David Russell
RETHINKING GENRE: AN ACTIVITY THEORY ANALYSIS
SHORT VERSION
Vygotsky and his immediate successors did not use genre as a category of
analysis. But in the last decade, a number of Vygotskian theorists have
incorporated into their work various theories of genre. During the first
20 minutes of this roundtable I will propose a synthesis of a number of
elements from these theories, drawing heavily on the work of Gordon Wells
(1993, 1994), whose recent work connects Hallidayan functional linguistics
with activity theory (Leont'ev, 1981) to analyze classroom discourse, and
on the work of Charles Bazerman (1994), who analyzes genre as systems of
speech acts in social practices (institutions).
We'll then take the last 40 minutes and together construct diagrams of
genre systems, to see if this concept is a useful in analyzing how students
and teachers within classrooms use the discursive tools of classroom genres
to interact (and not interact) with the genre systems of social practices
(activity networks) outside the classroom those of families, peer groups,
disciplines, and professions. This systemic genre analysis may be helpful
to reform efforts that must deal with diversity among students and
specialization in education and beyond. I hope that analysis of genre
systems may offer a theoretical bridge between the sociology of education
and Vygotskian social psychology of classroom interaction.
LONG VERSION (3 1/2 pages)
In thinking about genres in relation to the Vygotskian tradition of
educational analysis, the first step is to go beyond the conventional
notion of genre as a set of formally definable text features that certain
texts have in common important as these are to any principled analysis and
consider genre in relation to social activity and action. From this
perspective, genres are text-mediated ways of interacting among people in
some social practice or, to use the terms of Vygotskian activity theory,
some activity network (AN). An activity network is any ongoing,
object-directed, historically-conditioned, tool-mediated human interaction:
a social club, a political movement, a course of study, a discipline, a
profession, an institution, a research laboratory, a family, and so on.
These activity networks are mutually (re)constructed by participants using
certain tools and not others (including discursive tools). The activity
network is the basic unit of analysis for both groups' and individuals'
behavior, in that it analyzes the way concrete tools are used to mediate
the motive (direction, trajectory) and the object (end or goal) for the
changes in both. (I'll show Engestrom's [1987] triangle diagram
here--subject, object/motive, tools)
Activity theory demands that genres not be seen merely as texts that share
some formal features but as texts that share some use by some group of
people that share some guiding object/motive (an AN), a kind of text that
mediates purposeful activity in some typified way(s). In this sense,
genres, as Bazerman says, are not best described as textual forms, but as
"forms of life, ways of being, frames for social action. They are
environments for learning" and teaching, and as such are essential to the
functioning of zones of proximal development (ZPDs) ("Life of Genre" 1).
In complex ANs, such as those of educational institutions, there are
typically many genres, which function together to organize interactions.
Charles Bazerman has developed a theory of what he calls genre systems,
which "are interrelated genres that interact with each other in specific
settings" (1994). These "settings" I conceive as activity networks, which
systems of genre mediate, producing coordinated actions (though
contradictions and conflicts may by part of those coordinated actions). In
the genre system of some AN (or among ANs), "only a limited range of genres
may appropriately follow upon another," because the conditions for
successful actions of each AN are conditioned (constrained and afforded) by
their history of previous actions (Bazerman 1994). The system of genres
serves to operationalize the purposeful interactions of the participants in
regular ways, bringing stability and through the process of
appropriation change to social practices and institutions. As Gordon Wells
(1993) has argued, a genre is ordinarily best analyzed at the level of
operation, the use of some tool, some mediational means, to carry out a
repeated action, an action which in turn furthers the motive and acts upon
the object of some collective (activity network). Because genres have
operationalized (routinized) many actions, insiders do not ordinarily need
to choose each time they take action. However, this means that newcomers
must appropriate at least some of those routininzed tools-in-use (genres)
in order to function with others in the AN.
Though the system of genres in a professional AN or family, for example, is
very complex, it pales by comparison with the modern university or
comprehensive secondary school, which selects and prepare students for a
wide range of social practices (activity networks). As the very names
imply, these ANs bring together a range of other ANs with vastly different
and often contradictory motives, and their genres are also myriad. A
university or secondary school actually functions at the boundary among a
number of ANs: those of students' family, peer groups, etc., and those of
teachers' disciplinary/professional networks the "content."
There are, within a university or comprehensive secondary school myriad
genres that we will call, following Christie (1985), "classroom genres."
