This collection of essays traces the attempts of one writing teacher to understand theoretically -  and to respond pedagogically - to what happens when students from diverse backgrounds learn to use language in college.

Bizzell begins from the assumption that democratic education requires us to attempt to educate all students, including those whose social or ethnic backgrounds may have offered them little experience with academic discourse.  Over the ten-year period chronicled in these essays, she has seen herself primarily as an advocate for such students, sometimes called  “basic writers.”

Bizzell’s views on education for “critical consciousness,” widely discussed in the writing field, are represented in most of the essays in this volume.  But in the last few chapters, and in the intellectual autobiography written as the introduction to the volume, she calls her previous work into question on the grounds that her self-appointment as an advocate for basic writers may have been presumptous, and her hopes for the politically liberating effects of academic discourse misplaced.  She concludes by calling for a theory of discourse that acknowledges the need to argue for values and pedagogy that can assist these arguements to proceed more inclusively than ever before.

The essays in this volume constitute the main body of work in which Bizzell developed her influential and often cited ideas.  Organized chronologically, they  present a picture of how she has grappled with major issues in composition studies over the past decade.  In the process, she sketches a trajectory for the development of composition studies as an academic discipline.

How was academic feminism formed by the very institutions it originally set out to transform? This is the question Ellen Messer-Davidow seeks to answer in Disciplining Feminism. Launched thirty years ago as a bold venture to cut across disciplines and bridge the gap between scholarly knowledge and social activism, feminism in the academy, the author argues, is now entrenched in its institutional structures and separated from national political struggle.
Working within a firm theoretical framework and drawing on years of both personal involvement and fieldwork in and outside of academe, Messer-Davidow traces the metamorphosis of a once insurgent project in three steps. After illustrating how early feminists meshed their activism with institutional processes to gain footholds on campuses and in disciplinary associations, she turns to the relay between institutionalization and intellectualization, examining the way feminist studies coalesced into an academic field beginning in the mid-1970s. Without denying the successes of this feminist passage into the established system of higher learning, Messer-Davidow nonetheless insists that the process of institutionalization itself necessarily alters all new entrants—no matter how radical. Her final chapters look to the future of feminism in an increasingly conservative environment and to the possibilities for social change in general.
Disciplining Feminism’s interdisciplinary scope and cross-sector analysis will attract a broad range of readers interested in women’s studies, American higher education, and the dynamics of social transformation.