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An effort to contribute to the "story" of English teaching in the United States at the dawn of the new millennium, this book presents 17 essays that tell diverse and complex stories of the value and difficulty of teaching English. The voices in this volume represent an eclectic rather than a comprehensive group of teachers and scholars, some familiar, some perhaps less so, who draw from their experiences in secondary and postsecondary English classrooms to examine the question of the relevance of their work to the lives of their students. After an introduction: "The (Ir)relevance of English at the Turn of the Millennium" (Robert P. Yagelski), essays in Section I, Contexts: American Culture and the Study of English, are: (1) "The Academic Language Gap" (Gerald Graff); (2) "When the Multicultural Leaves the Race: Some Common Terms Reconsidered" (Victor Villanueva); (3) "It's Not an Economy, Stupid! The Education-as-Product Metaphor as Viewed from the English Classroom" (Scott A. Leonard); (4) "Literacy, Gender, and Adolescence: School-Sponsored English as Identity Maintenance" (Margaret J. Finders); (5) "On the Business of English Studies" (Stephen M. North); and "Exchange: Economies, Politics, and English Studies" (Finders, North, Leonard, and Villanueva). Essays in Section II, Changes: English Classrooms in an Evolving World, are: (6) "The High School English Teacher: A Relevant Member in a Good Tribe" (Donald L. Tinney); (7) "Promoting a Relevant Classroom Literacy: Personal Growth and Communal Action in a Middle Grades Curricular Development Project" (Sarah Robbins, with Mary Miesiaszek and Beth Davis); (8) "Women in Mind: The Culture of First-Year English and the Nontraditional Returning Woman Student" (Patricia Shelley Fox); (9) "Community College English: Diverse Backgrounds, Diverse Needs" (Kathleen R. Cheney); (10) "The Relevance of Paulo Freire on Liberatory Dialogue and Writing in the Classroom" (Christina Kirklighter); (11) "Surviving Intact: African American Women Negotiating Scholarly Identities through Graduate School Writing" (Juanita Rodgers Comfort); and "Exchange: Literacy, Classrooms, and Students' Lives" (Fox, Tinney, Kirklighter, Cheney, Robbins, Comfort). Essays in Section III, Futures: English Studies for the New Millennium, are: (12) "The Future of English Studies Made Personal, or, The Subversive Act of Teaching Well" (Valerie Hardin Drye); (13) "Cybrarians and Scholars in the New English Classroom" (Ted Nellen); (14) "The Past and Future of (Two-Year) College English Studies" (Mark Reynolds); (15) "Enacting Cultures: The Practice of Comparative Cultural Study" (Paula Mathieu and James J. Sosnoski); (16) "Critical Technological Literacy and English Studies: Teaching, Learning, and Action" (Richard J. Selfe and Cynthia L. Selfe); (17) "The Plural Commons: Meeting the Future of English Studies" (Kathleen Blake Yancey); and "Exchange: Language, Technology, and the Future of English Studies" (Drye, Reynolds, Mathieu, Sosnoski, R. Selfe, and Yancey). Contains an afterword by Richard M. Ohmann. (RS)