Building Context: Using Activity Theory to Teach About Genre in Multi-Major Professional Communication Courses

How Professional Writing Pedagogy and University–Workplace Partnerships Can Shape the Mentoring of Workplace Writing

“…Multiple studies have found that the goals of academic writing and workplace writing differ significantly (Anson & Forsberg, 2002;Beaufort, 2006;Dias, Freedman, Medway, & Pare, 1999;Freedman & Adam, 2004;Kain, & Wardle, 2005), mainly due to the differences that school and the workplace ask of individuals when constructing knowledge and conveying it to audiences. Deans (2000) typifies this movement as "the movement between academic and non-academic contexts, codes, literacies, and assessment measures" (p. 56).…”

“…However, even in professional writing courses and specialized communication courses in science, technical, technological, and business-based fields, the use of writing to promote active, critical, problem-based learning similar to workplace tasks can still be difficult due to the differences in context and linked organizational activities in a classroom setting. Kain and Wardle (2005) summarize the problem of advanced professional communication courses:…”

Contemporary Research Methodologies in Technical Communication

“…Activity theory, which was introduced to professional communication via Bazerman (1988), Russell (1995Russell ( , 1997a, and Berkenkotter and Huckin (1993), has been widely used in technical communication to study how genres are durable, suasive, and mediatory within specific activity systems (Fraiberg, 2013;Kain & Wardle, 2005;McCarthy, Grabill, Hart-Davidson, & McLeod, 2011), across linked activity systems (Gygi & Zachry, 2010;McNair & Paretti, 2010), and in broader networks (Ding, 2008;Propen & Schuster, 2010;Sherlock, 2009;Spinuzzi, 2008Spinuzzi, , 2012. (For more detailed overviews of studies involving genre and activity theory, see Russell, 1997b; Activity theory posits a clear asymmetry between communicators and their tools and technologies.…”

Assessing excellence: Using activity theory to understand assessment practices in engineering communication

“…More complex versions of an activity system add a contextual layer below that includes the rules by which the system operates, the communities in which the activity occurs and from which the subjects come, and the system of work or division of labor by which the activity is organized [3][4][5]. All of these factors interact within the system in ways that make them central to understanding how and why texts emerge, why they have certain features, and whether they are in fact successful.…”