Lisa Ede OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

In an often-quoted passage in Language as Symbolic Action, Kenneth Burke notes that: "Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality" (45). Although Burke is here speaking specifically about language, his comments remind us more generally that the way in which we direct our attention in part determines what we perceive. This is certainly true of the teaching of writing.

If we examine the material conditions that characterize the teaching of writing in North America today, for instance, we see a disturbing picture, one described in the Conference on College Composition and Communication's 1989 Statement of Principles and Standards for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing:

More than half of the English faculty in two-year colleges, and nearly onethird of the English faculty at four-year colleges and universities, work on part-time and/or temporary appointments. Almost universally, they are teachers of writing. . . . These teachers work without job security, often without benefits, and for wages far below what their full-time colleagues are paid per course. Increasingly, many are forced to accept an itinerant existence, racing from class to car to drive to another institution to teach. (330)

If we narrow our focus to one aspect of this overcrowded scene, the textbooks used by the often overworked and underprepared instructors who teach the majority of composition classes, the picture becomes only a shade less bleak. For as Donald Stewart notes in a review of recent composition textbooks, despite the presence of a number of innovative ones, many commercially successful textbooks continue to present traditional formulas and models. Because underprepared and overworked teachers often rely upon textbooks to structure most in-and out-of-class activities, textbooks mirror an important reality about the teaching of writing.

By shifting our gaze, we can compose a more optimistic portrait. The development of English compositionas a field--the growth of graduate programs and of journals, conferences, and other scholarly apparatus-has inevitably influenced the teaching of writing. The faculty member directing a writing program is now likely to be someone with a Ph.D. in composition studies, someone who actually wants and is trained to do the job. These and other developments in the field must be seen as positive, but they cannot obviate the fact that there continues to be a substantial gap between what researchers and experienced practitioners in the field know about the teaching of writing and how writing is actually taught in many community colleges, colleges, and universities.

Any discussion of the teaching of writing must begin by acknowledging this situation. Furthermore, this acknowledgment compels us to recognize that research on writing can have only limited impact on the actual teaching of writing as long as current conditions persist. Teachers of writing must work together to challenge such inequitable and pedagogically inappropriate practices as the exploitation of part-time instructors. While doing so we must also, of course, continue to teach our courses--to make decisions about textbooks, assignments, grading, and other classroom matters.

Teachers attempting to make informed decisions about matters such as these face a number of difficulties. One involves the sheer volume of research on writing. As the review that I undertook before beginning this essay reminded me, over the past twenty-five years we have amassed a considerable body of theoretical, historical, pedagogical, quantitative, and qualitative research on the teaching of writing. Each of us can name efforts that have had a significant impact on our field. My own list includes studies of the composing process, of invention and revision, of the relationship of cognitive development and writing, of basic writing, of the role of audience in discourse, of the impact of computers on writing, of assessment, of the writing-reading relationship, of style, of collaborative learning and writing, of rhetorical theory, and of the history of writing instruction.

This list, incomplete as it is, is impressive. But reading research on the teaching of writing may not resolve teachers' problems. Indeed, as teaching assistants taking their first composition theory class often attest, it can (at least in the short term) exacerbate them. For how, teaching assistants often ask in frustration, should they apply the knowledge they're gaining in the classes they teach? And what are they to make of the many conflicts that characterize the field of composition studies? For these and other writing teachers the often-asked question "What do we know about the teaching of writing?" may not be as crucial as another question: "What can and should teachers do with what we know about the teaching of writing?"

Some theorists have responded to this question by attempting to categorize various approaches to the teaching of writing. By grouping assumptions and practices into coherent "approaches," theorists such as James Berlin, Lester Faigley, Richard Fulkerson, Paul Kameen, and Richard Young hope, in Berlin's terms, to help "writing teachers become more aware of the full significance of their pedagogical strategies" ( "Contemporary Composition"766). Like Berlin, in this essay I hope to help writing teachers become more theoretically sophisticated and more confident practitioners. Rather than surveying various approaches to the teaching of writing, however, I will follow a different strategy. I will suggest what might best be thought of as a way of reading the diverse and constantly growing body of research on the teaching of writing and of thinking about the relationship of theory and practice. For although approaches to the teaching of writing can be described and grouped, although experts have written and will continue to write books about what we "know" about the teaching of writing, composition teachers will always have to negotiate a minefield of competing theories and research studies, just as they will always have to evaluate the consequences of these efforts for their practice.

