At the start of each fall semester, my first-year writing students and I spend some time listing taboos associated with "school writing." In addition to insisting that we should never start a sentence with "and" or end it with a preposition, my students invariably tell me that the pronoun "I" should never be used in essays, in reports, or in any other kind of academic work. Indeed, I have encountered all manner of convoluted attempts to produce prose free of the recalcitrant "I" (a tricky feat when trying to write about oneself). Of course, what students take to be teachers' injunctions against the first-person pronoun are often warnings about redundant structures, such as "I think" or "I believe," or expressions of emotional response when analytic or informational discourse has been called for. Indeed, most college writing teachers seem to have an expansive appreciation for self-reference as well as some tolerance for a student's misreading of the requirements for the assignment. However, the "personal" at the center of composition debates is of a different character and magnitude entirely.

This "personal" involves a particular way of conveying information that seems to represent the writer's reflections on his or her lived experience. Most often, it is described as personal narrative, although personal essays can be nonnarrative in structure, and all personal writing is certainly not essayistic. In writing classrooms, it is associated with "expressivist" writing pedagogy, and it is this controversial, expressivist personal writing that Karen Surman Paley takes up in I_Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person Writing. According to Paley, critics have misunderstood and misrepresented the potential of expressivist writing instruction by viewing it as naive, solipsistic, and apolitical. Her monograph works to redress these misconceptions by "demonstrat[ing] that `expressivist' programs are much more complicated than they have been made out to be and that first-person writing can be simultaneously highly personal and highly politicized."

The centerpiece of Paley's project is an ethnographic study of two college-level expressivist writing teachers. (I should note, at this point, that throughout her book Paley problematizes the term expressivist by using quotation marks in an effort to indicate that the label is often reductively and pejoratively applied to composition programs in which students write about their lived experience.) Using thick description and a magnified focus, she describes what expressivist teachers actually do and what is really taking place in their classrooms. Paley first introduces Helena, an African American and Puerto Rican doctoral student who teaches writing. Although Paley characterizes Helena's first-year writing seminar as expressivist, the four required assignments consist of a personal narrative, an analysis, a persuasive paper, and a research paper. Significantly for Paley, Helena's narrative assignment serves as a catalyst for students choosing topics of both personal interest and social and political importance in their subsequent essays. For example, one student, Janet, writes a personal essay about a family conflict, her grandmother's rejection of mother and daughter; later she pursues the themes of abandonment and alienation in her service-learning project on homeless shelters. Another student, Catherine, first writes about her father's debilitating alcoholism and later analyzes causes and effects of college students' binge drinking behaviors. Paley shows that, regardless of genre, the students' essays, teacher conferences, class discussions, and assigned writing address significant issues of race, class, social identity construction, and political consequence.

Paley's ethnographic research in Debby's prose writing course uncovers that same complexity of course content and discourse in an apparently traditional expressivist approach that she found in Helena's semi-expressivist pedagogy. Debby, a white woman in her mid-fifties, does not assign formal topics or writing genres, and although she provides background information on various rhetorical modes as well as a wide range of readings on timely subjects, including some "overtly political pieces," Paley explains that most of Debby's students write autobiographical narratives. However, Debby encourages them to problematize their renderings of experience and self by calling attention to their socially and textually constructed personas and depictions of reality. Like Helena's assignments, the students in Debby's class write essays that "inadvertently served to connect home and school cultures," thus supporting Paley's feminist insight that "the family system is a site of both individual development and of political consciousness." Paley introduces Mark, whose then-and-now personal narrative about childhood pranks on a mentally ill neighbor becomes a metaphor for his relationship with his own father. Because Mark has the freedom to choose writing topics, Paley argues, not only was he able to write "through" the disconnection he felt in his own family dynamic, but he also gains authority to write with confidence on a variety of academic and personal subjects, including an expository essay about Albert Einstein, an argumentative letter to the editor, and an essay about his father.

For Tanya, another of Debby's undergraduate students, emerging confidence in her "writer's voice" contributed to both stronger writing and the politicizing of the prose writing class. As Paley constructs it, Tanya's story of an African-American student in a predominantly white institution marks the intersection of the personal and political for writing teachers and student writers. Tanya chooses to analyze and critique an educational program that bussed urban black children to a wealthy white school district outside of Boston. Tanya learned about the program when she was student teaching at the school and was herself the only black teacher. Her essay draft—a combination of personal response, exposition, and critique—initially seems unfocused and ambiguous. During writing conferences, Debby not only addresses rhetorical issues related to the essay but gives Tanya feedback that confirms the teacher's recognition of what it means to be an institutional outsider. Tanya ultimately reveals that her writing insecurities stem directly from her student teaching experience: her supervisors determined that her dialect reflected poor grammar skills and required that she complete a second practicum. According to Paley, Debby's empathy contributes to the writer's emerging confidence as she redrafts the essay and finally workshops it with the class. Significantly, Tanya's essay initiated an important class discussion of institutionally sanctioned racism and provoked other students to write antiracist essays. Paley argues that "the experience of sharing some of what life is like for black people to her white classmates and of having them listen with a combination of identification, respect, and discomfort enhanced her self-confidence." Paley describes Tanya as a participant in the class and as the writer of several humorous papers that she confidently discussed in workshop. All in all, the ethnographies in I_Writing reveal expressivist classrooms in which personal writing generates essays, class discussions, and student-teacher engagements of social and political consequence.

