#19451
This study synthesizes Y. Engeström's version of cultural historical activity theory and North American genre systems theory to explore the problem of specialized discourses in activities that involve non-specialists, in this case students in a university 'general education' course in Irish history struggling to write the genres of professional academic history. We trace the textual pathways (genre systems) that mediate between the activity systems (and motives) of specialist teachers and the activity systems (and motives) of non-specialist students. Specifically, we argue that the specialist/lay contradiction in U.S. general education is embedded in historical practices in the modern university, and manifested in alienation that students often experience through the writing requirements in general education courses. This historical contradiction also makes it difficult for instructors to make writing meaningful for non-specialists and go beyond fact-based, rote instruction to mediate higher-order learning through writing. However, our analysis of the Irish History course suggests this alienation may be overcome when students, with the help of their instructors, see the textual pathways (genre systems) of specialist discourse leading to useful knowledge/skill in their activity systems beyond the course as specialists in other fields or as citizens.
Russell, David R. and Arturo Yanez. WAC Clearinghouse (2002). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric
#19447
This chapter reports on an ethnographic study of the technology-mediated discourse practices of a professional organization in a period of major transition. Employing theories of genre and activity along with other theoretical constructs, the study examined how the Bank of Canada, the country’s central bank, employs a “Communications Strategy” to orchestrate the organization’s communicative interactions with other social groups in the Canadian public-policy sphere. After identifying a set of written and spoken genres associated with the Communications Strategy, the chapter suggests that the genre set and various mediating technologies can be usefully viewed as parts of a local sphere of organizational activity. The chapter then describes two features of the genre set: the genre knowledge within the community-of-practice associated with it and the relationship of the genre set to processes of organizational change. Next, the chapter discusses the role that the genre set plays in the activity of the Communications Strategy, focusing on three primary functions: cocoordinating the intellectual and discursive work of a large number of individuals performing a variety of professional roles; generating, shaping, and communicating the “public information” that constitutes the Bank’s official public position on its monetary policy; and acting as a site for organizational learning. The chapter concludes with five theoretical claims regarding the way in which the genre set, mediated by technology, operates within the Bank, suggesting that these theoretical claims might serve as a heuristic for other researchers.
Smart, Graham. WAC Clearinghouse (2002). Articles>Business Communication>Rhetoric
#19449
Compound Mediation in Software Development: Using Genre Ecologies to Study Textual Artifacts
Traditionally, technical communicators have seen the texts that they produce -- manuals, references, instructions -- as 'bridging' or mediating between a worker and her tool. But field studies of workers indicate that the mediational relationship is much more complicated: Workers often draw simultaneously upon many different textual artifacts to mediate their work, including not only the official genres produced by technical communicators manuals but also ad hoc notes, comments, and improvisational drawings produced by the workers themselves. In this chapter, I theorize these instances of compound mediatiation by drawing on activity theory and genre theory. I describe an analytical framework, that of genre ecologies, that can be used to systematically investigate compound mediation within and across groups of workers. Unlike other analytical frameworks that have been used in studies of technology (such as distributed cognition's functional systems and contextual design's work models), the genre ecology framework highlights the interpretive and cultural-historical aspects of compound mediation that are so important in understanding the use of textual artifacts. The analytical framework is illustrated by an observational study of how 22 software developers in a global corporation used various textual artifacts to mediate their software development work.
Spinuzzi, Clay. WAC Clearinghouse (2002). Design>Collaboration>Software
#24460
Creating a Text/Creating a Company: The Role of a Text in the Rise and Decline of a New Organization 
A case study in the history of Microware, a microcomputer software company.
Doheny-Farina, Stephen. WAC Clearinghouse (1991). Articles>Management
#19450
Creating a Writer's Identity on the Boundaries of Two Communities of Practice
In this case study, we explore the way one student, who aspired to become a professional writer, learned through her writing activity in two communities: academia and public relations. We use activity theory to conceptualize the student's learning as an activity that balances between individual agency in meaning making and the social, historical and cultural forces that shape how individuals make meaning. Perceiving the two settings as communities of practice that provided opportunities for pursuing shared enterprises and engaging in collective learning, we show how the student's simultaneous participation in these contrasting communities challenged and refined her understanding of what it means to be an effective writer . We discuss how the work she engaged in on the boundaries of two writing communities enhanced her developing identity as a professional writer as she became aware of and tested the limitations of writing in these two communities. 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.
Ketter, Jean and Judy Hunter. WAC Clearinghouse (2002). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric
#24496
During scientific researchers' collaborations, authors draw on many extratextual resources (social, intellectual and empirical) which are deployed in their texts.
Bazerman, Charles. WAC Clearinghouse (1991). Articles>Scientific Communication>Collaboration
#24445
A Psychiatrist Using DSM-III: The Influence of a Charter Document in Psychiatry 
Explores the influence of DSM-III in the limited sphere of a single child psychiatrist.
