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This essay employs Barbara Herrnstein Smith's notion of “contingencies of value,” the idea that evaluations of text vary because our readings take place in specific contexts and are shaped by cultural and historical exigencies. In this study, we apply this notion to the reading of student texts in a college composition portfolio assessment. Through an analysis of taped teacher discussions of students' writing and an examination of student responses to the grading process, we conclude that in every reading of a text (but especially in the reading of the multiple texts of a portfolio) readers posit an “implied author.” That is, based on their reading of a single text or portfolio, teacher-readers construct a persona that represents the author, and this projection can strongly influence the reader's evaluation of student work. Group discussions of portfolios allow teachers to expose and explore the value-laden nature of these judgments.

This article presents a comprehensive model for teaching writing in schools of social work in order to prepare students to meet the demands of contemporary social work practice. The model is grounded in contemporary composition theory and capitalizes on the reciprocal interactions between reading, writing, and talking. The model develops students' ability to use writing both as a mode of learning and as a tool for effective advocacy.

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.

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