In "First the Bad News, Then the Good News: Where Writing Research Has Taken Us and Where We Need to Take It Now," Wendy Bishop suggests that for the last twenty years, it has been a strong tenet of composition writing classrooms that instruction should start where the student is-that it should engage students and encourage them to view themselves as literate citizens while developing their literacy skills. While a great deal of composition research was completed to understand how writers compose, how writing students respond to teacher-commentary on their work, and so on, far less research has provided context-based insights into the general classroom experiences of first-year writing students, asking whether and how theory has been put into practice, if students feel engaged in or even well served by contemporary writing curriculums, and if and how they view themselves as developing writers and literate citizens.

Bishop's conversational style, with the reader and herself, offers an appropriate questioning ploy for the focus of this chapter. Indeed, Bishop notes that when researchers have asked such questions, they've uncovered perplexing issues. For instance, Jennie Nelson found students evaluating assignments far more pragmatically than their professors assumed, Susan Wyche-Smith found writing classrooms playing a minor role in complicated student lives, and Susan Miller and five student-researchers uncovered strongly conflicting views of literacy among college professors across the curriculum and among the studentresearchers she worked with. Bishop consequently reconsiders the students' repeatedly documented isolation, even from their classmates, and the distancing strategies, humor, and anger they found to naturalize it.

While composition professionals have rightly and usefully looked at curriculum and program design and institutional politics, composing processes and workplace practices--all with the goal of improving classroom instruction--they have, perhaps, overlooked the more difficult to study arena of college composition students' experiences. Bishop explores the ways composition research has focused more on the needs of teachers and programs than on the results of instruction and experiences of student writers in classroom contexts. Bishop calls for a refocusing of our research that might lead us to insights into why--with the best of intentions--some of our classroom practices are having less than stellar success.

Kelly Lowe chapter "Composition and the End of Everything; or The Bravery of Being Out of Range: What's Wrong with a Postmodern Composition Theory?" takes the reader on an interesting journey from graduate student full of wonder to compositionist full of reality. Here we see the evolution of writing teacher, and this chapter "unpacks" this evolution with startling frankness. Postmodernism is noted as a wonderful theoretical exercise (but not without a few jabs along the way), but when the realities of composition classes (note plural) come to bear, this theoretical construct holds little water. Simply stated, once Lowe enters the world of full-time employment in composition and meets students who have already articulated much for themselves, postmodernity hits a giant academic and philosophical roadblock.

Lowe asks our theorists to think again--to attempt a more realistic approach to his students--and again he points to postmodern composition's failure to reach his students. Through a compelling, no-holds-barred, chapter, Lowe has written frankly and clearly about what it means to "grow up" in the composition classroom. His chapter offers the beginning compositionist hands-on experience and reaction to the implementation of theory (at least postmodern theory) in the composition classroom. The author explores what it means to put theory into practice at the grassroots; his picture makes interesting reading for those on both sides of this fence.

In "Expressivisms as 'Vernacular Theories' of Composing: Recovering the Pragmatic Roots of Writing Instruction," Don Bushman notes that over the course of the last fifteen years, certain methods of composition instruction have fallen into "disrepute," mainly, he suggests in this chapter, because of the "philosophization" of composition studies. When critics like James Berlin and Lester Faigley began to seek out the epistemological roots of various pedagogical methods, they were certainly performing valuable critiques of established pedagogies, but they may also have persuaded many of us to turn our backs on effective pedagogies--among them those that have been classified as "expressivisms." Bushman continues that although recent apologists for expressivism (e.g., Burnham, Gradin) have claimed that expressivist rhetorics have been misread and misrepresented as they've been critiqued, those claims both are and are not justified, that expressivist works often mirror a less-rigid epistemological framework than we have come to expect from a "theory" of composing. The early expressivists, Bushman argues, are not really "theorists" in the same sense that, say, Linda Flower and John R. Hayes are considered "cognitive theorists" of composition. These expressivists are instead "vernacular theorists" of composition. The term "vernacular theory" has been popularized in Thomas McLaughlin book Street Smarts and Critical Theory ( U Wisconsin P, 1996), wherein he defines "theory in the vernacular mode" as theories that are undertaken by those "who do not come out of the tradition of philosophical critique" and that "arise out of intensely local issues." He goes on to say that while vernacular theories often "fail to transcend ideologies," they "manage in spite of their complicity [with those ideologies] to ask fundamental questions about culture" ( 5 - 6 ). In this chapter, Bushman proposes that the theories of early expressivist compositionists (such as Macrorie, Coles, and Elbow) are "vernacular theories" and that the criticisms against them are indeed often valid: expressivist rhetorics are often complicit in a foundationalist/essentialist worldview. But he also argues that their often-contradictory epistemological stances in no way impinge upon their pedagogical effectiveness in certain local contexts, and, in the process, he addresses the positive and negative consequences of the "philosophization" of college writing instruction.

In "The Post-Process Movement in Composition Studies," Bruce McComiskey argues that after John Trimbur described the "post-process" movement in composition studies as the result of a crisis within the process paradigm and a growing disillusion with its limits and pressures, the term "postprocess" recently enjoyed some currency in composition studies. McComiskey continues that its meaning remains unclear because in each idiomatic usage of the term this "post" means something different, ranging anywhere from a radical rejection to a complex extension of what came before. In this chapter, McComiskey argues that the most fruitful meaning for the "post" in postprocess is extension, not rejection, and he offers social-process rhetorical inquiry as a method for extending our present view of the composing process into the social world of discourse.

