Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts

266 Pages·1999·14.34 MB·English

by  Patrick Dias

WORLDS APART
Acting and Writing in Academic
and Workplace Contexts
RHETORIC, KNOWLEDGE, AND SOCIETY
A Series of Monographs Edited by
Charles Bazerman
Winsor • Writing Like an Engineer: A Rhetorical Education
Van Nostrand • Fundable Knowledge: The Marketing of Defense
Technology
Petraglia • Reality by Design: The Rhetoric and Technology of
Authenticity in Education
Prior • Writing/Disciplinarity: A Sociohistoric Account of Literate
Activity in the Academy
Swales • Other Floors, Other Voices: A Textography of a Small University
Building
Atkinson • Scientific Discourse in Sociohistorical Context: The
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1675-1975
WORLDS APART
Acting and Writing in Academic
and Workplace Contexts
Patrick Dias
Aviva Freedman
Peter Medway
Anthony Pare
~~ ~~~;~;n~~~up
NEW YORK AND LONDON
First Published by
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
10 Industrial Avenue
Mahwah, NJ 07430
Transferred to Digital Printing 2011 by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Copyright © 1999 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form, by photostat, microfilm, retrieval system, or any other
means, without prior written permission of the publisher.
Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Worlds Apart: acting and writing in academic and workplace
contexts I Patrick Dias ... [eta!.].
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8058-2147-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
-ISBN 0-8058-2148-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
English language-Rhetoric-Study and teaching. 2. Aca
demic writing-Study and teaching. 3. Technical writ
ing-Study and teaching. 4. Business writing-study and
teaching. I. Dias, Patrick.
PE1404.W665 1999
808-dc21 98-49931
CIP
Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.
CONTENTS
Editor's Introduction vii
Preface xi
Introduction 1
1 Introduction: Researching Writing at School and at Work 3
2
Situating Writing 1 7
II University Writing 43
3
The Social Motive of University Writing 47
4 Complications and Tensions 65
5 Writing and the Formation of the Architect 82
v
vi CONTENTS
Ill Workplace Writing 113
6 The Complexity of Social Motive in Workplace Writing 11 7
7 Distributed Cognition at Work 135
8 From Words to Bricks: Writing in an Architectural Practice 151
IV Transitions 183
9 Students and Workers Learning 185
1 0 Virtual Realities: Transitions From University to 201
Workplace Writing
11 Contexts for Writing: University and Work Compared 222
References 236
Author Index 246
Subject Index 249
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
Charles Bazerman
University of California, Santa Barbara
Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts is an im
pressive multisite comparative study of writing in different university courses and
matched workplaces: law and public administration courses and government institu
tions; management courses and financial institutions; social work courses and social
work agencies; and architecture courses and architecture practice. The study, carried
out across 7 years by a dozen people, looked intently into how writing functions
within the activities of each of these various settings. The study, despite its size and
multi-authorship, avoids the simplifications that typically are needed to generate
consistency and comparability across extensive data. Rather than looking for easy
points of comparison, the authors sought to understand each setting through detailed
ethnography and found comparisons only by understanding how writing is operative
within the particularities of settings.
This revealing theoretical understanding was developed in a conversation
among the four lead investigators over the years of the project, a conversation that I
saw as a distant onlooker and then as an editor. Although there are numerous other
products of this research project, this book is a culmination of that theoretical dis
cussion about the overall meanings of all of the findings. What they found at each
of the sites was that learning to write in the locally relevant genres was a means by
which individuals were socialized into the particular activities, ideologies, identi
ties, meaning systems, power structures, institutional goals, and cooperative en
deavors enacted in each place. Furthermore, those genres became the site of
tension among the various motives, perceptions, and goals of different individuals
as those in institutional power tried to regulate others into particular ways of life,
vii
viii EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
and others insisted that important motives were being lost if they wrote as they
were directed, as in the case of the social work agency. Yet, in many of the sites the
generic shaping of the communal activity and way oflife went uncontested as indi
viduals wanted to become creative architects, competent lawyers, recipients of
contracts, contributors to a well-analyzed monetary policy, or just students with
good grades.
Each of these settings offered different pathways of explicit and implicit in
struction, mentoring, disciplining, accountability, and evaluation. In schools, no
matter what the subject area, the socialization into practice predictably appeared
as pedagogy directed toward student performance of known practice, for which
students were held accountable-what the authors here have called facilitated per
formance. Although workplace internship experiences carried important elements
of learning, these still became framed as facilitated performance when returned to
the classroom. In the workplace, the focus was on the work task at hand, rather than
the overt instruction and evaluation of the learner; the learning was in the doing
and the accountability was in the accomplishment of the work; insofar as there was
overt training, it was built around the learner's actual participation in the work, ei
ther through what the authors call attenuated authentic performance (where men
tors limit, focus, advise, and themselves remain responsible for the tasks of the
novices) or through legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wegner's term
here used to indicate the novice's actual responsibility and accountability for lim
ited tasks performed).
In each of the classroom and workplace sites, the writing was integrated with
relevant practices, modes of expression, and material realities, but most of the
classrooms were so fully devoted to textual practices that the world of student pro
duction was tightly framed by the written and spoken texts that made up the course.
The most notable exception was in architecture, where the writing was integrated
with, and subordinated to, visual and material design; internship courses also pro
vided some contact with the social, material, and representational complexity of
the workplace, although students' papers remained the central form of evaluation
and responsibility. In the workplace, however, the writing was integrated with
many forms of experience and representation in the course of the work-relation
ship with and responsibility toward clients and the dramatic realities of courtroom
proceedings; economic data and the actual economic well-being of a nation; and,
again most strikingly, in architecture, the visual design and material construction.
These issues are made most explicit in the chapters on architectural education and
practice, but they are an undercurrent throughout the book.
In coming to understand the writing process and writing learning in these vari
ous sites, the authors have developed and refined activity theory as a tool of analy
ses. The theoretical discussions in this book are clear and illuminating, and lead to
a widely applicable and easily intelligible way of approaching writing in any
school or workplace setting.
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION ix
The ultimate effect of the theoretical clarity evolved through the long conversa
tion of the authors, however, is the surprising illumination of the details of how writ
ing works in each of these settings and the kinds of demands and opportunities each
presents for the developing writer. The theoretically illuminated case studies reveal
the rich and multiple contours of writing within each situation and thereby help us to
see similar dynamics in other situations. The authors have used theory to help them
figure out what they have seen and thereby have given us sharper theoretical lenses
to see what is occurring in other places. That is among the best uses of theory.