Gordon, Judy, Mike, Leigh, and others,
> One
>important continuum concerns the extent to which a text in a genre is
>co-produced (e.g. face-to-face interaction, published interview, etc.),
>but also important is the number and status of the participants. As I
>understand Bakhtin's use of the term 'speech genres', it also includes
>these distinctions but perhaps not so explicitly.
Bakhtin's definition of utterance/speech genre is very explicit about
including addressivity, the management of social relations, and certain
features of co-production (like the ways others' words are taken up, his
distinction between primay and secondary speech genres). He lacked any
detailed knowledge of conversation analysis (it not yet being a field of
inquiry when he wrote about speech genres) or process studies of writing
(another non-field at the time), so he doesn't address the kind of detailed
variations in co-production and participation that people have recently.
However, he also makes the particular content itself central to
utterance/genre, as central to the spheres of activity within which genres
coalesce.
In reading and listening to Freedman's work, as Judy also suggested, the
accounts of school and work do seem starkly different, as the title of the
Dias, Freedman, Medway, and Pare book, _Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in
Workplace Contexts_ (Erlbaum, 1999), suggests. Typical of this view is the
following quote:
"...in one case, that of school-situated facilitated performance, the goal
of the activity itself is learning; in the workplace, through processes of
attenuated authentic participation, the learning is incidental, and occurs
as an integral but tacit part of participation in COP, whose activities are
oriented toward practical or material outcomes." (p. 199)
I think their research program is quite fascinating and includes a lot of
rich stories, but it does repeatedly represent writing in school as
explicit, clear, evaluated, motivated by student learning, and
individualistic and writing in the workplace as tacit, messy, unevaluated,
motivated by practical production, and collaborative. Their use of
different terms for learning in school and work is an indication of this
difference. An, I assume, unintended consequence of this is to write
school as pretty much an irrational dysfunctional social formation and work
as a rational functional social formation. I see schools and workplaces as
more alike than that, more mixed. Certainly my own studies of graduate
seminars (e.g., in _Writing/Disciplinarity_, Erlbaum, 1998) found a lot of
tacitness and messiness and that students' writing in school and
instructors' reading is multimotivational, an expression of complexly
laminated social identities and practices.
(An interesting link here to the Leontev discussions might be the
difference between his Problems of the Development of Mind representations
of activity as having *a* motive, school is for learning, work is for
production, and his later Activity Consciousness and Personality argument
that all activity is multimotivational.)
I'd certainly concur with your description, Gordon, of texts (written and
spoken) as tools for mediating activity. From a Bakhtinian perspective,
I'm a little concerned about the possible implications of calling genres
tools: as practices or ways of orienting to discursive worlds rather than
set text types; genres certainly are mediating activity, genring to play on
Alton Becker, but tool could have that thing-y ring to it.
I'm still struggling with the question of what to make of explicit
representations of texts, genres, norms, etc. I'm uncomfortable, Judy,
with declarative vs. procedural knowledge, though I see that it names
something of interest, for much the same reason that I'm uncomfortable with
an explicit-implicit binary. What about knowing how to declare knowledge
and procedures mediated by verbal regulation. I am hearing though that you
see these "mixtures" too when you stress the need for BOTH BOTH. And then
there is Vygotsky's argument for the value of grammar instruction. What if
we applied the same logic to rhetoric?
On Hanks's publications, I haven't seen anything really recent except a
collection of older work, Intertexts (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). He had a
flurry of pubs in 96. His Language and Communicative Practices (Westview,
1996) seems quite useful. And he had an interesting chapter in Silverberg
and Urban's Natural Histories of Discourse (Chicago, 1996). There's also a
chapter in Gumperz and Levinson's Rethinking Lingistic Relativity
(Cambridge, 1996).
And thanks Leigh for the citations for Yates' work!
>I was surprised by what you wrote about Aviva Freedman's work: [she seems]
>>to deny for example that
>>workplaces engage in any direct instruction of writing or even in
>>intentional structuring of worker's literacy enculturation. I certainly
>>see most of genre development as tacit and don't think rules really can
>>describe genres (if describing involves the way content and social
>>relations are handled and the possibility of quite flexible,
>>non-canonical,
>>sometimes transformative performances); however, I think we should see
>>direct instruction, rules of thumb, explicitly stated guidance, and
>>especially provided models *as* elements of situated learning, part of the
>>process, even if analysis makes clear that the rules and models are
>>insufficient or even inaccurate.
>My reading was that she contrasted workplace and [university] classrooms
>in terms of the amount of on-the-job guidance that is experienced in the
>workplace, as novices work with more experienced staff in preparing texts
>that "act into the world." In this latter context, the models and rules
>of thumb were provided in relation to the purpose of the text to be
>produced rather than in the form of abstract 'rules'. So I wouldn't
>disagree with your statement:
>>As Hanks and others have suggested, our everyday
>>metadiscursive ideologies and notions form part of what we employ to
>>produce and co-ordinate our discourse practices.
>
>My main point (not made sufficiently explicit) is that texts, spoken and
>written, are tools for mediating ongoing activity. The genre forms (the
>synoptic 'rules') are functional with respect to commonly occurring
>rhetorical situations, where the goal extends beyond the production of the
>texts themselves. Like all tools, therefore, they need to be adapted to
>the task in hand, which may involve substantial transformation of the
>cultural norms. Teaching text construction as following norms rather than
>achieving effects with respect to the specific situated activity that the
>texts are intended to mediate does not seem to me to be very useful. That
>being said, it can certainly be useful in the classroom to deconstruct
>existing 'model' texts to explore how they function in context. This
>obviously occurs most frequently with respect to written texts, but
>teachers I know have found it helpful occasionally to record and
>transcribe classroom discussions in order to enable students to explore
>the spoken texts they co-construct. For an example, see Hume (in press,
>http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~ctd/networks/journal/Vol%201(1).1998sept/article3.
>html).
>
>Gordon Wells
>OISE/University of Toronto
Paul Prior
p-prior@uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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