Woven throughout my discussion are a number of references to the work of Peter Elbow. I have chosen to focus on Elbow not because he is a major theorist of composition--although he is--or because I wish to attack or defend his views. Rather, Elbow's work is helpful for my purposes because, for a variety of reasons, it has attracted both strong proponents and equally strong attackers and thus represents the sort of "problem" that teachers of writing attempting to evaluate authoritative knowledge for pedagogical practices regularly face.

Consider, for instance, the case of freewriting. Freewriting, is, as most teachers of writing know, a method identified with Ken Macrorie and Peter Elbow; here I will be concerned with Elbow's advocacy of freewriting. From the start, Elbow has made strong claims for freewriting. Writing Without Teachers, published in 1974, begins with this sentence: "The most effective way I know to improve your writing is to do freewriting exercises regularly" (3). Eight years later--years during which considerable research on the teaching of writing in general and on invention in particular was published--Elbow makes similar claims in Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process: "Freewriting is the easiest way to get words on paper and the best all around practice in writing that I know" (13).

Elbow's claims have been affirmed in a variety of ways. Elbow's books and essays have influenced a whole generation of teachers. A 1989 survey of ninth-grade English teachers in the Corvallis, Oregon, school district, for instance, indicated that more teachers were familiar with Elbow's work than with that of any other theorist (Howry). Most composition textbooks include freewriting as an inventional strategy. And recently freewriting has attracted traditional scholarly analysis as well. In Nothing Begins with N: New Investigations of Freewriting, Pat Belanoff, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl Fontaine present a number of discussions of freewriting, including case and experimental studies of the effects of freewriting on students.

But freewriting has also met with criticism. Perhaps the strongest attack has come from George Hillocks' Research on Written Composition: New Directions for Teaching, the 1986 study that evaluates empirical research on composition published from 1963, the year of Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer Research in Written Composition, to 1982. This study, which uses the statistical process of meta-analysis, ends with recommendations for teachers of writing. Freewriting does not fare well in this analysis.

Hillocks begins his discussion of freewriting by noting that "research on the composing process [ Hillocks here refers to a wide variety of studies, many of which were not included in his meta-analysis] provides little evidence to suggest that free writing as a main focus . . . of instruction will be effective" (231). Hillocks goes on to report that his meta-analysis confirms this inference: freewriting, Hillocks states, "has only minimal effect on the quality of writing" (232). Later, in discussing what he terms the "foci of instruction," Hillocks comments that "as a major instructional technique, free writing is more effective than teaching grammar [the least effective focus of instruction studied] in raising the quality of student writing. However, it is less effective than any other focus of instruction examined" (249).

Set in stark opposition, Elbow's and Hillocks' emphatically contradictory claims about freewriting are so unsettling that it is tempting to bracket them, to dismiss them as atypical. But in fact many similar contradictions abound in discussions of the teaching of writing. Consider, for instance, arguments about the use of heuristics. In the early 1970 s, Janice Lauer and Ann E. Berthoff debated the value of heuristics in the pages of College Composition and Communication. Lauer ( 1970) asserted that heuristic procedures developed by psychologists have much to offer theorists and teachers of writing. Berthoff responded by charging that such methods are "philosophically disastrous and politically dangerous" (95).

Or consider arguments about the best way to help students learn to revise. "Can you teach revision through specific writing tasks?" John Warnock asks in "The Writing Process": " Hillocks said yes. [Donald] Murray said no" (10). These debates point to a larger issue, the proper role that teachers of writing should play when they work with students. As Lil Brannon observes, some teachers--Brannon calls them "transmission" teachers--"believe that teachers can give writers skills and strategies" (22). Brannon includes in this group such researchers as Richard Young, Frank D'Angelo, and Linda Flower. Others, whom Brannon calls "reactive" teachers, "emphasize encouraging writers to use the latent resources they already have" (23). Donald Murray, Peter Elbow, and William E. Coles, Jr., are notable members of this group.

