“The chapters in this volume look at human activity and writing from three different perspectives: The role of writing in producing work and the economy; the role of writing in creating, maintaining, and transforming socially located selves and communities; and the role of writing formal education” (2).
In the introduction to their book, Bazerman and Russell explain that the authors of the chapters in this collection use Activity Theory as a means of analyzing and understanding writing activity. Specifically, this collection “grows out of th[e] tradition… of bringing writing together with activity…through the study of genre as mediating socially organized activities” (2). The editors argue, “To advance in productive ways, practical or theoretical, writing research needs to move beyond texts as ends in themselves…The activity approaches to understanding writing presented in this volume give us ways to examine more closely how people do the work of the world and form the relations that give rise to the sense of selves and societies through writing, reading, and circulating texts. These essays provide major contributions to both writing research and activity theory as well as to recently emerged but now robust tradition that brings the two together” (4).
“The chapters in this volume look at human activity and writing from three different perspectives: The role of writing in producing work and the economy; the role of writing in creating, maintaining, and transforming socially located selves and communities; and the role of writing formal education” (2).
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Utilizing interpretive ethnographic methodologies, Smart analyzes the genres sets within the Back of Canada in an effort to discover how technology-mediated discourse genres are used as organizes change. He states that “changes in work, activity, discourse genres, and technologies appear to occur dialectally, in complex patterns of causality” (34). He offers the following five claims “as a heuristic resource for researchers wishing to examine genre sets employed in other professional organizations to accomplish intellectual and discursive work” (54).
Key Terms/Concepts
Three key characteristics of organization activity systems:
In this chapter, Schryer and her co-authors analyze medical case presentations as a genre and as a site for identity-making and agency negotiation. After analyzing the presentations, they came to the following conclusions (direct questions from page 91):
Key Terms
Spinuzzi is interested in “how textual artifacts co-mediate work” and uses genre ecologies as a theoretical frame (97).
Key Terms
Other Concepts
Critical reflection: Second, once articulated, frameworks can be examined and incrementally improved by various researchers. They become objects of study themselves…and therefore can be studied more critically. Consequently, later researchers might improve on the reliability, validity, and analytical power of existing frameworks. Scalability: Third, since analytical frameworks are developed to offer a systematic analysis, they tend to be scalable. For instance, work models can be applied to very small numbers of artifacts … or very large numbers” (98). Geilser details the cultural history of Palm technologies and studies her own use of these technologies to gain insight into “the individual development of a Palm use’s motives, and the patterns of Palm embedded-technology” (129). She argues, “The cultural history of these Palm tools is complex, but we can begin with paper-based antecedents like the personal organizers, Filofax and Day-Timer, and rotary files like the Rolodex…In addition to the physical tools, the cultural history of a device like the Palm handheld includes the social arrangements that support it”: time management and professionalization (130-1).
Text: Geisler encourages us to think about how our understanding of “text” changes with new text technologies. “As information technologies re-mediate paper-based technologies, however, our prototypical view works less well even for those texts that look like a ‘text’. Texts in word processors, for instance, have many attributes beyond what a paper-based medium affords. Words have attributes of time, date and even authorship, which can be used to display editing changes. Words can be assigned attributes for annotations, hypertextual links, and stylistic characteristics, all of which can be used to control the readers’ experience” (129). She defines a text later in her chapter: “an arrangement of discursive symbols which was read, written, or transformed by the operation” (140). Activity Theory: Unlike most of the authors in this book, Geilser focuses on a specific part of activity theory. “Activity theory provides a useful analytic framework for this purpose. One of the major contributions of activity theory has been the integration of a psychological account of individual development with a sociohistorical account of the development of culture. At any given time and place, the collocation of actors, motives, and mediational means that constitute an activity are taken to be the result of a convergence of two lines of development:
She also argues that, in light of her analysis, we need to rethink activity theory.
Prior and Shipka study the writing processes of four writers – two undergraduates, one graduate and one professional. They asked each person to draw and talk about their processes, including locations, materials, ambient environment, and emotional responses. Ultimately, they argue,
the central narrative of CHAT has focused on internalization and idealization, on the gradual move from externalized practice to interiorized practice, from external regulation of behavior (by environments and other people) to self regulation (by inner speech)… ESSP’s highlight people’s situated agency, their tuning to and of environments, their making of artifacts of all kinds. Critically, the ESSP’s that we detail here not only involve externalizations, but externalizations meant to regulate thought and affect, to channel attention and action…ESSP’s, the ways writers tune their environments and get in tune with them, the ways they work to build durable and fleeting contexts for their work, are central practices in literate activity. They call for attention to the agency of actors, to the production of environments, and finally to consciousness itself as a historied practice. (228) They also make the following points:
Key Terms
Flower offers a new way to (a) engage in productive dialogues and (b) analyze those kinds of dialogues.
