Re: ontogeny/cultural history
Charles Bazerman (bazerman who-is-at humanitas.ucsb.edu)
Sat, 6 Mar 1999 11:15:09 -0800 (PST)
I took Mike's initial inquiry about ontogeny and cultural history
to be about early childhood, but Phil's comments about hospitals as sites
of ontogeny opened up the whole issue of adult development within
historically emerged organizations and socio-cultural systems.
Late adolescent and adult learning within particular
institutional/organizational settings is closely tied to issues of
learning to write in the academy, professions, workplace and other sites.
Of course there has always been an association between learning to write
and development of cognition, personality, along with social participation
and identity, but genre and activity studies of writing provide more
concrete ways of understanding sociocognitive development in using genres
and engaging in discursively mediated activity systems. Substantial
chunks of the research in writing across the curriculum, writing in the
disciplines and professions, etc, can be understood in this light.
The special issue of MCA 4:4 on the Activity of writing that David
Russell and I co-edited is a good place to start on this, especially
David's review of the literature, Paul Prior's article on the multiple
disciplinary, social, and personal histories that create the discursive
space within which specific students write in one particular seminar
within the evolving field of American Studies (his book
WRITING/DISCIPLINARITY takes this complex laminated further) and the
Berkenkotter/Ravotas article which examines the tools of both client and
therapist thought within the discursive institutions of psychiatric
diagnostics.
To continue in the spirit of shameless self-promotion, My book
coming out this summer, THE LANGUAGES OF EDISON'S LIGHT, considers how
Edison came to know, participate in and mobilize the discursive systems
of his day (patents, newspaper, financial, technical journals). Each of
these stories of Edison's development and practice is set within the
history of these discursive forms and the social systems they circulated
in.
Chuck Bazerman