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WA hen composition began to be taught in American colleges and universities in the 19th century, the first-year course was so central to the field one could almost say it was the field. Over the past 50 years, since CCC first appeared, what we understand to constitute our field has changed dramatically into something more closely resembling other academic disciplines. Yet the first-year course which was our beginning has maintained its position at the center of our enterprise: most of our teachers teach it, most of our students study it, most of our textbook writers write for it, and most of our theoreticians theorize it. In addition, it is what we argue about most. A central argument in the field has revolved around the requirement of first-year writing. In several CCCC panels, journal articles, and an edited collection, such respected figures as Lil Brannon, Robert Connors, Sharon Crowley, and Charles Schuster have spoken against requiring first-year students to study composition. The course requirement, these scholars argue, frequently results in an oppressive arrangement in which grudging, uninterested students struggle through a curriculum focused on low-level skills in classes taught by poorly-supported faculty, typically adjuncts and graduate students. This arrangement, they suggest, helps perpetuate the demoted status of the composition course as a service activity rather than as part of a bona fide academic discipline.

In original essays, fourteen nationally known scholars examine the practical, philosophical, and epistemological implications of a variety of research traditions. Included are discussions of historical, theoretical, and feminist scholarship; case-study and ethnographic research; text and conversation analysis; and cognitive, experimental, and descriptive research. Issues that cross methodological boundaries, such as the nature of collaborative research and writing, methodological pluralism, the classification and coding of research data, and the politics of composition research, are also examined. Contributors reflect on their own research practices, and so reflect the current state of composition research itself.

Portfolios provide a mode of assessment that dovetails neatly with process theories about writing. As we have come to pay increasing attention to drafting and revision, and to the development of self-reflection and self-critical perceptions in the writer, many of us have increasingly come to value the idea of collecting students' work over time and evaluating the entire body of their writing. Grading students' work in pieces, product by product, or making significant judgments of students' writing based on one writing sample produced under timed circumstances, has come to seem a violation of the very things we teach about writing. For these reasons, talk about portfolios is everywhere. We hear of their use in school districts (Belanoff and Dixon; Camp and Levine; Murphy and Smith); in universities (Belanoff and Elbow; Elbow and Belanoff; Daiker et al.; Smit); in state assessments (Vermont Writing Assessment); in the British school system (General Certificate of Secondary Education English Literature Syllabus B), and elsewhere in the English speaking world. What we don't hear a great deal about is the process by which portfolios get proposed, designed, tested, and implemented. Since the rash of educational innovation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, educational theory has begun to view this process of implementation as a field in itself. Implementation studies examine the processes of innovative change and their meanings, often revealing the difficulties and complexities of attempts at systemic change (see Fullan; and for an earlier view, Miles). But we who do most of our work in English studies often focus our attention principally on our proposed designs and the intended outcomes, not on the all-important ways that the pro

In late nineteenth-century Hawaii, trading ships brought to the islands, among other things, an infestation of rats. As one way of dealing with the ensuing health problems, authorities decided to import mongooses, lithe, greybrown creatures which feed on small rodents. A shipment was therefore brought from India and set loose on the rat population of Hawaii. But things did not turn out as expected, for the mongoose proved to be a diurnal creature, a hunter by day, while the rat worked nights. The two animals thus lived side by side but very seldom met, and both populations flourished. Now Hawaii has a rat problem and a mongoose problem. Since 1984, I have been a co-author of the twice-yearly annotated bibliography of research for Research in the Teaching of English (RTE). In that time, I have observed a similar pattern occurring in composition studies. Researchers and theorists perceive a problem. A remedy is proposed-a new line of research, one of instruction, or more commonly a mixture of both. The remedy is implemented, only to reveal a new set of problems and concerns. Sometimes the research question may even be largely resolved, yet problems and concerns remain. For example, we have learned a great deal about how virtually every type of writer composes, from poets (Armstrong) to professors (Levi and Grasha), to pre-school children (Cox and Sulzby). But amidst the neat rows of results come new and even more beguiling questions: What good is knowledge of writers' processes without equally detailed knowledge of the contexts