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Writing and Genre in Higher Education and Workplaces: A Review of Studies That Use Cultural--Historical Activity Theory
David R. Russell

Online Publication Date: 01 January 1997

To cite this Article Russell, David R.(1997)'Writing and Genre in Higher Education and Workplaces: A Review of Studies That Use

Cultural--Historical Activity Theory',Mind, Culture, and Activity,4:4,224 237

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MIND,CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 4(4), 224-237

Copyright O 1997, Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparitive Human Cognition

ARTICLES Writing and Genre in Higher Education and Workplaces: A Review of Studies That Use Cultural-Historical Activity Theory
David R. Russell
Iowa State University

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This article reviews a tradition of North American research on writing in higher education and workplaces that draws on cultural-historical activity approaches. Growing out of college composition courses, writing-across-the-curriculum programs, and technical writing courses, the research takes as its object the roles writing plays in various activities, particularly those activitiesin which writing most powerfully mediates work: academic disciplines, professions, and other large and powerful organizations of modern life. Genre is an important analytical category, defined not in terms of formal features but in terms of typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent social situations. Researchers use qualitative and historical methods to trace the ways people create, appropriate, and recreate dynamic genres to mediate a wide range of social practices.

Writing is pervasive and powerful in modern societies. Indeed, modern societies are unthinkable without the marks on surfaces, the inscriptions, we call writing. Perhaps because writing is such a common action, such a part of carrying out everyday activities in school and out, it tends to be transparent, a mediational means of accomplishing goals and not an object of conscious-much less systematic-examination itself. Yet a tradition of research has grown up in the last 15 years in North America that takes as its object the roles writing plays in various activities, particularly those activities in which writing most powerfully mediates work: academic disciplines, professions, and other large and powerful organizations of modern life. This article reviews a tradition of North American research on writing in higher education and workplaces that draws on cultural-historical activity approaches.'

Requests for reprints should be sent to David Russell, English Department, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 5001 1. E-mail: drmssel@iastate.edu

here is of course much study of writing in elementary schools using cultural-historical activity theory (e.g., Cazden, 1992; Green & Dixon, 1993; Gutierrez, 1995; Moll, 1990; Sperling, 1996). These traditions have influenced research on mother-tongue writing in higher education and workplaces as well. And there is cultural-historical research not explicitly pazt of the composition-basedtradition I describe here. such as Bayer (1996).

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This research has grown out of three activities that are virtually unique to North America: general composition courses, writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) programs, and business and technical writing courses. To understand the motives of this research it is helpful to have a sense of these activities' histories. General composition courses, usually housed in English departments, have been the single curricular common denominator in U.S. higher education since the rise of the modern university over a century ago (and were also widely taught in Canada for much of this century; Brooks, 1997). The motive of these courses is to improve students' writing and prepare them for academic and workplace writing, which was assumed to be a single, generalizable skill learned once and for all, usually at an early age. Throughout their history, "Freshman Composition" courses have been considered remedial, have performed a primary gatekeeping function in many universities, and have been considered marginal to the central object of English departments-literary study-which was generally conceived in formalist terms. Students have been given a set of precepts and some models, then told to write-well. In the late 1970s, however, composition teachers professionalized, developing several strands of research drawn from both the humanities (i.e., classical rhetoric) and the social sciences. The social scientific strands were initially based on behaviorism, information-processing cognitive psychology, and Piaget's structuralism. Researchers examined the psychology of individual writers, attempting to find a generalized "writing process" individuals use. However, just as cross-cultural comparative studies made the limitations of experimental psychology apparent (Cole, 1996), cross-disciplinary rhetorical comparisons made the limitations of these generalized approaches apparent with the rise of the WAC movement in the early 1980s, which grew out of the newly professionalized field of composition (Russell, 1991). In response to the influx of previously excluded groups with open admissionspolicies in higher education, many colleges and universities began programs to enlist the aid of faculty in all disciplines to improve students' writing. As teachers and researchers of composition interacted with faculty in other disciplines, through workshops and consulting, they glimpsed the great variety and richness of the uses of writing and began to rethink fundamental assumptions that have undergirded general composition courses for a century. A few researchers began to use ethnographic methods to explore the variety of ways writing mediates learning in specific disciplinary activity systems, writing processesrather than the writing process. Classroom practice in general composition courses began to change as well. There was much more small group work, collaborative writing, and peer editing, influenced by Kenneth Bruffee's (1984,1993) use of Richard Rorty's philosophy, and a move toward teaching and writing texts from other disciplines, influenced by Charles Bazerman's (1988,1994) sociology of science research on the writing of scientists and social scientists. Thus the social as well as psychological dimensions of writing came to be an object of focus, though the early research reinscribed formalist and structuralist assumptions by treating the differences as caused by the textual conventions of "discourse communities" (Nystrand, Greene, & Wiemelt, 1993). However, as researchers and theorists looked more widely and deeply at disciplinary activity systems extending beyond the classroom, some began to focus not on discourse per se, but on the ways discourse mediates disciplinary and professional activities. Cultural-historical activity approaches were appropriated. University-level business and technical communications courses have been taught in North America since the 1st decade of the 20th century. Generally housed in English departments and,