First, Thomas Kent uses the term "post-process theory" to signify his radical break with modernist writing process pedagogies. Kent argues against "systemic rhetorics" that treat the production and analysis of language as a codifiable process. Language is inherently unstable, contradictory, chaotic, Kent argues; and writing thus cannot be reduced to a system or taught as a process. McComiskey argues, however, that while pedagogical strategies for invention and revision may indeed constitute a systemic "metalanguage," they comprise no more a metalanguage than paralogy and dialogue, the keywords Kent uses most to describe post-process theory. Further, the very word "theory" implies a systemic view of the thing that Kent argues has no system. Without a certain degree of systemic rhetoric, Kent would neither be able to compose arguments against process pedagogy nor even be able to conceive of post-process as a "theory."

McComiskey further notes that the critique of expressivist ideologies from social perspectives in composition scholarship has resulted in the incorrect perception that with this social critique comes a necessary rejection of the composing process, but this is simply not the case. As James Berlin, Lester Faigley, and Karen Burke LeFevre have all pointed out, social approaches to writing instruction view composing as a social (not individual) process. Thus, "the writing process" is not the sole province of expressivism, and the "social turn" in composition studies, which Trimbur labels "post-process," does not constitute, in practice or theory, a radical rejection of the process movement, but rather its extension into the social world of discourse.

McComiskey concludes that social-process rhetorical inquiry, a specific pedagogical methodology that responds to the exigencies of the post-process social turn in composition studies, begins with a cyclical model of writing (the production, distribution, and consumption of discourse) that accounts for both the composing strategies of writers and the socio-discursive lives of texts. Invention heuristics based on this cycle encourage students to understand language and culture as constructive forces conditioned by contexts and negotiated by critical subjectivities who then use their negotiated readings of existing texts to produce new texts, and so on. McComiskey concludes that students who engage in detailed exploration of all three moments in this cycle develop the sense that culture itself is a constantly changing process and that their own writing can influence some of the changes that cultures undergo, and social-process rhetorical inquiry brings these "post" processes of rhetorical intervention consciously to bear on students' own critical writing.

Gina Claywell, in "Finding 'The Writer's Way': What We Expected and How We've Erred," cites Mina Shaughnessy Errors and Expectations, written in 1977, as a response to the basic writing problems created by open admissions, and notes that this work is now canonical in rhetoric and composition, not only for its recognition of the patterns of errors students write but also for its empathy regarding the difficulties that students have with writing and that teachers have with teaching writing. In the twenty years since its publication, the field of rhetoric and composition has blossomed, and its members have zealously examined new trends in related fields, applying a plethora of methods and theories to the teaching of writing as they went. Still, none of us seem quite satisfied with our programs or our individual instruction. Claywell notes that only now are we beginning to understand that Shaughnessy's concern with "the writer's way" implies a multitude of writing processes, not one way of writing shared by all writers. And, though we give lip service to the recommendations Shaughnessy made lo those many years ago and despite the technology that makes writing much less onerous than ever, we still have much more to accomplish in areas such as writing across the curriculum, student writing conditions, the social independence of classrooms, and the content of composition courses themselves. Claywell's chapter examines these areas, comparing the predictions and hopes Shaughnessy revealed to the current status of composition programs at four schools in three states. It draws on past experiences of the author at these sites, but is further supported by incidences cited in current literature and by readily available data on the Internet. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways real changes can be made--most of which include the need for English programs to consolidate their political muscle but not before they reach consensus about what they really value.

Christina Murphy and Joe Law chapter, "The Writing Center and the Politics of Separation: The Writing Process Movement's Dubious Legacy," notes an important development in composition related to the world of writing centers and their place in the composition discipline itself. Famously hailed by Maxine Hairston as a "paradigm shift" on the order of the revolution in science, the writing process movement is closely associated with a curious development in writing centers--a tendency to separate themselves not only from English departments but from the rest of the academy as well. A key moment in this development is Stephen M. North "The Idea of a Writing Center" ( 1984), an essay that crystallized the attitudes of many writing center practitioners at that time and that has since been widely regarded as a writing center manifesto. Asserting that English departments do not understand the work of writing centers, North goes on to affirm that this work focuses on writers rather than on their writing, and his description of writing center practice firmly links it to the "paradigm shift" that had occurred in composition.

Murphy and Law do not want to suggest that North's essay is itself the cause of subsequent developments in writing center discussions; however, his frequently cited work seems typical of what has followed. Two principal strands in "The Idea of a Writing Center"--the distinction between the writing center and the rest of the academy and the emphasis on the writer as an individual to be improvedhave dominated much writing center scholarship over the past fifteen years. The classroom and writing center are often treated as though they are in competition. At other times, the sense of conflict escalates to take on the academy as a whole.

Murphy and Law report several unfortunate consequences from these strands. They report that first, although the emphasis on the individual student would seem to be a good thing, published writing center scholarship has tended to center on the affective level of the writing center's work rather than on its effectiveness as pedagogy. That focus includes the current debate about the "ethics" of tutoring. Though interesting in their own right, these side issues do not address the more pressing questions of assessing our pedagogical effectiveness, an issue crucial to the future of writing programs in general. If the public in general--and legislators in particular--continue to perceive problems in higher education, questions of who owns the text will become irrelevant. The authors further note that this larger aspect of "institutional politics" has largely been ignored. Much of the writing on the topic has been of the sort that represents the writing center professional as a martyr to marginalization without looking at the role of the writing center in the institutional context. Such posturing can only alienate the administrators who make crucial decisions about the writing center and justify their tendency to make those decisions without consulting writing center personnel.