What is at least partly at stake in this debate, of course, is the question of whether writing can be taught or only assisted, supported, encouraged. Often playing a hidden role in this opposition are other issues. As Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole point out, for instance, "In practice, a prototypical form of text [such as the personal narrative essay or technical report] underlies most analyses of the writing process" (60). Some writers recognize this inevitable bias. In the first chapter of Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing, for example, Linda Flower notes that her textbook focuses on "the problems people face when they need to write academic papers, persuasive reports, concise memos, and essays that can open a reader's eyes" (1). Other theorists and textbook writers are less explicit about the prototypical genres or forms of text that their discussions of writing and of the writing process assume.

We should not be surprised that Flower's prototypical text differs from that of, say Murray or Coles. The single term "writing" can never cover or evoke all the various uses we actually make of writing in our lives--from jotting down grocery lists to writing letters and journals and composing legal briefs and technical reports. As Warnock notes: "Though 'writing' is often used with an apparent confidence that we all know what we mean by the term, that confidence is as unwarranted as our sometime confidence about the term 'literacy'" (3).

Metaphor also plays an important role in discussions of writing, for we can never have complete or unmediated access to the process of writing. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky acknowledge this reliance on metaphor in Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course when they introduce their study by noting that "This book is not only a description of the [ University of Pittsburgh's basic writing] course as we are teaching it now, but it is also an extended presentation of the metaphors we have chosen to represent our subject" (4). ( Bartholomae and Petrosky note, for instance, that "we choose to represent our student readers as composers rather than decoders" [15].) Linda Flower and John R. Hayes make a similar observation at the start of "The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem": "Metaphors give shape to mysteries, and traditionally we have used the metaphor of discovery to describe the writer's creative process" (22).

Even when theorists such as Flower and Hayes and Bartholomae and Petrosky attempt to acknowledge the metaphors that animate their vision of writing and the writing process, much inevitably remains hidden, unexplored. In "Control in Writing: Flower, Derrida, and Images of the Writer," Robert Brooke deconstructs Flower and her colleagues' work to demonstrate the role that the unacknowledged metaphor of "control" plays in Flower's texts: "the explicit rhetorical purpose of her texts is to help teachers and students 'control' their writing processes, yet the processes she describes are dynamically beyond control" (407). Brooke's Derridean reading of Flower causes him to propose that teachers of writing should help students "accept a different way of imagining themselves--a way of conceiving of the self which is not as threatened or troubled by internal confusion as the seemingly commonsensical classical subject" (416).

This discussion of metaphor leads us back to Elbow's and Hillocks' conflicting claims about freewriting. Elbow's books abound with metaphors; metaphors also play a crucial role in Elbow's argument. Writing with Power utilizes what Elbow calls the "cookbook strategy" of giving readers a variety of techniques for particular purposes, such as getting feedback or generating ideas. Like a writer of a cookbook, Elbow thus "provide[s] choice . . . but within any given recipe I have not hesitated to spell out in explicit detail the steps you should follow" (8). As might be expected, Hillocks' use of metaphor differs sharply from that of Elbow. Research on Written Communication generally avoids the use of obvious metaphors, though it cannot entirely do so. Hillocks' favored mode of instruction, the "environmental" mode, for instance, depends not only on the results of meta-analysis but also on the metaphoric implications of the term "environmental" for its persuasive impact.

A critical reading of the acknowledged and unacknowledged metaphors that inform both Elbow's and Hillocks' work might provide a way to get beyond or beneath their disagreement about freewriting to more foundational issues. For as Phillip K. Arrington notes in "Tropes of the Composing Process," tropes, such as metaphor, have the capacity "to prefigure our ideological stances toward language and writing" (335) and thus open up new space for discussion. In "Modernism and the Scene(s) of Writing," for instance, Linda Brodkey demonstrates how the suppressed metaphor of the scene of writing--that of "a solitary writer alone in a garret working into the small hours of the morning" (396)--has influenced the teaching of writing. Brodkey urges us to reexamine our thinking about writers and writing; to do so, we must "begin not by ignoring the scene of writing, but by reinserting some of the tensions between readers, writers, and texts that the world represented in the scene of writing so artfully supresses" (397).