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like composition, generally marginalized, these courses have also traditionally taken a formalist approach, with students learning proper formats for letters, memos, reports, and so on. With the publication of Ode11 and Goswami's (1985) Writing in Non-Academic Settings, ethnographic methods were applied to questions of writing in the activities of professionals. Here again the goal was to improve the teaching of writing by learning about how writing mediates the actions of workplace professionals. Writing research moved beyond academia and into other activity systems, where writing researchers and consultants brought their expertise to bear on a wide range of problems. In the research that grew out of these three activities, the earlier formalist, cognitive, and Piagetian approaches, which drew on literary New Criticism, psychology, and structuralist linguistics, were largely replaced by social approaches, drawing on poststructuralist literary theory (notably Bakhtinian dialogism), on social constructionism, and on applied linguistics (sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, and so on; Nystrand et al., 1993). One strand of this writing research is based on the theoretical category of genre, though it is a formulation of genre very different from traditional formalist notions of literary genre. The North American genre school, as it is called, began with Miller's (1994) formulation of genres as "typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations" (p. 31; see also Miller, 1984). Genres are not constituted by formal features, then, but by recurring social actions that give rise to regularities in the discourse that mediates them. (For helpful introductions see Freedman & Medway, 1994a, 1994b.) The North American notion of genre as an analytical category is closer to the Australian Hallidayan views, which see genre as a "staged, goal-oriented social process" (Martin, Christie, & Rothery, 1987, p. 58; see also Hasan & Martin, 1989; Reid, 1988). Martin (1993), for example, provided a systematic description of certain features of texts, primarily their stages, and then connected those features to certain social practices (report, medical interview,job interview, and so on). He described overarching genres that can be generalized across social practices to explain commonalitiesin grammatical features and categories that can correspond to grammatical features in the system. The North American approach sees genre in much more local and dynamic terms. Rather than looking for, say, the commonalities in "reports" among workplace professionals in a range of institutions (and children in a range of schools), one looks closely at one specific activity system, and those with which it interacts, to find regularities in the ways people in that activity system write reports, and the history of their language use. (In the work of Cope & Kalantzis, 1993, and Wells, 1996, there is an attempt to find commonalities in the two views of genre.) The North American genre school is closer still to the recent European tradition of critical discourse analysis (CDA), which also focuses on the dynamism and variability of genres conceived historically (genre as social process) and the political and power issues involved with texts (Fairclough, 1992;Kress, 1993; van Leeuwen, 1993).However, CDA tends to rely on close textual analysis and political theorizing, whereas the North American genre school tends to keep its analytical lens in the middle, on the interactions of people with texts and other mediational means, using ethnographic and case study methods, supplemented by historical and textual analysis. Much of the research in the North American genre tradition does not explicitly use cultural-historical activity theory (e.g., Freedman & Medway, 1994a, 1994b). And there are many useful qualitative and historical studies of writing in the disciplines and professions that do not directly employ either genre or cultural-historical activity theory (e.g., Anson & Forsberg, 1990;Bazerman