Engaging in Productive Dialogues Flower asserts that “the real challenge of knowledge building is to embrace, not just tolerate, conflict” (240). To accomplish this, she suggests a rival stance: this stance takes one beyond merely considering available alternative understandings, to actively seeking them out, eliciting rivals that might remain silent, striving to comprehend them, and, in embracing the difficulty of talking across difference, expanding our understanding of a more multi-faceted reality (257). [Participants] enter the dialogue using a set of strategies designed to seek rival readings of the world, that is, to support and draw out the local knowledge of their partners, to explore options, and to use their differences (in effect to privilege them) to create a collaboratively expanded understanding. (258) Analyzing Dialogues Flower suggests a combination of activity theory and negotiation analysis to investigate dialogues. She pulls three claims from activity theory:
Finally, she addresses the evaluation of the dialogue. She writes, “The challenge for intercultural knowledge building is whether new knowledge has been constructed or whether prior knowledge has been transformed, by testing, qualifying, or conditionalizing previous ideas” (254). “[I]t is not enough for transformational knowledge to merely offer an alternative representation …Transformational knowledge is a change in the way people, their tools, and their worlds interact—a change in everyday practice itself…The outcome of knowledge building then is the “creation of artifacts, production of novel social patterns, and expansive transformation of activity contexts” (271). Key Terms
“Dissensus, resistance, conflicts, and deep contradictions are constantly produced in activity systems” (Russell qtd. on 280). Powell “propose[s] to learn about a writer’s - that is, a participant’s - identity by examining that writer’s self-representation. By learning about a writer’s identity as she represents herself in the various genres of the activity system, we can in turn determine ways the institution’s identity drives, or is driven by, the writer’s identity. Through a systematic analysis of self-representation, I suggest that the complexities of participant identity and consequently activity systems can be better understood. That is, my method of examining self representation offers us a way to examine participant identity within activity systems” (281). Powell argues that students represent their selves in three possible ways: (1) a student may “reproduce the discourse of the class” (299); (2) a student may resist the discourse in unproductive ways, leading to no change in the student or the activity system in which the student is involves; (3) a student may engage in knowledgeable resistance, “a productive way of negotiating discourse that provides for both learning and change” (295). [[The problem with this theory is that Powell suggests that reproducing the expected discourse is not a performance of self-representation. Instead, the student is “merely presenting a self that she think will be successful” (299). If the student is actively aware of the expected self and wants to appease the teacher by representing him/her self in this way, the student seems very much to be performing. Also, Powell – in naming a productive resistance as “knowledgeable” – implies that students are overtly aware that they are resisting a self-representation, which may not always be that case.]] Powell ultimately suggests that we should explicitly teach students genres and self-representations so they may have more agency over their rhetorical choices (301). She notes, “By explicit I do not mean the explication of textual features; rather, I mean the conscious, reflective discussion of the ways a critical self is composed within certain kinds of genres’ (302). Key Terms Genres: “mediate cultural and historical activities within systems and therefore the study of genre can reveal the ways in which writing within genres not only serves to stabilize an activity systems, but also the ways in which writing might resist and consequently change that system…[G]enres are used by participants to ‘carr[y] out’ the work of the system” (281). “Whenever conflict or tension arises within an activity system, genres serving as coping tools. Familiar genres provide, predictable…ways to frame an action, thereby making action the social ‘glue for mending the tension’” (283). Tools: “Within activity theory, the relationship between the subject and the object is mediated by a tool … In other words, people use tools (or resources) to help them accomplish certain goals. The tools mediate an activity in that they define how persons construct their participation within a particular activity. In this way, a tool’s meaning or function is only valid when put in context by a participant. Moreover, a tool is simultaneously enabling and limiting: It empowers the participant through its past use by other participants, but it also restricts participants in that the tool has already been defined in terms of its functionality and materiality. This does not mean, however, that either is mutually exclusive. The function of a tool exists on a continuum; the degree to which it is limiting/enabling depends on the context of the activity” (283). Self-representation: “[t]he performance of the rhetorical construction where self is continually shifting based on generic expectation and where discourses of power come in contact with discourses of identity” (284). Self-representation, for Powell, is a sub-tool of genre, which is itself a tool. In the activity system, then, self-representation looks like this: Powell argues that “the conscious representation of self within a genre is directly tied to the writer’s notion and awareness of that genre, the audience of the genre, and the way that the writer wishes to construct and represent her self within that genre. As writers attempt to enter into a particular discourse, they gradually learn to ‘perform’ the particular genre conventions of that discourse, imitating the conventions that are useful to them, and pushing the boundaries of those conventions that limit them… [Seeing] “self-representation as performance provides the subject with agency. Participants are not only acted upon; they are also actively engaging in discourse and negotiating it in various ways” (285). It is also important to recognize that students “own motivations, interests, and backgrounds affected those negotiations and the ways they proceeded through them. These factors were part of students’ senses of self before they entered college, and they intertwine with students’ responses to instructors, particular courses, and the institution itself” (282).