Tropological/rhetorical/ideological analysis (choose your term) such as Arrington's and Brodkey's holds great promise, for it provides a potential way to critique apparently oppositional claims such as those of Hillocks and Elbow regarding freewriting. A reading of these authors' works might ask questions such as these. What makes freewriting "free"? What is the nature of the "analysis" that grounds and guarantees the accuracy of Hillocks' meta-analysis? What, in other words, do Elbow and Hillocks assume as a common-sense grounding for their pedagogical advice? What presence operates, in Derridean terms, to make their approaches appear coherent and unassailable?

Until we see beyond these deferring claims to more central issues, until we are able, in Brodkey's terms, to reinsert some of the tensions that Elbow's and Hillocks' texts inevitably suppress, their disagreement remains a problem--rather than a fruitfully problematized site for exploration. What can or should teaching assistants taking a composition theory class "do," for instance, with Elbow's and Hillocks' contrasting assertions about freewriting? Must they choose between one or the other "camp"? Some students will approach these works with such strong predispositions that they will automatically do so. Others will grant that, despite these authors' disagreement about freewriting, both may be if not right then useful. Such students will thus pick and choose those aspects of Elbow's and Hillocks' work that seem helpful or effective given their own teaching style, situation, and students.

Both of these strategies have the virtue of maintaining collegiality--a virtue not lost on teaching assistants struggling to understand and survive academic politics. In some writing programs, adherents of Elbow and Hillocks can teach different sections of the same freshman composition course and not even know that they disagree about fundamental issues, while those who pick and choose from both can offend no one. In this regard, composition teachers have proven no different from English teachers in general who, as Gerald Graff points out in Professing Literature: An Institutional History, have tended to operate "on a principle of systematic non-relationship in which all parties tacitly agree not to ask how they might be connected or opposed" (8-9).

Writing of this situation in "Peace Plan for the Canon Wars," Gerald Graff and William E. Cain argue that the solution to theoretical and pedagogical conflicts should be neither "pluralistic evasion" (312) nor forced agreement. Rather, they argue that English teachers should instead "teach the conflicts" (312). In the case of composition studies, this means recognizing that teachers of writing need to address, not evade, the question of how we can best evaluate authoritative knowledge for pedagogical practices in composition. Considered in this light, Elbow's and Hillocks' disagreement about the pedagogical usefulness of freewriting is finally not a problem but rather an opportunity.

If we accept Graff and Cain's challenge to confront, rather than evade, theoretical and pedagogical differences in the teaching of writing, we will have to give up one of our favorite accommodational strategies: our hasty retreat when challenged to the assertion that a particular pedagogical approach or practice "works best for me and my students." Rejecting this strategy does not mean, however, that teachers of writing should ignore the specifics of their classroom and institution. Whatever the subject or level, teaching is, as my colleague Suzanne Clark eloquently affirms, "a rhetorical act, a language art." Accordingly, teachers--like all who use language--must be sensitive to their rhetorical situations. But just as sensitivity to a writer's rhetorical situation involves much more than considering demographic information about the writer's audience, so too does sensitivity to a teacher's rhetorical situation involve more than simple observation and adaptation. For rhetoric has always recognized--though it has not always used these terms--that "the self is already within ideology and language" ( Jarratt and Grogan5).

As teachers probe and clarify their rhetorical situations, they need to recognize the cultural, political, and ideological forces influencing both them and their students. They also need to establish a heuristic, dialectical relationship between theory and practice. Theory should inform practice, certainly--but practice must also inform theory, for practice also (we too easily forget) is knowledge-generating. And what is practice but the interaction of specific teachers and students in specific situations, the moment-to-moment rhetorical reality of the classroom?

Despite increasingly strong arguments for writing as a social process ( Brodkey, Cooper, Gere, Reither, and Vipond), composition theorists have only recently begun to probe the significance of students' and teachers' rhetorical situations. Much attention has been focused, for instance, on arguments for a social constructionist epistemology ( Berlin, Bruffee, Le Fevre, Reither). As Joseph Harris notes in "The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing," however, these arguments often ignore powerful cultural, political, and ideological aspects of students' situations. Thus, Harris argues, theorists have erred in treating the concept of discourse community as a monolithic construct, forgetting that students--and teachers--are "always simultaneously a part of several discourses, of several communities . . . [are] always already committed to a number of conflicting practices" (19).

