Teachers of basic writing know that much is at stake when they talk about students, classes, or programs. In this climate of restructuring, budget cuts, standardized testing, state-mandated assessments, and performance-based definitions of literacy, no conversation about writing-especially basic writing-is ever neutral or conducted in a vacuum. With each conversation, teachers and students alike become increasingly engaged in a larger debate about language and literacy and contribute to the narratives that continue to shape the field of basic writing.

This second edition of the Bibliography, which marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Conference on Basic Writing, continues to serve as a resource for those participating in conversations about basic writing and students in basic writing classes. But this edition of the Bibliography is also an artifact, a body of scholarship that provides the basic writing community with an opportunity to reflect on its history and the narratives about basic writing that have emerged over the past decades. By exploring basic writing's past and present, we hope to better understand the questions and issues that will shape the field in the years to come.

In every era, campaigns have been waged to exclude from the academy those values, ideologies, and abilities that are perceived to be threatening by those in power. Matthew Arnold led a movement to preserve the humanities in nineteenth-century England, Cambridge University intellectuals created a literary canon in the early 1900s, and teachers and parents raised concerns about "Why Johnny can't write" in American schools in the 1960s. Indeed, such campaigns often have sought a "return" to an idealized, mythical time when all citizens knew the same things and shared the same values, ideologies, abilities, and, presumably, culture.

However, none of these campaigns has been or even can be wholly successful because the mythical past never existed. Individuals and groups understand education differently, and some will fight what Michel DeCerteau called a "war of position" within (and sometimes against) the seemingly staggering opposition of the dominant authority. The Conference on Basic Writing, celebrating its silver anniversary in 2005, is one such group fighting for position, and the research produced by basic writing researchers chronicled in this bibliography attests to the positioning that has taken place in the midst of and sometimes in response to discussions and debates about basic writing and literacy.

For those looking for a citation, a resource, or an article, the second edition of this volume is certainly enormously useful, but it is also useful as a collective summary of the conversations about basic writing that have taken place and the narratives that have been constructed over the last thirty years. In addition, Karen S. Uehling's "The Conference on Basic Writing, 1980-2005" (000-0000) provides historical context to these conversations and narratives, tracing how the CBW has grown and adapted to changes in the field. In this sense, the second edition of the Bibliography captures the threads that these conversations have followed, and perhaps it can give basic writing teachers insights into the field's next thirty years.

While compiling two editions of The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Basic Writing, we reflected frequently on questions about what basic writing is, who basic writers are, how teachers should work with students in basic writing courses, and what the future of basic writing holds-some of the field's most compelling issues.