The first half is a series of essays originating from a graduate seminar Kameen team-taught with professor and poet Toi Derricotte in 1994. These essays combine personal narrative, reflective meditation, and critical inquiry -- all used as discourse to depict and examine the process of teaching.

The second half of the book contains essays on Plato's dialogues -- primarily Phaedrus and Protagoras -- as a means to interrogate the position of teacher. Here, Socrates is used as a tool to examine and critique both Kameen's own teacherly identity and, in a wider sense, the set of cultural forces that prefigure the available positions for both "teacher" and "student" in contemporary education.

What unites both halves is the way Kameen approaches each -- the "personal" and the "scholarly" -- from his position as teacher. Sure to be timely and controversial, Writing/Teaching will enter into the debate on whether to reconfigure the relationship between research and teaching currently taking place among teachers of composition, cultural studies, and rhetoric.