Similarly, in "Collaboration, Resistance, and the Teaching of Writing," Suzanne Clark and I argue that advocates of social constructionist theories, such as Bruffee, have overlooked the significance of resistance for theory and practice. Discussion of this concept must, we believe, be grounded in an analysis of the rhetorical situation of the classroom. Such analysis "complicates and enriches our understanding of resistance because it reminds us that teachers must always contend with the authority that their position constructs; students must always deal with their lack of authority" (12).

As the above examples demonstrate, the failure adequately to consider teachers' and students' rhetorical situations has potentially significant implications for research in composition studies. Consider, for instance, James A. Berlin's discussion of Elbow in Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. In this well-known work, Berlin uses epistemology as the basis for his critique of various approaches to the teaching of writing:

Objective theories locate reality in the external world, in the material objects of experience. Subjective theories place truth within the subject, to be discovered through an act of internal apprehension. And transactional theories (which Berlin subdivides into classical, cognitive, and epistemic theories) locate reality at the point of interaction of subject and object, with audience and language as mediating agencies. (6)

By focusing on epistemological assumptions, Berlin raises crucial theoretical issues and effectively highlights the way in which "in teaching writing we are providing students with guidance in seeing and structuring their experience, with a set of tacit rules about distinguishing truth from falsity, reality from illusion" (7). But this emphasis also causes Berlin to privilege some issues and practices while ignoring or devaluing others.

By privileging epistemology, for instance, Berlin deemphasizes the consequences of Elbow's commitment to writing groups. Berlin argues that Elbow's approach must be classified as subjective rather than epistemic--Berlin's favored category--because his "commitment to an epistemology that locates all truth within a personal construct arising from one's unique selfhood . . . prevents . . . [him] from becoming genuinely epistemic in . . . [his] approach, despite . . . [his] use of activities--such as the editorial group--that on the surface are social in nature" (153). But can Elbow's advocacy of writing groups be so easily dismissed? Doesn't this argument ignore the fact that, as Brian Street asserts in Literacy in Theory and Practice, "the processes whereby reading and writing are learnt are what construct the meaning of it for particular practitioners" (8, my emphasis)?

Patricia Bizzell echoes Street's assertion in "Arguing About Literacy" when she notes that the teaching of writing might best be viewed as the "process of constructing academic literacy, creating it anew in each class through the interaction of the professor's and the students' cultural resources" (150). In her essay, Bizzell comments that although teaching and learning writing--the production of literacy--are inherently collaborative, students and professors are hardly equal partners in this joint venture: "The professor automatically has more persuasive power for what he or she wants to include in academic literacy, simply by virtue of the social power his or her position provides over the students" (150).

Street's and Bizzell's comments suggest that a contextualized, rhetorically and ideologically grounded analysis of Elbow's approach to the teaching of writing must consider not only his epistemological assumptions but such factors as the teacher-student relationship his approach fosters and the kinds of activities that actually occur in writing classes. Such a perspective makes it much less easy to categorize Elbow's work. If teachers and students who employ Elbow's approach not only freewrite and keep journals but also spend considerable class time in group work, can the significance of this activity for the social construction of literacy in the classroom be so easily dismissed? Similarly, don't Elbow's statements about writing--statements that are, as Berlin rightly observes, grounded in the discourse of individualism--need to be examined not just in theory but in the context of actual classroom situations? When Elbow tells students that "everyone can, under certain conditions, speak with clarity and power" ( Power7) or that "I am talking to that person inside everyone who has ever written or tried to write . . . who seeks power in words" ( Power6), might not these statements represent a wise (if intuitive and thus untheorized) effort to mitigate the inevitable power imbalance between students and teacher that Bizzell describes?

Berlin's analysis of Elbow demonstrates how difficult it is fully to contextualize discussions of the teaching of writing. In Rhetoric and Reality, Berlin characterizes transactional theories of rhetoric as "based on an epistemology that sees truth as arising out of the interaction of the elements of the rhetorical situation" (15). Despite this recognition, Berlin himself fails adequately to ground his discussion of Elbow in a fully contextualized consideration of the actual classroom practices Elbow advocates and the way in which those practices may respond to the ideological and political situations of students and teachers. In so doing, Berlin may create an opposition between subjective and socialepistemic rhetoric that exists more strongly in theory than in practice.

