Ultimately, Bazerman argues that we can use genre and activity systems to “help guide us through the dilemmas of local learning and large-scale assessment, just as they guide us through the conundrum of living our improvised local lives with some sense of order, expectation, and relevant skill” (429):
In short, genre and activity systems analyses give us ways of considering the important particularities of learning and
assessment situations without seeing all situations as being so particular as to be incommensurable and idiosyncratic. The genres students are requested to write establish expectations and the level of challenge students will have to meet to
realize the demand of the genre. Each genre, to be well performed, requires the use and display of specific kinds of
knowledge, specific kinds of understanding and operations applied to that knowledge, and specific kinds of intellectual
skills. That is, each genre carries with it implicit challenges and implicit criteria of assessment. Making explicit the
challenges and specific criteria of each writing task and the genre it is to be realized in provides the means for in situ
assessment integrated the larger systems of learning activity. (465)
Key Words
- Genres: “typified forms of utterances recognized as useful in circumstances recognized as being of a certain type. We coordinate our speech acts with each other by acting in typical ways, ways easily recognized as accomplishing certain acts in certain circumstances…As typified responses, genres also serve to further typify motives, actions, and circumstances (462). “Genres typify many things beyond textual form. They are part of the way that humans give shape to social activity…[T]he textual forms mediate our relationship with others who are part of the activity, thereby giving regularity to our form of participation, our relations to others, and our contribution to the entire object-orientation of the activity system…Those spheres of activity, or activity systems, having then been constituted, the genres then form modes of participation and motives for formulating one’s participation…The typified informational landscape and action of every genre establishes expectations of knowledge and thought that each text in that genre must fulfill if it is to be effective in its work” (463).
- Genre Set: “the collection of types of texts someone in a particular role is likely to produce (Devitt, 1991)” (464).
- Genre System: “comprised of the several genre sets of people working together in an organized way, plus the patterned relations in the production, flow, and use of these documents (Bazerman, 1994). A genre system captures the regular sequences of how one genre follows on another in the typical communication flows of a group of people. The genre set written by a teacher of a particular course might consist of a syllabus, assignment” (464)