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...ucational researchers in several other nations elaborated the theory and conducted empirical research, both quantitative and qualitative. In the US, Activity Theory first influenced studies of literacy through the work of Sylvia Scribner, Michael Cole, and others at the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition. In the 1980's the theoretical tradition also became central to related lines of research into cognition in everyday life, particularly of adults David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 4 engaged in labor and the acquisition of labor-specific practices through apprenticeship (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1993). Though this tradition is by no means the dominant one in American developmental psychology, Activity Theory is an increasingly important perspective. Activity Theory analyzes human behavior and consciousness in terms of activity systems: goal-directed, historically-situated, cooperative human interactions, such as a child's attempt to reach an out-of-reach toy, a job interview, a "date," a social club, a classroom, a discipline, a profession, an institution, a political movement, and so on. The activity system is the basic unit of analysis for both cultures' and individuals' p...

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...ademic or public discourse. GWSI as teaching or improving writing in general The object(ive) of GWSI is most often described as teaching students "to write" or to "improve their writing." If writing were an autonomous skill, generalizable to all activity systems that use writing, improving writing in general would be a clear object(ive) of an activity system. But writing does not exist apart from its uses, for it is a tool for accomplishing object(ive)s beyond itself. The tool is continually transformed by its use into myriad and always-changing genres. Every text is some genre, to paraphrase Bakhtin (1986), part of some activity system(s). Learning to write means learning to write in the ways (genres) those in an activity system write (though one must remember that this is complicated by the fact that activity systems and their tools—including genres— are always in dialectical change). From this theoretical perspective, the object(ive) of GWSI courses is extremely ambiguous because those involved in it are teaching and learning the use of a tool (writing) for no particular activity system. And the tool can be David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 9 used for any number of object(ive)s...

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...riate identical discourse features, they do so for differing object(ive)s and thus often use the features differently. For example, pointing to the footnotes in a theoretical physics article and those in an article from PMLA would not be very helpful to a novice learning to write both genres, as compared with pointing out the very different object(ive)s of the two disciplines' activity systems, the very different material conditions of their work, the vast differences in their histories—differences which explain the profound and crucial differences in their uses of citation and documentation (Bazerman, 1988). Moreover, many of the genres written in institutions of higher education are not particular to academia, because many of the activity systems involved in academic David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 14 institutions are also involved in other, non-academic institutions, and with them their genres. Thus, any feature of academic writing that one might point to will also likely be found in a great deal of non-academic writing, and it is those connections—not the connections among academic departments—that are most important to those who use writing. Many texts written by chemists, e...

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...hose activity systems that make the role of writing in society the object of their study. Such a course would continue to provide many of the benefits of the GWSI course, but in a way that directly uses the unprecedented research of the last 30 years. By looking at the research on academic discourses—writing and learning in the disciplines—students may become more aware of the uses of written discourse in their institution and of ways they can use writing to further their own exploration of the "strange lands" of various disciplines and perhaps facilitate their entry into one or more of them (McCarthy, 1987). By looking at research on workplace writing, students would be introduced the roles writing plays in professions that colleges and universities prepare and credential students to enter—and eventually transform. By looking at how researchers in cultural studies, critical discourse analysis, and the sociology of knowledge provide insight into the uses of texts, students would critically examine some ways writing shapes social processes and power relations, through corporate, media, and governmental uses of writing. David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 31 As with any good course, st...

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...n several other nations elaborated the theory and conducted empirical research, both quantitative and qualitative. In the US, Activity Theory first influenced studies of literacy through the work of Sylvia Scribner, Michael Cole, and others at the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition. In the 1980's the theoretical tradition also became central to related lines of research into cognition in everyday life, particularly of adults David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 4 engaged in labor and the acquisition of labor-specific practices through apprenticeship (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1993). Though this tradition is by no means the dominant one in American developmental psychology, Activity Theory is an increasingly important perspective. Activity Theory analyzes human behavior and consciousness in terms of activity systems: goal-directed, historically-situated, cooperative human interactions, such as a child's attempt to reach an out-of-reach toy, a job interview, a "date," a social club, a classroom, a discipline, a profession, an institution, a political movement, and so on. The activity system is the basic unit of analysis for both cultures' and individuals' psychological an...

