Reading Response: Activity Theory

Activity Theory is the analysis of human behavior and consciousness, and is a theory which can be applied to composition and writing. Activity Theory has five parts:

• Historical Development
• HIstory is essential to the working of an activity. Culture (sometimes phylogenic) maintains the tools and gives them historical context
• Tool Mediation
• Changes in human behavior and consciousness is mediated by other human beings through the use of tools. History is human interaction with tools over time.
• Dialectical Structure
• Change is not one directional. One discipline may borrow and transform a tool of another discipline, and this may change how the original discipline views or uses that tool.
• Relational Analysis
• Unit of analysis in AT is the relations among the participants and their shared cultural tools. Perspectives range from individual to broad cultural views
• Zones of Proximal Development
• One can not achieve an object(ive) alone, and thus they must change themselves and their tools dialectically

The idea is that because writing is not an autonomous activity (that is, one does not learn to write in a vacuum), AT can be applied to writing because of the dialectic nature of writing. We can look at the tools of writing, the historical context of writing (say, within a particular discipline), the dialectic that occurs between students or between student and teacher, we can analyze that relation, and we can consider the places in which one learns to write (home, school, tutor session, etc.), and with this information we can consider how to improve an Activity System which has as its objective the improvement of one's writing.

There are two sides to composition theory though: WAC and discipline-specific. WAC looks for universal skills that a comp course could teach a student regardless of their major, skills that will apply no matter where they end up. This is similar to a "ball-handling" gym class; if you can teach a student how to handle a ball, he can theoretically apply some arbitrary skill to any ball (baseball, basketball, football, etc.). Others, however, say writing a genre cannot be learned outside of the discipline for to which that genre applies.

The solution to the WAC versus discipline-specific argument suggested by Russell is teaching "about writing" as opposed to teaching one "to write". That is, what can we teach students about the act of writing that isn't specific to one genre, and can what we are teaching be sufficiently universal enough to apply to any writing the student may do from creative writing to research writing?