McCarthy, Lucille Parkinson. WAC Clearinghouse (1991). Articles>Scientific Communication>Standards
#24444
Explains how rhetoric is related to modes of inquiry and to the social community in classical rhetoric and in scientific rhetoric in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Zappen, James P. WAC Clearinghouse (1991). Articles>History>Scientific Communication
#24461
Text and Action: The Operator's Manual in Context and in Court
The rhetorical process by which the immense body of expert knowledge is transformed into subsequent human action is a question of importance.
Paradis, James. WAC Clearinghouse (1991). Articles>Documentation>Legal
#24443
Texts in Oral Context: The "Transmission" of Jury Instructions in an Indiana Trial
Modern rhetorical scholars exhibit a curious reluctance to examine legal texts.
Stygall, Gail. WAC Clearinghouse (1991). Articles>Rhetoric>Legal
#21973
Both the Challenger and Three Mile Island disasters involved failures of communication among ordinary professional people, mistakes committed in the course of routine work on the job, small mishaps with grotesque conseqences.
Herndl, Carl G., Barbara A. Fennell and Carolyn R. Miller. WAC Clearinghouse (1991). Articles>Risk Communication>Engineering
#31375
This hypertext examines from an activity theory perspective the vexed problem of assessment and its relation to planning, accountability, curriculum, and learning. Assessment although only part of the educational process has implications for almost all of education. Local, state, and federal policies that have put great weight and high stakes on a battery of assessment tools that stand outside the daily life of the classroom but are intended to hold classrooms, teachers, and schools accountable for results. While situated evaluation is an aspect of most human practices, institution-wide testing creates substantial difficulties for the local practices of each class, and particularly creates tensions between student-centered classroom practice and subject-centered expectations. Such tensions have been a continuing puzzle for progressive education. Dewey and his followers regularly preferred to keep evaluation and decision-making local, but for various institutional reasons had to seek larger ways of assessing student achievement without ever being able to develop fully appropriate assessment tools. The teaching of writing has faced a similar dilemma, with standardized forms of writing assessment setting reductionist definitions and expectations of writing, and not directing students towards the highest levels of accomplishment. This study considers genre and activity analysis as the basis for defining and assessing writing tasks through analysis of materials collected from a complex sequence of social studies writing assignments on the Maya from a sixth grade class.
Bazerman, Charles. WAC Clearinghouse (2003). Articles>Education>Assessment>Activity Theory
#19448
When Management Becomes Personal: An Activity-Theoretic Analysis of Palm™ Technologies
Palm Technologies, a group of personal digital assistants or PDAs developed in the early 90s, have rapidly embedded themselves into the daily lives of users. The aim of this chapter is to provide an activity theoretic account of PDAs as technologies of text. Three questions are pursued: Out of what cultural history did Palm Technologies emerge? What motivated users to adopt Palm Technologies? How did Palm Technologies become incorporated into the activity patterns of everyday life? The evidence presented suggests that Palm Technologies work by moving systematic management techniques originally developed for organizations into the personal sphere. When systematic management becomes personal, task management separates from the task itself, leading to a fragmentation of motive that may challenge some of the basic assumptions of activity theory. This fragmentation is mediated through the space-time affordances of textualization and concurrent linearization of time. Like the systematic management of organizations before it, such textual affordances may become subject to surveillance and manipulation - by ourselves if not by others. All of this suggests that some interesting issues will arise as PDA technologies attempt to move outside of their managerial base and into the domestic sphere, in effect databasing our lives.
Geisler, Cheryl. WAC Clearinghouse (2002). Design>User Interface>Theory>PDA
#30061
Problem solving is common ground for all the disciplines and fundamental to all human activities. A writer is a problem solver of a particular kind. Writers 'solutions' will be determined by how they frame their problems, the goals they set for themselves, and the means or plans they adopt for achieving those goals.
Berkenkotter, Carol. WAC Clearinghouse (2001). Articles>Writing
#35180
Genre studies and genre approaches to literacy instruction continue to develop in many regions and from a widening variety of approaches. Genre has provided a key to understanding the varying literacy cultures of regions, disciplines, professions and educational settings. Genre in a Changing World provides a wide-ranging sampler of the remarkable variety of current work. The twenty-four chapters in this volume, reflecting the work of scholars in Europe, Australasia, North and South America, were selected from the over 400 presentations at SIGET IV (the Fourth International Symposium on Genre Studies) held on the campus of UNISUL in Tubarão, Santa Catarina, Brazil in August 2007 — the largest gathering on genre to that date. The chapters also represent a wide variety of approaches including rhetoric, Systemic Functional Linguistics, media and critical cultural studies, sociology, phenomenology, enunciation theory, the Geneva school of educational sequences, cognitive psychology, relevance theory, sociocultural psychology, activity theory, Gestalt psychology, and schema theory. Sections are devoted to theoretical issues, studies of genres in the professions, studies of genre and media, teaching and learning genre, and writing across the curriculum. The broad selection of material in this volume displays the full range of contemporary genre studies and sets the ground for a next generation of work.
Bazerman, Charles and Adair Biondi. WAC Clearinghouse (2009). Books>Rhetoric>Genre>International
