guidance and advice have helped us grow as editors.