Isaacs and Jackson's collection of twelve essays examines composition's current curricular and pedagogical emphasis on student writing as public text. The editors note the many public-writing proponents, in contrast to the few analysts who examine the practice's values, ethics, approaches, or strategies. Public Works: Student Writing As Public Text aims to fill this critical gap.
In their introduction, Isaacs and Jackson briefly review the last thirty years of composition scholarship and practices beginning with peer writing groups and sharing of writing, student-centered classrooms, writing as process, emphasis on audience, and the creating of engaged and critical student readers. Composition's recent innovations of combining service learning and composition, posting writing on the Web, and writing for the "real world" all contribute to the increasing trend of making student writing public. The practice is worthwhile, but as Isaacs and Jackson point out, there are important considerations which this collection opens for review and reflection.

Each of the collection's three sections has four essays, and as promised in the introduction, these essays consider complexities inherent in the practice of public writing. Part I: Pedagogical Negotiation of Public Writing begins with Andrea Stover's "Redefining Public/Private Boundaries in the Composition Classroom." Stover asks how teachers might structure an environment that is both private enough to be safe and public enough to engage students in the academic community. Her response includes three recommendations: a recognition not of two distinct categories of private versus public but of overlaps and mergers, a realization that classrooms can serve as spatial metaphors for mixing public and private writing, and a need for teachers and students to discuss the less-than-explicit boundaries of public and private writing. Through such discussion and negotiation, Stover argues, all writers gain better understanding of and control over their writing.

Also in Part I, Amy Goodburn uses an example from her teaching to reflect on what happened when a student, a community center volunteer, made his experiences public to other members of the class, especially when his reflections were at times negative about the center. Goodburn admits that as a teacher she was ethically ill-equipped to deal with the public-ness of such texts and now is more aware of how such texts function in her classroom and beyond.

Essays in Part II: The Virtual Public examine using the Web to make students' writing public. Charles Moran explores the conflicts of encouraging students to write from the heart and to publish such writing and how in the technological present we must be careful not to lose our focus on the student as a writer rather than as publisher or document processor.

Derek Owens wins the prize for the most intriguing title in Part II: "Some People Just Want Their Stories to Die with Them." As a teacher at St. John's University in Queens, he has successfully used an oral history preservation assignment. Once the assignment was completed and revised, he then posted students' essays on the Web, with their permission. His objectives were to gain a greater sense of community among students, to encourage revision, and to promote "sustainable thinking." However two Chinese American students refused permission for anyone else in the class to read their oral history interviews, much less allow them to be made public on the Web. Though Owens continues his practice of assigning the oral history project and posting the results with permission, these students taught him to be more aware of cultural differences. As Chinese Americans, they and their families believed an individual's history should die with the person and that it was taboo to make a blatant display of individualism-secrecy enabled a family unit to become stronger. Owens explains that this experience tempered his practice; he still invites students to post their revised texts on the Web but recognizes that some stories are better left private and unpublished.

Part III: The Pedagogy of Public Writing includes Jason Palmeri and Sara Daum writing of their experiences as undergraduates at New College. They formed and participated in teacherless, student-directed, peer writing groups. They offer convincing support for such groups in their essay, "Fending for Themselves." In the following essay, "Creating Rhetorical Exigencies," Chris Benson and Joan Latchaw discuss how making their students' writing public--in Latchaw's case a publication entitled "House of Pain" and in Benson's experience, a manual by his technical writing students for using Clemson University's electronic mail system-brought about very positive changes in their writing classrooms.

Isaacs and Jackson's collection of essays is worthwhile reading. The contributors write from experience, recognizing that as composition practices change and new pedagogical trends and emphases emerge what is important is how students and their writing are affected. As teachers, we must recognize there may be risks in jumping on the current bandwagon, the wagon ride may be more complex that it first appears, and considering those risks and complexities is sound academic practice.

Gwen McNeill Ashburn,
UNC Asheville