In Listening Up: Reinventing Ourselves as Teachers and Students, Rachel Martin offers an abundance of classroom strategies and techniques for those who teach "literacy, writing, and ESL" (2). In chapter after chapter, she presents catalogues of useful ideas on how to help inexperienced writers realize they have a lot to say and to give them the tools with which to present their stories to a wider audience. Readers who choose to read this text could glean many valuable teaching methods to add to their own collections of classroom tools. Some of the ideas might be very familiar, however, such as "clustering" (171), "dyads" (177), and "interviewing" (179). Yet others are more fresh and interesting.

At one point, for example, Martin notes that one can sometimes teach comparing and contrasting more effectively as a revision strategy. She tells the story of a student who had apparently written a paper on the joys of working for himself. She goes on to explain that "When Eddie asked himself if there were anything in his piece to compare or contrast, he saw ways to highlight the differences between working for someone else and being self-employed. He added details to heighten those differences: . . ." (116). I found several of her other suggestions valuable as well.

In reading Listening Up . . ., however, readers may encounter problems in staying with the book long enough to get to these helpful strategies and techniques. The major difficulty I found with the work involved a very confusing structure.

The book seems to lack a coherent argumentative thread, though Martin is clearly trying to make an argument. Something is wrong in the way most teachers approach the teaching of basic literacy skills, according to her. That much is clear. Yet the structure of her own argument never emerges, and it is difficult to pin down exactly why. She is trying to do several things here, and that is part of the problem. Early on in the book, I thought a central focus of the work was going to be a critique of Paulo Freire, and she does offer something of that for a while in Chapter Two. Freire comes back again at the end of Chapter Three, but then he largely disappears.

Early in the text, Martin also tells the reader that she has learned a good deal from both poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory. Again, she does provide some focus on both, primarily in Chapter Three, but then they, too, are largely absent in the rest of the text.

The majority of the book is then devoted to detailed explanations of things that she has tried in the classroom that either did or did not work. She is admirably honest in admitting that she does not always succeed. Given the amount of space she devotes to this discussion of various approaches she has tried, the book could be said to fall into the category Steven North (The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1987: 23) calls "practitioner lore" in the field of composition studies. A focus like that would be perfectly legitimate if the earlier sections of the book had not seemed to suggest that we were going to see these practices through the lens of a particular theory or theories: anti-Freirian or postructuralist or psychoanalytic or all three. Yet there is no coherent theoretical focus to guide the reader, and so the text is ultimately reduced to a rather laborious catalogue of unconnected "helpful hints for teachers." This is too bad, because Rachel Martin is clearly a teacher who cares deeply and thinks seriously about her students and her profession.

Peter Caulfield
UNC Asheville