"In this intensely intelligent and compassionate book, Timothy Lensmire offers educators a thoughtful and purposeful reflection, executed with grace and wit, on how our teaching can rise with the encouraging tug of art and politics, literature and literacy."

–John Willinsky, University of British Columbia

"Extending the ideas of Bakhtin, Dewey, and others, Tim Lensmire generates powerful insights that these authors themselves could not have imagined. His is a philosophical and political quest that gives us new understanding, but even more important, a path to a more humane form of education."

–Jim V. Wertsch, Washington University in St. Louis

In this long-awaited book, Timothy J. Lensmire examines the problems and promise of progressive literacy education. He does this by developing a series of striking metaphors in which, for example, he imagines the writing workshop as a carnival or popular festival and the teacher as a novelist who writes her student-characters into more and less desirable classroom stories. Grounded in Lensmire's own and others' work in schools, Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching makes powerful use of Bakhtin's theories of language and writing and Dewey's vision of schooling and democracy. Lensmire's book is, at once, a defense, a criticism, and a reconstruction of progressive and critical literacy approaches.