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Book Reviews: Envisioning New Possibilities for the Reform of Urban Schools

During the summers of 1994 and 1995, I had the opportunity to travel to South Africa with the expressed goals of exploring similarities and differences between South African and American educational practices and learning more about educational reform, language policy, and literacy education currently being practiced in that newly emerging democracy. During my preparations for these travels I read Sarah Warshauer Freedman's book, Exchanging Writing, Exchanging Cultures. Although few cross-national studies engage seriously with data other than that obtained by questionnaire, the study described in this book used a variety of methods to study school reform efforts and their effects on writing in the United States and Great Britain. Particularly remarkable about this study, aside from its use of a rich and diverse database, is its ability to situate reform within a historical context, its attention to issues of reform in urban schools, and its depiction of the cross-Atlantic collaboration between Freedman and Alex McLeod of the University of London. The collaborative nature of this work emerges in many ways throughout the book and illustrates the value of engaging an insider as coresearcher in any site— whether it be at the level of national reform or at the classroom level. Freedman very graciously acknowledges the value of their collaboration. Freedman's motivation for writing the book was a conviction that "a careful examination of the classrooms of well-respected British teacher-leaders could help U.S. educators think anew about literacy instruction" (p. 3). Drawing on her long history of experiences with writing teachers as director of the National Center for Writing and Literacy, Freedman conceptualized the writing exchange as a possible vehicle for permeating and studying cultural boundaries. Freedman realized that a cross-national comparison could stimulate the imagination for new possibilities for American instruction. Freedman hopes that the discoveries from such an exchange would help U.S. teachers, researchers, and students to "expand our world views and broaden our vision as we rethink how students in our classrooms learn to write" (p. 228). In conceptualizing the project, research teams in the United States and Great Britain worked from a theoretical base that holds that written language is acquired through a process of social interaction. This emphasis on the centrality of social interactions in language and thought was based on the work of Vygotsky (1962, 1978), Wertsch (1991), and Bakhtin (1986). With this theoretical base in mind, Freedman selected teachers whose practices were consistent with these theories to highlight how theory is applied to practice. Freedman follows a plan that used questionnaire data and students' writing exchanges to make up the substance of the book. Following an introductory chapter that situates the research, chapters 2 and 3 of the book present the findings from the national surveys conducted to investigate school structures that shape and influence classroom practice. The questionnaire data came from a U.S.-based sample of 560 primary and secondary teachers and 715 secondary students and a British sample of 135 primary and secondary teachers and 187 secondary students. Although attempts were made to select parallel samples in all phases of the study, different cultural contexts, different networks to identify and select participants, and different age and ability grouping of students resulted in different samples, thus causing limitations to the research findings. Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 examine the details of the writing exchange and issues, such as assessment, that influence schools and classroom practices. In addition to teachers' interviews and journals, the writing exchange data included students' essays, letters, autobiographies, fiction, poetry, books, and opinion pieces about important and often controversial issues. These rich and diverse sets of data provide the basis for comparing learning to write in these two nations. The final chapter of the book summarizes the research findings and discusses theories that guide participating teachers' practice. Central to the study is the writing exchange between English classes from four middle and high schools in the San Francisco Bay area—Grades 6 through 9—and four counterparts in London—Forms 1 through 4. All eight classes were from urban multicultural schools that served mostly lowerand working-class students. Over a oneyear period, students exchanged writing within a frame that allowed the researchers to observe interactions among and between students engaged in parallel writing activities. Teachers