Keeter and Hunter “use activity theory to conceptualize [a writer’s] learning as an activity that balances between individual agency in meaning making and the social, historical and cultural contexts that influence how a single writer makes meaning” (308). They conclude that “teachers of writing need to help students conceptualize all writing activity as collective work…Our study shows the benefit of providing opportunities for teachers and students to explore how contrasting communities of practice define successful writing activity and how writing activity operates in the cultural and political sphere of each community…Academic communities of practice can encourage students to develop the self-reflexivity that will enable them to chart their own identity definition and to understand the power relations they engage in as they write” (327).
Key Terms
Russell and Yanez explain, “The broad goal of this synthesis of activity theory (AT) and genre systems theory is to understand the ways writing mediates human activity, the ways people think through and act through writing…We suggest ways these theories can help teachers and students learn and critique existing discursive pathways (genres) – and create new ones – for expanding involvement with others” (331). They argue that there are contradictions in general education because (a) teachers have specialist knowledge and discourse and expect that their students will also and (b) the university systems sees writing as through the transmission model and through the genius model (332). This can make students feel alienated. “Viewing teaching learning through the lens of activity systems and the genre systems that mediate them may give teachers and students a sense of what goes into the making of, for example, historical argument, the why (motivation through potential use value) as well as what [motives] and how of writing academic history” (357). They combine activity and genre theory, stating that “each activity system of singing has its own genres, its own expectations and norms and rules, its own culture and historical traditions and ways of making sounds in the air with the voice” (337). “The issue of genres, as tools and rules, leads us to see the specialist/lay divide not in terms of a neat division or unassailable contradiction, but in terms of the circulation of discourse, how genres intertextually link activity systems. Activity systems are not hermetically sealed, neatly divided between specialist and generalist, but in complex textual (genre) systems, through which the specialist/generalist contradiction is created and maintained…The object and motive of the different activity systems have historically led people in each activity system to expect different things of the genre - thus there are different genre rules or norms” (348). Key Terms Activity Theory: “AT is a way of analyzing human activity over time, especially change – including that kind of change called learning…It is a heuristic…[S]hared tool models like AT view communication and learning as social in origin, and human activity as collective. In these models, we humans (subjects) act together with others humans and material tools to change something in our world, the object of our activity. The tools that we use, including writing, mediate our thinking and doing. One such tool, writing (and the action of writing) actively mediates—shapes—both our thinking and our action together, our activity” (335). “Shared tool models…see context as a weaving together of people and their tools in complex networks. The network is the context” (336). AT follows “several basic principles”:
“There are rules, both official rules and that kind of unofficial unwritten rules we call norms. Some of these rules or norms are expectations, conventions for using writing in the university and in the discipline of activity history – genre” (339).
In thinking about using AT as a methodological framework, the authors explain that “we could use this flexible triangular lens to zoom in and out to one students, to several or all the participants, or to the whole university, depending on the question we’re asking” (339). Dialectical Contradictions: “‘historically accumulating structural tensions within and between activity systems’…But contradictions also present a constant potential for change in people and tools (including writing) – for transforming – re-mediating – activity systems. Thus, there is always potential for learning, both individual and social, for becoming a changed person and changed people, with new identities, new possibilities – often opened up (or closed down) through writing in various genres” (341). Genre: “In North American genre theory (Freedman and Medway, 1994a, 1994b), genres are understood not merely as formal textual features, the what and how to write. Genres are also seen as expected ways of using words to get things done in certain recurring situations—the activity system, in AT terms. This brings into genre analysis questions of social motive and identity. The why and who of genre. And thus genres, as Bazerman (1994) has argued, form systems that follow and mediate the work pathways within and among activity systems” (351). “Genres and their systems help us make sense of what's happening. They allow us to do certain kinds of work that are otherwise impossible (imagine a hospital without medical records). But of course they can also be constraining (they are expectations, rules, norms, after all)…In genres (tools for coordinating actions) deep dialectical contradictions are instantiated and negotiated, and the political and personal struggles those contradictions give rise to. In this contestation, learning can also occur, as participants struggle with the constraints, and see new possibilities for transforming (re-mediating) their activities, themselves - and their genres, for genres are always only stabilized-for-now, as Catherine Schryer (1994) puts it” (352). Evans studies when and why teachers slip into transmission models of communication even then they have been trained to distrust and avoid these models. “Transmission models, then, are buttressed by a complex, dynamic, and interpenetrating host of influences. As we saw with our micro-social analysis of the cases of Rick and Lynn, particularly salient influences that can enable transmission models include the arena of discourse (related to the teachers' training), perceptions of task difficulty, and perceptions of student competence and effort (especially deficit models). The macro-social analysis also suggests that deficit models are key influences, along with the pervasiveness of the conduit metaphor in our metalingual apparatus [the deficit and transmission models are mutually reinforcing], the real resemblance between transmission models and the way communication actually works, our tendency to reduce complex data and overgeneralize, assumptions about what counts as evidence that mutual understanding is empirically verifiable, our vested interest in being able to communicate our intended meanings, the power and control enabled by transmission models, and ideologies of individuality. Although this is surely an incomplete account of the resilience of transmission models, it nonetheless suggests why people—even teachers trained in post-transmission models—are likely to rely at times on a transmission model” (421). Moving forward, then, Evans recommends, “Teacher training…could encourage teachers to self-monitor their models of communication within arena such as the following: writing prompts; readings of student work; respond to student writing; and classroom discussion, including but not limited to discussion of readings and assignments. Teacher training could also help prospective teachers to better assess task difficulty” (422). She also recommends that we utilize “activity theory [to] motivate us…to seek out more knowledge of context – knowledge both about what students intend to communicate as well as the logic that underlies these intentions” (423).
