Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction

Bookmarked: Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction

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David Russell. Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction." In Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction. Ed. Joseph Petraglia. (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum,1995): 51-78.

The US is the only nation that requires of most students in higher education a course in what is known in the US as "composition."

Citation please.

David Kaufer and Richard Young have called "writing with no particular content," or what is often called in this anthology general writing skills instruction or GWSI

THis could be pusehed on to blogging without purpose. we introduce so many people to their own website bbut only few stick with it from formal education. That would be a good longtitudinal study. Match attrition in terms of involvement based on formal and informal learning spaces.

First, he says, there is a "lack of general agreement about course content, so that depending on the prejudices of the teacher, departmental policy (or lack of it), or current fads, the course may center on

Second, the course cannot "be said even by the most charitably disposed critic to be on the same level of intellectual rigor and maturity as textbooks and class work in other freshman courses such as chemistry or economics"

Cited author never took one of my writing intensive classes, this statement shows some bias

Kitzhaber calls the aims of the course "over-ambitious—to eradicate, in three hours a week for 30 or 35 weeks, habits of thought and expression that have been forming for at least 15 years and to which the student is as closely wedded as he is to his skin; and to fix indelibly a different set of habits from which the student will never afterwards deviate

Kitzhaber admits that those who have studied its effectiveness (and no one had studied this more than he) have "too seldom" been able to find "a comforting relationship between the degree of improvement and the quantity of labor expended."

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

In an activity system, the object(ive) remains the same while the mediational means, the tools, may vary.

activity systems have histories that are essential to their workings. For human beings, these histories are predominantly cultural (though phylogenic change may also play a role)

anges in human behavior and consciousness, individual or collective, are mediated by other human beings through the use of tools

Third, activity systems are dialectal. Change is not one-directional. It is accomplished through joint activity, whether cooperative or conflictual, face-to-face or widely separated in space or time.

the unit of analysis in Activity Theory is not the workings of an individual mind but the relations among the participants and their shared cultural tools. Thus, activity systems can be analyzed from multiple perspectives (of the various participants) and at many levels (from the individual to the broadest cultural levels)

I think I am trying to use innovation systems as a larger analytical tool as it is activity theory with a very organized goal. A shared focus

e 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).

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.