"A Historical Perspective" (Head Scratching)

I'm embarrassed to say I'm more than a bit intimidated reading "A Historical Perspective..." by Alexander and Fox.  It's a very ambitious paper, yet it tries so hard to skim over the surface and give a concise overview, that, to me at least, it comes up short on crucial details.  As an absolute novice regarding this mountain of research, it's a struggle to maintain interest in the various schools of thought contributing to the study that is Comp Studies.  We barely get a solid definition of the behaviorists, the mentalists, etc., when they're whisked away by a new decade and a new group that utterly ignores the forgoing research, proposing their own new Gospel According to ______ (fill in the blank). As a writer and as a reader, I can only surmise that Alexander and Fox assumed their audience was adequately familiar the various groups; this would explain the brisk and superficial discussion on each school.  From my humble standpoint, I wish I knew more about each group and its ideas.  I have a hunch such a paper would be far more interesting and far more practical to a teacher training program like ours.