Anthony Pare <PARE who-is-at education.McGill.Ca>

Anthony Pare (PARE who-is-at education.McGill.Ca)
Mon, 06 Oct 1997 11:29:58 -0400

I teach in the faculty of education at McGill University in Montreal,
Canada. I am most closely associated with the faculty's Centre for the
Study and Teaching of Writing, which provides undergraduate and some
graduate courses in composition and rhetoric to various disciplines
across the university curriculum. I also teach literacy education
courses for undergraduate and graduate teachers-in-training. Along with
colleagues at Ottawa's Carleton University (Aviva Freedman and Peter
Medway) and McGill (Patrick Dias and Ann Beer), I have been involved in
a long-term study of academic and nonacademic writing in a variety of
disciplines, with particular emphasis on the transition between school
and work. My chief interest within the project is in academic and
professional social work writing. Theoretical support comes from genre
theory (Miller, Bazerman, Bakhtin, Freedman and Medway, etc.), activity
theory and cultural psychology (Cole, Engestrom, Vygotsky, Wertsch,
etc.), studies of situated learning and distributed cognition (Lave,
Rogoff, Salomon, etc.), and from sociology (e.g., Bourdieu) and
anthropology (e.g., Douglas). I am currently intrigued by how newcomers
to institutional life take on a collective or institutional ideology and
consciousness by participating in an organization's regular rhetorical
practices; I am interested, as well, in how students and practitioners
can be helped to achieve a critical stance on that transformation.