And, btw, I agree about the genre-based approach Trimbur takes, but as I explain here, I liked his emphasis on the flexbilibity of the essay form–particularly on how JT ties form to invention. That, for me, might be the starting point away from the “conservative” model here–invention, and inventing new ways to achive the same ends.

It is interesting to me that you brought up this point. You seems to imply that only traditional, ‘conservative’ teaching ‘improves’ student writing, and anything else, eg the mystory, doesn’t. (That’s not your exact point, but it comes off that way.) This is something I struggled with too when I started incorporating the mystory into my syllabus (not that the mystory is the only non-traditional assignment out there, it’s just the one I use too). And oddly enough, before that I spent several years using Trimbur’s A Call to Write as my textbook. The one problem I had with Trimbur was that I felt myself just teaching one genre of writing before I moved on to another—literacy narrative, letter to the editor, analysis of an article, research paper… I felt that both the students and myself were like “ok, check that genre off the list; on to the next one” and by the end of the semester we were all bored to death. As a result, I’m not sure that anyone’s writing really “improved.”

I think the struggle is, whether we use ‘traditional’ textbooks or ‘non-traditional’ textbook (I can see Jeff cringing now at the binary I’m creating), to find prompts/assignments that engage the student and encourage them to think for themselves and to communicate those thoughts. And I think the possibility is there to do that with any textbook.