TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Finding the Work

Part One: The Cognition of Composing, 1980-1985

Introduction
Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block (1980)
Two Case Studies from Writer’s Block: The Cognitive Dimension (1984)
   Appendix A: Writer’s Block Questionnaire
   Appendix B: Assignment Materials for Stimulated-Recall Study
Complexity, Rigor, Evolving Method, and the Puzzle of Writer’s Block: Thoughts on Composing Process Research (1985)
Sophisticated, Ineffective Books – The Dismantling of Process in Composition Texts (1981)
Speculations on Process Knowledge and the Textbook’s Static Page (1983)

Part Two: Teaching and Academic Writing, 1979-2001

Introduction
From When Faculty Talk About Writing (1979)
Remedial Writing Courses: A Critique and a Proposal (1983)
  Comment on “Remedial Writing Courses” by David Peck and Elizabeth Hoffman
  Peter Elbow Responds to “Remediation as Social Construct”
“A Sociology Assignment: The Phases of Culture Shock” from Critical Strategies for Academic Thinking and Writing, with Malcolm Kiniry (1998)
A Call for the Teaching of Writing in Graduate Education, with Karen McClafferty (2001)

Part Three: Integrating the Cognitive and the Social: Critical Perspectives on Writing Instruction, 1985-1991

Introduction
The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University (1985)
Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism (1988)
“This Wooden Shack Place:” The Logic of an Unconventional Reading, with Glynda Hull (1990)
Remediation as Social Construct: Perspectives from an Analysis of Classroom Discourse, with Glynda Hull, Kay Losey Fraser, and Marisa Castellano (1991)

Part Four: School and Society, 1989-1995

Introduction
From “The Politics of Remediation” in Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America’s Underprepared (1989)
From Introduction to Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America (1995)
From “Baltimore, Maryland” in Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America (1995)

Part Five: The Mind at Work: Researching the Everyday, 1999-2004

Introduction
“Our Hands Will Know”: The Development of Tactile Diagnostic Skill – Teaching, Learning, and Situated Cognition in a Physical Therapy Program (1999)
The Working Life of a Waitress (2001)
Words in Action: Rethinking Workplace Literacy (2003)
“On Method” from The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (2004)

Part Six: Public Writing: Style and Persuasion, 1989-2005

Introduction
What’s Right with Remedy: A College Try (1989)
School-Business Ties: The Unexamined Paradox of Past Performance (1990)
Educational Standards Must Be Reclaimed for Democratic Ends (1991)
What We Talk about When We Talk about School (1996)
Saving Public Education (1997)
Extol Brains as Well as Brawn of the Blue Collar (2004)
How Should We Think about Intelligence? (2004)
Rags to Riches, Republican Style (2005)

Bibliography
Index

Introduction: Finding the Work

As anyone who spends an evening with a box of old photographs knows, it can be, by turns, wistful and revealing to go back through your past. For me, the collecting of these pieces of writing, published between 1979 and early 2005, was both. Rereading the early articles called up the books and the work of the time – teaching or running a program – and people, whose letters I read again, bringing back old acquaintances and the ideas that came with them. There are flaws and limits in that early writing, yes, but particular kinds of beginnings as well, and for those I feel grateful.

Selecting the more recent material and laying it alongside the old affords a new reading of the old. I think I understand it better… or a little more fully. And I see what carries over to the new, the long-running concerns and commitments.

There is a deep belief in people’s ability, and my interest is in language use and thinking, how they are defined and assessed, and how they are opened up or shut down by social circumstances. There is a belief in the richness, the complexity and variability of human behavior, and an attempt to study and represent it through the details of the classroom, the workplace, and the run-of-the-mill events of our daily lives. Hand-in-glove, there is a distrust of abstraction about all this, a skepticism about broad claims and big theories concerning how people – either generically or by group identity – think, or use language, or make meaning of the world.

Over time, I have been driven to understand different disciplines and to forge synthesis: synthesis of practice and theory, of the cognitive and the social, of forms of writing, of research methodologies. Thus, over time, I’ve paid a lot of attention to methodology itself, to the process of inquiry. I’m aware, looking back over this writing, of some kind of restlessness, at the least a discomfort with the professional confines of disciplinary life – at the same time that I’ve struggled to learn how a particular discipline works and what it enables one to do.

Many of the pieces in this collection are critical of standard practice and the social order, but it is hope that drives the writing, hope that careful analysis and the right phrasing might in some small, small way open a space to think anew.