This article chronicles changes in the author’s service-learning pedagogy, concentrating on his recent attention to genre and its consequences for course design. The cumulative influences of rhetoric, discourse community theory, collaborative assignments, and genre theory are traced. The core claim, however, is that instructors should help students grasp the concept of genre as social action.… Continue reading Genre Analysis and the Community Writing Course by Thomas Deans

Insights from activity theory—specifically, David Russell’s synthesis of activity theory with genre theory—suggest ways to understand and ease problems of clashing expectations encountered in professional writing classes that use a client-based assignment model for service-learning. Link to PDF

This essay considers the implications of using David Russell’s activity theory to re-conceptualize models of community service writing (CSW) that stem from discourse community theory. Here I argue that the notion of discourse community is of limited use to practitioners committed to CSW, because it leads students to adopt unrealistic expectations about their roles in… Continue reading From Discourse Communities to Activity Systems: Activity Theory as Approach to Community Service Writing by Michael-John DePalma

In 1984, Carolyn Miller’s “Genre as Social Action” was published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, laying the foundation for what we now call Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS). In this oft-cited piece, Miller outlines a theory of genre “centered not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to… Continue reading Review:Genre and the Performance of Publics by Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi (Eds.) reviewed by Charles N. Lesh