Key Words
Bazerman discusses assessment, particularly the issue that institutions need to be able to standardize assessments while standardizing removes the analysis of higher order skills. He states that assessment is important because it “has implications for almost all of education” (428). He argues, “How people are assessed, how writing instruction is assessed reflects what is valued and evaluated in the competence…[T]he assessment of writing is the site at which we examine, reflect upon and evaluate who we are becoming as individuals and societies…This evaluation in turn constrains, directs, rewards and punishes particular lines of development, affecting our planning for who we become in our writing and who our students become within our curriculum” (430). Thereby, “assessment is closely tied to the organization, planning, and constant unfolding of activities and is not just an after-the-fact evaluation of student accomplishment which may have consequences for rewards and punishments” (441).
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
Lundell and Beach argue, “Previous research on dissertation writing fails to embed it within the context of different, and often competing institutional forces constituting the genre expectations associated with producing the dissertation” (483). Thereby, they “propose an alternative perspective to understanding dissertation writing as constituted by students’ participation in a complex maze of competing activity systems: the Graduate School, the department, advisors and committees, graduate student employment, and the job market, systems rife with conflicts, tensions, and contradictions” (485).
“To successfully complete their dissertation, participants needed to learn various practices for operating in these different systems. In some cases, the systems did not effectively socialize students to help them acquire practices necessary for successful completion of the dissertation. In other cases, students were successful because the systems provided explicit socialization of these practices, instances that suggest ways for improving the overall experience” (491). “In constructing themselves as agents within a new activity, students began to recognize the differences between the objects and motives of research universities as opposed to other university/community college systems” (505). Dissertation “It is assumed that by maintaining high standards of production for writing the dissertation, that only those candidates who can achieve these standards would be entering an over-crowded market…In the job market system, the dissertation not only acts as a tool in training, it also acts as a tool in evaluation of competence and a tool in hiring” (484-6). Activity system “An activity theory analysis serves to highlight the ways in which contradictions arise in these systems given their conflicting objects/motives, rules, tools, and division of labor” (507). “Each of these systems is driven by different objects and motives” (486). “Complicating this landscape is the fact that these systems are continually in flux as new forms of disciplinarity, genres, and research paradigms challenge and replace the old, only to be subject to new challenges” (486). Genres “Understanding the uses of genre tools entails perceiving how they afford or mediate systems” (489). Genres can also be a space for “establish[ing] agency within systems” (489). For instance, the dissertation genre as tool to ‘position’ themselves within these potential systems, positioning that entails active participation in presenting conference papers, networking with members of a field, publishing, and challenging status quo perspectives…In some cases, students are merely "passing" (p. 101) through their programs by completing assignments or engaging in "procedural display" (Bloome, Puro, & Theodorou, 1989, p. 266). Others display “deep participation” (p. 102) through participation with faculty or peers in collaborative research projects or writing, leading to a sense of agency, status, or being included in important events (Wenger, 1998) as valued participants in graduate school. (489-90) Learning The authors use Gregory Bateson’s (1972) model of three levels of learning:
Construction of new knowledge: "[T]he construction of ‘created new’ activity involves several phases. Initially, a person experiences a ‘need state’…associated with competing object/motives involving the experience of contradictions in a system…[Contradictions] leads to analysis, inner dialogue, and reflection associated with an awareness of the double bind. This reflexive element is a central aspect of Engeström’s concept of the double bind. Triggered by a set back, disturbance, or surprise, learners recognize, define, and reflect on the double bind in order to begin entertaining ways of coping with the double bind…In facing these contradictions, students recognize that they are caught in a double bind, requiring the creation of new activities" (488). In the conclusion, they assert the following about dissertation:
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