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...ous—even systematic and explicit—teaching, they may learn to perform an action more quickly and more easily than if they simply "picked it up." Students might do better at learning to use the genres of writing in some activity system if they had specific, conscious coaching, mentoring, or formal instruction in those genres of writing. Activity Theory research suggests that by consciously creating more effective zones of proximal development, activity systems may be able to improve a novice's acquisition of the systems' genres, though that research is far from conclusive (e. g., Markova, 1979; Freedman, 1993; Williams & Colomb, 1993). But such pedagogical efforts, whether formal or informal, require conscious effort and an awareness of the role of writing in the activity system—the very things that the daily functioning of an activity system tends to obscure. The WAC movement has nevertheless helped to make many faculty and students aware of the importance of David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 27 writing as a tool in their work, helping them better to use it for teaching and learning their activities. To borrow a term from another context, bilingual education, WAC programs facilitat...

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... are linked to disciplines and professions. It is not part of a path that leads students further into an activity system, as, for example, general chemistry or psychology leads on to the activity systems of the disciplines and professions of chemistry or psychology, within and outside academia. Some institutions do have a series of writing courses in creative, scientific, business, or technical writing that lead to careers in those disciplines and professions. However, the GWSI course is not traditionally structured to introduce students to the activities of those disciplines and professions (Russell, 1991, chap. 4). In Activity Theory terms, the course's object(ive) is contradictory, since writing in GWSI courses must be an instrument of different object(ive)s for each of the different activity systems it "serves," with no activity system of its own beyond the course itself. David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 20 This fundamental contradiction, however, has been masked by the myth of autonomous literacy and its corollary, the myth of UED. These myths masks the contradictions in the relationships of composition with the other activity systems: with English, with other disciplines, ...

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...f the new genre/activity that resemble features in a genre/activity one already knows. It may also be true that a person may have "learned how to learn" new genres. That is, one may have learned to be alert to the role language plays in an activity system, to take instruction from an adept in the genres one is trying to learn, to notice the differences in writing processes of various activity systems, and so on. Indeed, research in second language acquisition suggests strongly that it is easier for adults to learn third language than a second, and perhaps the same is true for learning genres (Ellis, 1994). David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 12 But to try to teach students to improve their writing in general by taking a GWSI course is to encounter the problems of our mythical ball-using course, the long-standing problems Kitzhaber noted with first-year composition courses. (1) Disagreements over content spring from the inevitability of linking writing to some activity system(s) and thus certain genres. One must always choose genres—and hence choose the activity systems that give those genres meaning and purpose. But which genres and activities, out of the myriad? (2) Problems of r...

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...g—directly or vicariously—in some activity system(s). From this perspective, adolescents and adults do not "learn to write," period. Nor do they improve their writing in a general way outside of all activity systems and then apply an autonomous skill to them. Rather, one acquires the genres (typified semiotic means) used by some activity field, as one interacts with people involved in the activity field and the material objects and signs those people use (including those marks on a surface that we call writing). This Activity Theory formulation of the acquisition of writing resists what Brian Street (1984) has termed the myth of autonomous literacy. David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 8 Literacy is not learned in and of itself and then applied to contexts (activity systems). It does not exist autonomously, divorced from some specific human activity. Literacy is always and everywhere bound up with the activity systems that it changes through its mediation of behavior—and which change it, for writing is an immensely protean tool that activity systems are always and everywhere changing to meet their needs. Activity Theory Analysis of GWSI as Writing with No Particular Content What is ...

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...adiction, however, has been masked by the myth of autonomous literacy and its corollary, the myth of UED. These myths masks the contradictions in the relationships of composition with the other activity systems: with English, with other disciplines, with institutions of higher education, and with the education system as a whole. To the institutional structure that usually houses GWSI, English departments, the course has often been seen as introducing students to or preparing them to enter its own activity system, literary criticism, and has thus served the object(ive) of that activity system (Carson, Chase, Gibson, and Hargrove, 1992). That object(ive) has conflicted with the object(ive) of higher education at large for composition: to help students "write better" for all courses. However, the myth of universal educated discourse has masked this contradiction by positing an overarching discourse that all disciplines (or all educated persons) use or should use. English departments have not generally had to confront the contradiction because the myth of universal educated discourse allowed them to teach primarily their own discourse (and thus values) in GWSI classes as if that discourse (and those values) were, or ought to ...

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...ther activity systems (disciplines or professions) ought to use instead of their own "jargon." Yet GWSI courses must select genres—and thus activity systems or "content"—to teach. Because of the history of GWSI courses, these genres tend to be literary analysis (or, more recently, cultural studies), from the dominant activity systems of English departments, or essays of the type published in upscale magazines (e. g., New Yorker), read by those in activity systems for which GWSI courses were originally designed to prepare students when the courses were first introduced at Harvard in the 1870s (Ohmann, 1976; Wall, 1994). Of course some genres that are often taught in GWSI classes may bring students into contact with certain activity systems where issues of public policy are negotiated David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 18 (writing a letter to the editor or to a legislator, for example). So also GWSI courses— particularly those with a "writing-across-the-curriculum" emphasis—sometimes expose students to some genres of some disciplines. But because the teaching and the writing are taught separately from the activity systems, students are only peripherally involved in the intellectual...

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...m, learning to write academic discourse means learning to write some more or less specialized genre or genres. And learning to write public discourse means learning to write some more or less specialized genre or genres, because all writing is specialized David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 17 in the sense that there is no overarching discourse of which others are merely subsets. Nor is there a generalizable skill or attainment called "academic discourse" or "public discourse" transferable to any academic writing situation or any situation calling for writing about public issues (Smagorinsky and Smith, 1992). To teach students to write "academic discourse" one must engage them in a specific activity systems—and therefore specific genres—where academic work goes on. Similarly, to prepare students to write "public discourse," one might involve them in those activity systems upon which much public discourse draws: through "liberal arts" or introductory courses in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. One might also involve them in those activity systems—and therefore specific genres—where issues of public policy are negotiated, through professional courses that specifically train students to...

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...This is because scientists do not ordinarily participate in the activity system of journalism and have not learned its genres. Like the handling of balls, the writing of genres is "generalizable" to the extent that written text is handled in similarly ways for similar object(ive)s. A person who can write a footnote in a history paper may find it easier to learn to write a footnote in a chemistry paper than a person who has never written a footnote (though the differences in citation purposes and practices may actually make it more difficult—what second language teachers call "interference.") (Swales, 1990). But from the Activity Theory perspective I am developing here, there is no autonomous, generalizable skill or set of skills called "writing" which can be learned and then applied to all genres/activities. As one becomes adept at more and more activities that require writing and hence at writing more genres, it is more likely (but by no means certain) that one will be able to master a new genre more quickly, since it is more likely that there will be some features of the new genre/activity that resemble features in a genre/activity one already knows. It may also be true that a person may have...

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... through conscious—even systematic and explicit—teaching, they may learn to perform an action more quickly and more easily than if they simply "picked it up." Students might do better at learning to use the genres of writing in some activity system if they had specific, conscious coaching, mentoring, or formal instruction in those genres of writing. Activity Theory research suggests that by consciously creating more effective zones of proximal development, activity systems may be able to improve a novice's acquisition of the systems' genres, though that research is far from conclusive (e. g., Markova, 1979; Freedman, 1993; Williams & Colomb, 1993). But such pedagogical efforts, whether formal or informal, require conscious effort and an awareness of the role of writing in the activity system—the very things that the daily functioning of an activity system tends to obscure. The WAC movement has nevertheless helped to make many faculty and students aware of the importance of David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 27 writing as a tool in their work, helping them better to use it for teaching and learning their activities. To borrow a term from another context, bilingual education, WAC pr...

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...or their writing, goals that are directly related to their interests. Writing is not segregated into "remedial" courses where students are presumed to be preparing for any writing situation in general and none in particular. The movement toward collaboratively assessed writing is well under way in certain professions in the US, such as law and medicine, which have added disciplinespecific writing to national entrance examinations for professional schools. Written assessment in the transition from secondary to higher education is also being developed. For example, in the New Standards Project (O'Neil, 1993) secondary teachers across the nation are developing discipline-specific written assessment tasks. Thousands of teachers are learning to collaboratively assess portfolios with high rates of reliability, as teachers in many other nations have done for years. This development is promising. For until the kinds of texts (and thus knowledge and work) that each discipline values are taught, assessed, and made the basis for selection, the myth that writing is autonomous will help to mask the inequities in the US selection system. And disciplines will rarely feel the need to consciously reexamine they...

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...tivity Theory perspective I am developing, there is no distinctive genre, set of genres, linguistic register, or set of conventions that is academic discourse or public discourse per se, because "academia" and the "public" are not activity systems in any useful sense for writing instruction. These categories create and preserve the false notion that there can exist "good writing" independent of an activity system that judges the success of a text by its results within that activity system, and that the teaching and learning of such writing can be divorced from any activity system beyond GWSI (Miller, 1991, chap. 2). Academia in general has no object(ive) that those carrying on its immensely varied activities share. It exists to select and prepare people for a wide range of activity systems within and beyond institutions of higher education. From this perspective, academic discourse consists of the dynamic aggregate of all the many specialized discourses of all the activity systems (disciplines and departments) that make up academia. And the protean tool called writing is appropriated and transformed by each activity system according to its object(ive)s and the material conditions of its work t...

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...model, the standards for written performance are evolved and maintained by each discipline, and each must collaboratively arrive at both the discipline's standards and the score on each student's written performance. This is inherent in the written assessment model, where objectivity depends on multiple raters. Raters must negotiate and eventually agree on what makes writing good within their David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 24 activity system at each educational level. With some exceptions, in the US model standards for writing are arrived at individually, by each instructor (Coles & Vopat, 1985). This individualism and consequent subjectivity often allows the GWSI and the education system as a whole to continue without confronting the differences in discourse among disciplines or even among instructors within the same composition program. GWSI is thus alienated from other activity systems and prevented from forming a coherent one itself. This lack of collegial written assessment in the disciplines and in GWSI has profound implications for first-year writing courses and for the role of writing in US education in general. The US model separates writing from the curriculum. To attempt t...

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...al educated discourse has masked this contradiction by positing an overarching discourse that all disciplines (or all educated persons) use or should use. English departments have not generally had to confront the contradiction because the myth of universal educated discourse allowed them to teach primarily their own discourse (and thus values) in GWSI classes as if that discourse (and those values) were, or ought to be, universal. The myth of UED reinforced the values of the activity system of English, values that justified its distance from scientific and social scientific activity systems (Graff, 1987; Russell, 1991). English was able to criticize other disciplines for their technical "jargon" without feeling an obligation to investigate or teach the genres of other disciplines. The myth of UED served to reinforce and reproduce the values (and genres) of the activity system of literary criticism. Given its departmental position, GWSI has rarely had to engage and confront the profound differences in disciplinary discourses, because its interactions with other disciplines have been minimal. Such engagement would have made the contradiction in GWSI evident. But such engagement would have been...

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...ls (from the individual to the broadest cultural levels). And an analyst can shift among multiple views to study an activity system, triangulating the various views (Engestrom 1990). A central question for Activity Theory analysis is choosing the most useful "lenses" or perspectives for analysis among the many possible ones (Rogoff, 1993). Fifth and finally, Activity Theory explains change in terms of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD): the object(ive)-directed interactions among people, where one or more of the participants could not, by themselves, effectively work toward the objective (Newman, Griffin, and Cole, 1989, p. 61). In these "construction zones" writing and learning take place as people, using their tools, mutually change themselves and their tools. All learning is situated within some activity system(s). And one learns by participating—directly or vicariously—in some activity system(s). From this perspective, adolescents and adults do not "learn to write," period. Nor do they improve their writing in a general way outside of all activity systems and then apply an autonomous skill to them. Rather, one acquires the genres (typified semiotic means) used by some activity field, as one interacts wit...

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...fferences in disciplinary discourses, and, apart from WAC efforts, there are no other institutional structures to bring these to light, since disciplines largely carry on their activities (including writing) in departments (literally and figuratively). Finally, GWSI helps to mask the whole system of social selection in the US. The vast majority of education systems select students for higher education on the basis of their extended writing in the disciplines, either in essay examinations, as with the French baccalaureate, or in course work portfolios, as with the English system of moderation (Russell, 1992; Russell, forthcoming). This writing in the disciplines is assessed collaboratively, by teams of examiners in the disciplines. Writing is thus tied directly to the curriculum and is visibly central to social selection, the object of intense attention and, often, controversy. But there are virtually no GWSI courses in higher education. David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 23 In the US, the role writing plays in selection is much less visible because writing is not directly tied to the disciplines or curriculum but viewed as a general, autonomous skill. The fact that first-year comp...

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...wn writing rarely became an issue of sufficient weight to prod them into action, because their writing was and is adequate to their object(ive)s. Their genres originally evolved to meet their object(ive)s, and thus their "jargon" served their purposes well. And when their genres did not serve, those genres evolved again. Second, disciplines were able to reproduce themselves (select and prepare future participants) without offering formal instruction in writing, through the normal, tacit process of apprenticeship in writing that goes on in any activity system that requires writing to function (Sullivan, 1988). Writing tends to remain transparent, part of the "natural" daily actions of participants in a discipline—until something breaks down. Disciplines and professions consciously act to change the ways students acquire the writing of their activity system when they find that the kinds of discourse they socialize students to use are no longer adequate (as when employers complain) or when significant numbers of students do not learn in the usual ways to write the genres required for the activity system's work (as David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 22 when there is an influx of second ...

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...mately with a discipline's activity, struck many educators as presumptuous if not foolhardy. In 1915 one educator wrote of composition courses: The department of English is straining to become a forum of discussion of all questions that have assailed human intelligence. . . . Those instructors of English [who teach composition] are asked to become actively conversant with science, politics, philosophy. Though still devotees of belles lettres, they are also striving to speak with authority on every other subject. . . . Frankly the assumption is startling. May not a cog have slipped somewhere? (Thurber, 1915, p. 328) The cog metaphor is apt. Writing in GWSI courses is not engaged with the activity systems that give writing meaning and motive. It is, in other words, divorced from content. The problem of content lies behind the other three problems that Kitzhaber and many others before and since have found: lack of intellectual rigor, unrealistic expectations, and difficulty in assessing effectiveness. Rigor is the result of a history of using tools in certain ways for common goals, a tradition of shared expectations. Rigor is David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 19 a product of an acti...

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...systems (disciplines or professions) ought to use instead of their own "jargon." Yet GWSI courses must select genres—and thus activity systems or "content"—to teach. Because of the history of GWSI courses, these genres tend to be literary analysis (or, more recently, cultural studies), from the dominant activity systems of English departments, or essays of the type published in upscale magazines (e. g., New Yorker), read by those in activity systems for which GWSI courses were originally designed to prepare students when the courses were first introduced at Harvard in the 1870s (Ohmann, 1976; Wall, 1994). Of course some genres that are often taught in GWSI classes may bring students into contact with certain activity systems where issues of public policy are negotiated David Russell Activity Theory & Composition Page 18 (writing a letter to the editor or to a legislator, for example). So also GWSI courses— particularly those with a "writing-across-the-curriculum" emphasis—sometimes expose students to some genres of some disciplines. But because the teaching and the writing are taught separately from the activity systems, students are only peripherally involved in the intellectual, cultural, a...