When teach modern literature courses, tell students literature evolves through a process of growth through innovation. That is, innovators like Kafka or Woolf or Joyce probed boldly beyond the current state of literary art, extending frontiers and opening territory for writers who later worked their ways toward the new borders. Much this same process, think, is at the heart of the composition teaching enterprise. Researchers and theorists push beyond the state of the art as it is practiced in composition courses, allowing textbook authors, curriculum developers, and classroom teachers slowly to work their ways into new territory. Slowly is a key word in sentence. For as you know, a wide gap separates state-of-the-art theory and state-of-the-art practice in composition. Maxine Hairston illustrates this point/ in The Winds of Change (CCC, 33 [Feb. 1982]), when she gives an answer to people in our profession who say that the admonition to 'teach process, not product' is now conventional wisdom for which further argument is unnecessary. I disagree, Hairston writes:

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