My earlier discussion of freewriting attempted to explore the nature of the claims made for and against freewriting, rather than to assess this method. Similarly, this critique of Berlin's discussion of Elbow's work should be read as an exploration of the difficulties involved in any effort to analyze the teaching of writing, rather than as an attack upon Berlin or a defense of Elbow. Theorists must establish criteria for analysis; my discussion of Berlin simply confirms Burke's observation that any terminology not only reflects but selects and deflects reality.

My analysis does suggest, however, that current efforts to argue for writing as a social process may rely upon unnecessary and unhelpful oppositions. Furthermore, even though advocates of writing as a social process argue that literacy instruction is embedded in ideology, culture, and politics, this argument does not in itself guarantee that analyses of the teaching of writing grounded in this approach will themselves adequately address these issues. Nor, as Reither and Vipond observe, is there any guarantee that accepting this theoretical position will catalyze changes in actual classroom practices:

The topic of writing as social process has been a hot one in the last few years, so much so that it has become a dominant strand in our literature and at our conferences. The result has been a kind of revolution in composition theory. Unfortunately, however, the revolution seems to have been confined pretty much to the literature. Although the case for writing's social dimensions no longer requires arguing--it can be assumed--we would be hard put to point to a corresponding transformation in the ways writing is conceived and dealt with in our classrooms. In fact, even though radical changes in practice seem called for if we believe even some of what has been claimed about the social dimensions of writing, little substantive change in either course design or classroom practice has come about that can be said to result directly from this reconsideration of the nature of writing. (855)

Knowing that writing is a social process does not necessarily empower teachers--or students--effectively to resist the structures and discourse of contemporary education.

Reither and Vipond's comments bring us back to the relationship of theory and practice in the teaching of writing, reminding us that theoretical revolutions may--or may not--have significant pedagogical consequences. And perhaps we are distanced enough from the writingas-process revolution to recognize that this movement, enthusiastically received by college and university writing teachers in the early 1970s but only now filtering down to the public schools, may not have dramatically changed teaching practices. Instead, some teachers of writing may have replaced one narrow and rigid set of practices for another. Teachers who in pre-revolutionary days assured their students that they couldn't possibly compose an effective essay without writing a formal outline before drafting may now require their students to complete a series of prescribed heuristic activities instead.

Despite the large and diverse body of research on the teaching of writing, we are just beginning to recognize the difficult questions raised by a rigorous examination of the relationship of theory and practice. ( Louise Wetherbee Phelps makes a useful contribution to discussion of this issue in the final chapter of Composition as a Human Science: Contributions to the Self-Understanding of a Discipline.) We have accumulated a large body of information on the teaching of writing in the last twenty-five years, but we are just beginning to explore the reasons why this research has had so little impact on actual practice. We are also just beginning to recognize the extraordinary complexity of these activities that we call writing and teaching, to consider what it means for us as teachers when we recognize that all language use, including our own, is embedded in ideology, culture, and politics.

Research in literacy studies offers perhaps the most fruitful grounding for efforts to respond to these and other issues and problems. For when we view writing in the context of literacy studies we are reminded that writing engages students--and teachers--who have not only minds but also bodies and emotions, who bring to school not only their own experiences, interests, desires, and prejudices but also those of their families, neighbors, and community. An ethnographic study like Heath Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms forces us to confront how little we know about the "living, believing, and valuing" that our students bring with them to school and how crucial these will be as they attempt to acquire "knowledge and skill in the symbolic manipulation of language" (367).

Heath's study also reminds us that even innovative and effective pedagogical practices, like those Heath developed with local teachers, parents, and students in the Piedmont Carolinas, may not be able to resist larger forces. In the epilogue to Ways with Words, Heath notes that thanks to "a decrease in the autonomy of teachers as competent professionals and an increase in the bureaucratization of teaching and testing," the ethnographic methods that teachers had successfully used in the 1970s and that teachers interviewed in 1981 recalled as "a creative high point in their careers" have "all but disappeared" (356).