While “valuable” and even “innovative” seem appropriate to describe Courses for Change in Writing, “unsettling” keeps registering. To be sure, the problems of balancing theory and practice inherent in writing about pedagogy are the problems that most disturb me about Change.

Each of the collection’s twenty essays on course design and faculty development programs was originally drafted by its authors at the NEH Iowa Institute on Writing in 1979 or 1980 under the direction of Carl H. Klaus. Later these courses and programs were tried out and refined at the participants’ home institutions, and the final descriptions are contained in this collection.’ As Klaus explains in the Introduction, the “materials in this volume, then, are offered not so much as literal models, but as manifestations of a set of ideas” (xvi). What could be better than a group of dedicated writing program directors working and learning together and then from that commu­nal experience proposing a set of courses that apply the most recent research and theory in composition, language, and rhetoric studies? What could be better than having access to courses sound in concep­tualization and tested in the classroom? Change could apparently be the answer to the lack of articles and professional journals interested in pedagogy and the application of theory.

Both James Britton in the “Foreword” and Klaus in the “Intro­duction” make much of the common theoretical packaging of the courses and programs outlined in Change: Britton, a visiting consultant for two years at the Institute when these essays were being drafted, states that he had upon reading the collection “a lively sense of moving from classroom to classroom, each very different from the others, yet holding certain things in common” (vi). Most of the essays explicitly war against the current, traditional paradigm of teaching writing, hence the title of the collection—with emphasis on “Change.” Although various descriptions of the traditional teaching of writing crop up in the essays, Philip M. Keith in his” ‘Really Communicating’ and Writing” strikes a basic tone carried throughout”:

Second, virtually all of the courses—whether focused on writ­ing about literature, history, language, sex, or society—progress neatly from informal to formal discourse, from expressive to transac­tional. In the “Introduction” Britton reminds us that the use of expressive writing in the courses lends itself well to Bruner’s “spiral curriculum.” Truly most of the courses described in Change do indeed spiral—right out of Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage into this Formal Operational Stage, from Perry’s dualist to relativistic develop­mental personality, from Kohlberg’s preconventional to postconventional moral level. No problem here, although we do have to take the word of the authors that the intellects of the students served by the courses are also spiralling along with the frenzy of course assignments.

As a third theoretical underpinning, most of the courses use writing as epistemic activity, as a way to get students to see that language is the principle means for interpreting the world of experience. Inductively-based instruction is how most of the authors describe their methodology and Klaus says that “the Institute courses are designed to offer instruction in writing that is experientially oriented” (xvii).

All of this sounds promising. So why “unsettling?” Why all the worry about balance in writing about teaching writing? The bulk of Change is course sequences, handouts, assignments, and explanations geared to students, not professional colleagues. The short explanatory commentaries leading to the course designs are most often inadequate for readers to share with the authors the reasons why something is done one way as opposed to another. Absent is the formative material that can truly affect teaching practices and move teachers responsibly toward change. There is usually mention of the particular constraints imposed on the course designs such as school mandates about compo­sition, faculty expertise, student competency, and time structures; there is usually mention of the old and unsatisfying ways of teaching writing and then upbeat encouragement to see the teaching of writing in the largest possible context; and there is avid allegiance to expres­sive writing, at least early in all the courses. But the finger-posts charting evolution are missing. We are left with only Britton’s “Foreword” and Klaus’ “Introduction” to understand the mapping of the course designs.

To their credit, the editors anticipated this reaction. In his “Introduction,” Klaus makes his case: “These ideas [instigating the course and program descriptions] which were just beginning to be widely disseminated to writing instructors when the Institute was in session, have by now become so familiar that they need no detailed explanation. James Britton takes note of them in his ‘Foreword’ and sources for them are listed in the ‘Bibliography.’” Klaus goes on to clarify even more by offering four assumptions controlling the essays: Writing is a profoundly personal activity, is a profoundly social activity, is a way of learning, and is formative (xvii).

Few people would argue about any of the theory and assumptions that Britton and Klause say are beneath the courses. However, if I am to be as interested as I should be in the course designs, if I am to be a real participant in the reading, and if I am really going to “change” the composition courses at my university, then I need to be dealt into the action. Let’s face it—one note (citing Flower and Hayes), single contextual references to only Coles, Sommers, Emig, Moffett, and Elbow, in three hundred pages of text, and even multiple refer­ence to Britton may not be enough to plow through pages of assigned explication and directives about writing, no matter how heuristic, suggestive, or improvisational the designs.

Change deserved to have been published and deserves to be in our libraries. It is, I think, both valuable and innovative. The “unsettling” effect of Change first comes from not knowing how to make significant application of this text. Sandra Doe hints at what must have gone on in Iowa, what may have prompted her course entitled “Experiments in Composing”: “. . . I learned that a good writing assignment should be both a teaching device and as nearly as possible to a work of art—that it should invite students to gesture in language, allow becoming, produce a richness of difference, and generate (at last) mistakes that teach” (161).

Maybe that is how this collection should best be taken, as a teaching text solely devoted to assignment-making, most of the pages offering example after example of student tasks that have become for their originators workable applications. Some may be good teaching “devices,” and even “works of art.” Maybe the bottom line is that we should study the courses only to enjoy the myriad approaches in composition, and to ask nothing more. Perhaps the “unsettling” effect of Change comes from our not yet knowing what the essay on teaching writing really is rather than from any shortcoming of the collection.