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: