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”:
- Human behavior is social in origin, and human activity is collective…; Human consciousness – ‘mind’ - grows out of people's joint activity with shared tools. Our minds are in a sense co-constructed and distributed among others. Our thoughts, our words, and our deeds are always potentially engaged with the thoughts, words, and deeds of others.
- Through involvement in collective activity, however widely distributed, learners are always in contact with the history, values, and social relations of a community - or among communities - as embedded in the shared cultural tools used by that community(ies) to mediate activity.
- AT emphasizes tool-mediated action. Human beings not only act on their environment with tools, they also think and learn with tools. At a primary level these tools are material, ‘external’ - hammers, books, clothing, computers, telecommunications networks. But we humans also fashion and use tools at a secondary or ‘internal’ level - language, concepts, scripts, schemas, and (as we will see) genres. Both kinds of tools are used to act on the environment collectively…
- AT is interested in development and change, which AT understands broadly to include historical change, individual development, and moment-to-moment change. All three levels of analysis are necessary to understand people learning (beyond mere rote learning). AT grounds analysis in everyday life events, the ways people interact with each other using tools over time, historically. AT assumes that "individuals are active agents in their own development but do not act in settings entirely of their own choosing" (Cole, 1996, p. 104). Individual learners learn, of course, but they do so in environments that involve others, environments of people-with-tools that both afford and constrain their actions.
- AT, as Cole says, ‘rejects cause and effect, stimulus response, explanatory science in favor of a science that emphasizes the emergent nature of mind in activity and that acknowledges a central role for interpretation in its explanatory framework.’ Accordingly, it ‘draws upon methodologies from the humanities as well as from the social and biological sciences’” (337-8).
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).