This timely intervention into composition studies presents a case for the need to teach all students a shared system of communication and logic based on the modern globalizing ideals of universality, neutrality, and empiricism, staging key debates that all writing instructors must grapple with.

This book presents a model of Practitioner Inquiry (PI) as a systematic form of empirical research and provides a rationale for its suitability within a writing center context.

Using the concept of "plasticity", or the brain’s ability to change through growth and reorganization, as a theoretical framework, this book argues that encouraging an exploration of the self better establishes emotional value in the composition classroom.