As relevant as Paley's project is for constructing "the scene of writing" in expressivist classrooms, it is perhaps more notable for what it reveals about the complexity and politics of constructing a first-person scholarly account. In this vein, I_Writing teaches us about the way we read and the way we write our scholarship while modeling the integration of the personal and academic. Paley reminds us that the many readings that go into the construction of any text are simply readings: positioned, biased, and socially constructed. She calls our attention to the interpretive nature of ethnographic research, the ways in which the research "reads" the cultural events she is observing and then narrates these events for others. Ever conscious of her own subject position, her social, ethnic, and political locations, and her re-presenting of her informants' experiences, Paley admits that "in writing up my observations, I found there was no way to mask my opinions. There is neither a neutral posture nor neutral language." Consistent with feminist empirical research, she makes no claims to objectivity.

By marking her own ethnicity, academic status, political activism and affiliations, Paley reveals where she is located politically, socially, and in the context of the material she is observing. Moreover, she openly praises and criticizes her research subjects, both teachers and students, explaining her emotional reactions to their various behaviors and speculating about how she might have handled similar circumstances. For example, in describing a writing conference between Helena and her student, Janet, whose two essays and classroom pronouncements about homeless people reflected self-righteousness and middle-class stereotyping, Paley states, "I was often frustrated both by the way that Janet presented herself as an expert on the subject of the homeless and by the way that her teacher allowed her to maintain that subject position." Paley takes care to analyze her emotional responses in the context of her past history and experience. She views her impatience with Janet as a form of identification: remembering her own political naiveté early in the Vietnam War, she states, "My insight was that I had been impatient with Janet because she reminded me of a self I would just as soon forget." Repeatedly, Paley locates herself in relation to her observations of the student writers and their teachers—in Catherine's family's problems she identifies her alcoholic mother; in Tanya's unjust treatment, she recognizes her status as a Jewish person in a predominant Catholic university; in her frustration with Helena's circumspect demeanor, she measures her activist inclinations. By boldly revealing her various locations and biases, Paley reminds us that "the very words the researcher chooses and the situations he or she reports reflect the researcher's own values and subjectivities." Thus, Paley affirms that her story of these expressivist classrooms is only one reading and that there are many other ways the story might be told.

To confirm this insight, Paley incorporates the voices of her subjects into her ethnographic narratives, a gesture that underscores the complexity and possibility of personal accounts. In addition to direct quotations from interviews, conversations, and e-mail correspondence, Paley records Helena's and Debby's comments on Paley's observations, and their reactions are bracketed directly into the text at relevant junctures. In this way, Helena expresses her objections to Paley's reading of her engagement with Janet, which characterizes the teacher as unwilling to challenge the student's conservative assumptions about poverty and homelessness. Quoting Helena directly, Paley writes, "I don't expend my energy trying to change a mind that refuses to change at that moment." She also includes glosses that give us deeper insight into Helena's teaching philosophy as contrasted with Paley's: "Because you didn't see the product you wanted at the end of our semester does not mean that (Janet's intellectual growth was not fostered)." Repeatedly, Paley allows participants to speak for themselves, even as their statements undermine her interpretation of events.

But Paley constructs other readings as well. Her book begins as a reading of social-constructionists' reading of expressivist classrooms. According to Paley, both James Berlin and Lester Faigley inaccurately characterize expressivist writing pedagogy as an approach that posits individual, private vision, precludes tolerance for alternative viewpoints, and naively ignores postmodern conceptions of subject formation. Paley asserts that critics generally rely on definitions provided by Berlin and Faigley and a handful of other social constructionists and therefore fail to appreciate the complexity and sophistication of contemporary expressivist pedagogy. To redeem expressivism, she engages in a critique of her own, defending expressivism against its social-constructionist opponents while undermining their critical assertions as she constructs them. The second and penultimate chapters frame the ethnographic sections: on the one side, a description of Peter Elbow's expository writing course, based on Kathleen Cassity's unpublished ethnography; on the other, a description of one session of Patricia Bizzell's composition theory and pedagogy class, which Paley observed. In Paley's balanced account, both classes reveal more of the characteristics of the other than is generally attributed in the literature. Elbow makes race, gender, and sexual orientation central topics in his class discussion and assignments and encourages critical consciousness by openly challenging students' assumptions, while Bizzell's class offers both textual analysis and theory-building and opportunities for student tutors to discuss their individual problems and situations.

Like her ethnographic chapters, the initial and concluding sections locate Paley's affiliations and biases, exposing the many ways texts can be read and written. Her approach—simultaneously confessional, retrospective, reflective, expository, scholarly, and argumentative—presents a scholar's model for blending personal and academic discourse. Thus, she offers a more sophisticated version of the same blurred genre that Helena's student, Catherine, was trying for in her essay on student drinking—at once exploratory but with "character intrusions" always in evidence. Perhaps because she wants to emphasize contrasts in an effort to show the multifaceted and complex possibilities of personal writing, her own writer's voice at times seems accusatory and harsh. Reading her ethnographies, I often found myself lining up behind her teacher-participants, taking their side when it came to choosing. I truly appreciated the fact that Paley gave me an opportunity to read their accounts alongside of hers. Likewise, I found her critique of social constructionists unnecessarily severe and defensive, and I appreciated her willingness to mediate her stance by including Bizzell's response to her drafts. Ultimately, Paley acknowledges, "I too was `harsh' in my commentary on Faigley and Berlin. . . . [but] I felt that either no response or a lighthearted one would not be useful in dispelling the perpetuation of an Other in our field that has become serious enough to me to look like a kind of theoretical racism against one's colleagues." For me, this kind of rhetoric of victimization is unsettling, especially since Paley's project more than redeems expressivist pedagogy on its own terms. Indeed, it is this redemptive achievement that makes I_Writing an important new book for teaching us how to read, and thus to write, in the first-person singular.