- Genres…because they are regularized, create the time/ spaces where participants exercise a range of strategic choices…The ground or path of the genre, however, provided them with the sense of structure they needed to insert those choices at appropriate moments. [“In an apparently contradictory move, to establish their own agency…these neophyte practitioners must immerse themselves in the social practices of the their discipline” (63).] Because of the presence of the genre, these participants were able to negotiate their way through a complex and contradictory situation.
- Genres facilitate improvisation. Just like a good piece of “jazz” the genre lays down the line that the participants, once they understand the structure or conventions, can use to negotiate their own agency. Participants rarely know exactly what they are going to do or say. But the genre gives participants enough structure to develop a felt sense of what is appropriate to say or do at particular moments. Thus participants can develop over time a sense of agency as they figure out more and more of the appropriate choices for that generic situation.
- A constellation of strategies characterize genres. Not all participants in a genre use all the strategies associated with a genre. Participants select strategies that are appropriate to the genre but also appropriate to themselves. However, some strategies are clearly outside the genre (such as using incorrect terminology). Because social actors belong to multiple activity systems they can bring strategies from one system to another and perhaps even gain some cultural capital for doing so. [It is when participants bring strategies from one system to another that encourages change to the original system (68-9).] However, novices who are learning acceptable strategies rarely have an opportunity for such innovation.
- Genres have ideological consequences. Learning how to use a genre, means being genred. It means learning how to see the world from the perspective of that genre’s characteristic structure, register and syntax. [Bazerman (2002), like Bourdieu, notes that participation in these genre events is identity or habitus forming. As he observes, “‘genre shapes intentions, motives, expectations, attention, perception, affect, and interpretive frame. It brings to bear in the local moment more generally available ideas, knowledge, institutions and structures that we recognize as germane to the activity of the genre’” (70).]
Key Terms
- Agency: “the capacity for freedom of action in light of or despite social structures” (64).
- Structure: “the social forces and constraints that affect so much of our social lives” (64).
- Activity system: “Vygotsky envisioned agents as learning through using tools in purposeful, goal directed activities. He saw that these tools, both physical (hammers, pencils) and cultural (language), pre-exist their users and mediate the interaction between agents and their social environments. By using tools, human agents internalized the values, practices and beliefs associated with their social worlds. At the same time as they become experienced users, agents can, in the midst of purposeful activity, affect their social contexts or even modify their tools” (67). Leont’ev extended this by suggest that there is “a hierarchy of three levers…At the top level is the total activity system itself, the purposeful activity in which participants engage…Actions are [the] second level…[agents’] action is purposeful…but it is part of a larger system…Finally, agents also at the level of operations” (67). While Leont’ve “points out that operation become unconscious over time,…Russell observes, learning an operation can itself become an action and par of an activity system…At this point many of the later unconscious movements and assumptions can be overt” (67).