“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.
“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).
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). Framework
Shipka argues that “the theories informing our scholarship, research, and teaching must support the examination of communicative practice as a dynamic whole and highlight the emergent, distributed, historical, and technologically mediated dimensions of twenty-first-century composing practices” (39). She also asserts that “granting analytic primacy to mediated action [“the whole of this union or the sum of its parts” (42)] provides us with a way of examining final products in relation to the complex processes by which those products are produced, circulated, and consumed” (40). To do this, she argues for a sociocultural framework: “The four characteristics of mediated action that I will treat below are: (1) mediated action typically serves multiple purposes or goals; (2) mediated action is simultaneously enabled and constrained by meditational means [tools, whether by psychological tools and/or by technical tools such as hammers, nails, computers, poles, keyboards, pencils, and so on” (43)]; (3) mediated action is historically situated; and (4) mediated action is transformed with the interdiction of new meditational means” (44). Technology Shipka cautions us against “an overly narrow definition of technology” (20). “What are overlooked here are the technologies that students use in order to create looked here are the technologies that students use in order to create and sustain the conditions for engaging in these activities – turning on lights, arranging themselves at desks, on chairs, on beds, and so on” (10). In other words, we tend to look only at new and digital technologies. “[A] narrow definition of technology fails to encourage richly nuanced, situated views of literacy” (31) and “could limit…the kinds of texts students produce in our courses” (8). Shipka also argues that we need to pay attention to the history of technologies. “Tracing the processes by which texts are produced, circulated, received, responded to, used, misused, and transformed, we are able to examine the complex interplay of the digital and analog, of the human and nonhuman, and of technologies, both new and not so new” (30). Multimodality One of her central points is that all communicative practice is multimodal (13). “A composition made whole recognizes that whether or not a particular classroom or group of students are wired, students may still be afforded opportunities to consider how they are continually positioned in ways that require them to read, respond to, align with – in short, to negotiate – a streaming interplay of words, images, scents, and movements. Classroom experiences certainly demand this of them, but so does driving, crossing the street, or running to the grocery store” (21) Shipka “suggest[s] that what matters is not simply that students learn to produce specific kinds of texts – whether linear, print-based, digital, object- and performance-based texts, or some combination thereof. Rather, what is crucial is that students leave their courses exhibiting a more nuanced awareness of the various choices they make, or even fail to make, throughout the processes of producing a text and to carefully consider the effect those choices might have on others” (84-5). “A mediated activity-based multimodal framework for composing provides an alternative to pedagogical approaches that facilitates flexibility and metacommuncative awareness without predetermining for students the specific genres, media, and audiences with which they will work” (87). She “suggest[s] that students who are provided with tasks that do not specify what their final products must be and that ask them to imagine alternative contexts for their work come away from the course with a more expansive, richer repertoire of making-making and problem-solving strategies” (101). Pedagogy Shipka argues that her suggested pedagogy does not denigrate or ignore writing; instead, "attending to writing [is], indeed a crucial part of - but not the whole of - what it means to compose [and] is a necessary first step in working toward the realization of a composition made whole" (131). She also contends, "Creating courses that provide students with a greater awareness of, and ability to reflect on, the ways in which writing intersects and interacts with other semiotic systems does not necessarily make for more work. It makes for different work, perhaps, but work that I believe we should have been doing all along" (137). This pedagogy should not be one in which teachers attempt to teach one semiotic system for a period of time and then move to the next. Rather, "treating writing in relation to other kinds of modalities means that the purposes and potentials of alphabetic text can be attended to throughout the course of the semester" (137). This also means that "instructors who may not consider themselves experts is [other] modes can still focus primarily on the role that written text plays. The important difference has to do with refusing to ignore the presence or impact of these modes, and asking students to consider how other semiotic systems alter, complicate, expand, enrich, and/or share one's reception of the written text" (138). TL;DR: The goal of composition: is “to teach students effective, rhetorically based strategies for taking advantage of all available means of communicating effectively and productively, to multiple audiences, for different purposes, and using a range of genres” (108). Key terms
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