“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).
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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
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.
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).
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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).
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