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xv FOREWORD TO ACTS I In the lost 1970s, when the New Jersey Writing Project was just a whippersnap- per, I received a call one morning from a state coordinator of the English language arts. She had heard about the Project and wanted to consider offering several institutes the following summer to teachers in her state. She was however considering several other models of teacher education as well. What unique virtues did our project have? I spoke—I thought eloquently—about writing as a process, about the highly inter- active exchange between a teacher and her own writing, a teacher and her student, a teacher and her students’ writing, a student with another student, and one student’s writing with another student’s writing. She listened thoughtfully to my highly detailed description of the Project, then asked what textbooks and other written materials I could send her to use in a comparative presentation to her board. When I said that we had none beyond a very basic brochure, there was a palpable withdrawal of interest over the miles. Then she said that her board was uncomfortable without “manipulatives” to contemplate and that she would probably recommend another heavily texted project from our region. And she did. The incident revealed a tension those of us who espouse writing as a process have experienced over the fifteen years since the Project was formed: how to honor the tenets we believe in while yet providing the specific guidelines and help that stay true to those tenets, such as proffering, when needed and when requested, appropriate readings, activities, and advice. Through Acts of Teaching, Joyce Armstrong Carroll and Edward E. Wilson provide compelling solutions to this dilemma by giving just such help, advice, and solace. The virtues of this source book are too many to catalog, but three are especially noteworthy. First is the seamless connection between theory and practice. The classroom processes and activities they recommend are based always on the most current, valid theories of learning, writing, and thinking. They know, and appropriately apply, their Bruner, Donaldson, Murray, Vygotsky, and others. The second is how well they know those classrooms they serve. Carroll and Wilson’s advice is grounded in their almost daily observation of diverse teachers, students, and learning situations. They reveal that always discernible difference between those who spend vast amounts of time in the classroom and comprehend with sophistication what they see, like Jane Healy, Ann Dyson, and John Goodlad, and those who don’t, like Tracy Kidder in Among Schoolchildren. More, Carroll and Wilson can do what they say, what they recommend. Both are brilliant teachers who can cope on the spot with almost any learning challenge that greets them. Teachers consequently know that they can be trusted above the hit-and-runners who appear from academe or elsewhere and reveal immediately their own discomfort with the creative mess of daily learning and teaching.