These genres operationalize the interactions among students' ANs (families,
peer groups, churches, etc.) and the ANs of disciplines: written genres
such as dissertations, theses, research papers, essays, book reports,
precis, lab reports, and so on (not to mention oral, gestural,
architectural, and other genres). Each of these genres is modeled on and
bears an analyzable relation to a genre(s) of a professional AN, a
discipline. Historically, curricula in secondary and university education
have appropriated and transformed genres of professional practice to
mediate the boundary between the profession/discipline and the educational
institution, both to initiate and exclude students (Russell, 1991). These
classroom genres form genre systems, for individual courses, for curricula,
and for the wider bureaucratic structures of selection within the AN of the
educational institution.
Coming to write in new ways means establishing new tool-mediated
interactions (links, involvements) with an AN or ANs appropriating (and
sometimes reconstructing) genres. The process of "learning to write" can be
analyzed by tracing students' and teachers' mutual appropriation of new
discursive tools (and genres) within and among genre systems. Teachers may
"pick up" students' ways with words. But because of the power differential,
students more often appropriate the discursive tools (and genres) of a
discipline or profession. Change (such as "learning to write") occurs in an
individual or in an AN when one establishes new interactions (participatory
links, involvements) with (an)other AN(s) through appropriation of its
tools.
Engestrom's analysis (1987) of contradictions in ANs leads to an analysis
of the ways genre systems mediate change in ANs. As an activity network
interacts with other ANs in a complex dialectic of boundary work,
contradictions arise that drive changes within an AN and thus within the
genres that mediate its activity. An activity network "is constantly
working through contradictions within and between its elements"(Engestrom,
1987). In this sense, an activity network "is a virtual disturbance- and
innovation-producing machine" (Engestrom, 1991). A contradiction is,
etymologically, "speaking against" voices in discussion or debate over the
object/motive of an AN and the actions that further it. And the
etymological sense captures the sense in which activity theory uses the
term. These dialogic voices call for changes in the direction of the AN,
the motive and object (Wertsch, Voices).
Different participants in a zone of proximal development within an
educational AN bring not only different discursive tools from the ANs of
their previous interactions, but also different constructions of the
classroom AN. Elementary school children may initially view school as a
place to play with their friends, appropriating the school AN for the AN of
their play groups (a phenomenon not unusual in universities). However,
most students are gradually "enrolled" in (identify with, accept) the AN of
school in the sense that they come to appropriate the motive of the school
AN from the perspective of adults: wider involvement in the culture.
However, the genres of school talk, textbooks, student writing, etc., may
incorporate the genres of play, through, for example, reading lessons
incorporating stories about play, math lessons with story problems about
play and children may well "play school" outside of school, using the
genres of school talk to mediate their play activity.
Similarly, in a secondary school or university, it is possible to
categorize zones of proximal development in their relation to the wider
activity networks of disciplines and professions. (Here I'll show Venn
diagrams of disciplines intersecting with schools through genre systems).
At the furthest boundary of a professional AN are genres of commodified
tools, textbook statements that are only loosely connected to the
day-to-day workings of the professional AN. In the ZPDs characteristic of
general/liberal education courses, the genres are often appropriated as
discrete memorized "facts" whose immediate use is usually viewed by
students in terms of a grade (a tool used to mediate the selection motive
of the educational institution) but potentially as tools for some
unspecified further interaction with some social practice outside school
(though because students have not sufficiently specialized appropriated the
motive of a professional AN that remains vague).
As students begin to specialize (select a "major," for example) the ZPDs
begin to construct students as potential participants in a professional AN.
The classroom genres are more connected to the interactions of insiders,
more deeply involved in the genre system, through citation, laboratory
practice, etc. As students select and are selected for further involvement
in a professional AN (often in graduate school in the US), they become what
might be called journeyman insiders, and the genres are much closer to
those of professional insiders, such as case studies, research reports, and
so on.
In each of these kinds of ZPD, the contradictions existing in the
professional AN (particularly market value versus use value) interact with
the contradictions of the educational AN (particularly exclusion
[disciplinary "excellence"] versus inclusion [social "equity"]. By tracing
the relation of the disciplinary genre system to the educational genre
system through the boundary of the classroom genre system, the
analyst/reformer can construct a model of the interactions of classroom
with wider social practices, a model based on concrete tools-in-use such as
classroom texts (by students, teachers, school administrators, and
non-school professionals in disciplines).
Here we'll get out the markers and start playing with the diagrams to see
what activity networks interact with others in specific classrooms and what
genres (and contradictions) are appropriated across boundaries.
David R. Russell
English Department
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011
USA (515) 294-4724,fax 294-6814
drrussel who-is-at iastate.edu