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& Paradis, 1991; Blyler & Thralls, 1993; Spilka, 1993). 1 have limited this article to those studies that do. There is also a growing body of work in applied linguistics that focuses on second language writing using a cultural-historical activity approach and the category of genre. This is best represented by Swales's (1990) important book, synthesizing genre theory and research in applied linguistics and composition (see also Bhatia, 1993; Connor, 1996; Jacoby & Gonzales, 1991). Finally, there is an important and growing body of work on writing in higher education and workplaces in Northern Europe, from which North American genre theory and research is learning (e.g., R. Engestrom, 1995; Gunnarsson, 1992; Linell, 1996). All these must also largely lie outside this review for reasons of space. I begin this article with "nonacademic" or nonschool workplace studies (remembering that educational institutions are also workplaces with their own bureaucratic genres). I then work backward through studies of transitions from school to work, proceeding to studies of writing and learning in undergraduate "general" education.

WRITING IN WORKPLACES
The first studies of writing in workplaces grew out of an interest in the disciplinary practices that student WAC (may) lead toward. Later studies grew out of business and technical writing teachers' questions about the kinds of writing (processes) their students will encounter in business, industry, and government. Bazerman (1980, 1994) began the tradition of cultural-historical research into workplace writing by looking at the humble undergraduate "research paper," taught in 1st-year college writing courses for almost a century. He asked what kinds of writing go on among researchers in various disciplines and how writing helps disciplines work. The sociology, history, and philosophy of science (initially, Merton's wark; Bazerman, 1982) provided resources for looking closely at the ways scientists write, and Bazeirman (1988) began asking how communicationswere organized in disciplines, how texts of various genres "fit in with the larger systems of disciplinary activity" (p. 4). He looked at how writing practices (and genres) are regularized in various fields for various purposes, through comparative studies of single articles, through discourse-based interviews with physicists, through analyses of the citation practices of social scientists, and so on. But his most consistent method was and is historical study-initially of changes in the most important scientific genre, the experimental article, from its beginnings in the 17th-century Royal Society through the 20th century. Early amateurs of science, widely separated geographically, gradually developed a letter-mediated argumentativecommunity to provide communal vaIidation of experiments for which there could not be "ocular proof' for all members. A community "constituted itself in developing its modes of regular discourse," its genre, which became the experimental article (Bazerman, 1988, p. 79). As various communities of scientists proliferated, they developed ways with words that furthered their specialized activities through citation practices, grammatical and format choices, and a range of other textual habits that came to form their stabilized-for-nowgenres-and build their social credit. The concept of genre as social action (Miller, 1984, 1994) provided the theoretical genesis, which Bazerman has developed in relation to sociological theory, particularly Giddens's (1984) structuration theory and speech act theory in Bazerman's (1994) theory of genre systems.

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Bazerman (1994) explored these theoretical directions in a number of historical and theoretical essays, collected in Constructing Experience, and continuing with his recent book on Edison's rhetorical environment (in press) and the article in this issue. Bazerman's work was extended by a number of researchers who have examined texts in various social practices. Myers (1990) traced the textual genres and negotiations in biology research, using the "strong program" of science studies (Woolgar, 1988).He began with grant proposals, the most overtly rhetorical genre of scientific writing and the most essential. He followed two biologists revising proposals to align themselves with the mainstream of the discipline while carving out a space for their own attempts to modify the course of that stream, he investigated the negotiation of the status of the two biologists' knowledge claims in the reviewing process of a journal, and he chronicled the controversies among specialist "core researchers" as they reinterpret each other's work. Myers (1990) also moved beyond the activity systems of core researchers to consider the textual practices of popular sciencejournal editors and scientists as they reposition (one might say, with Latour, 1993, translate) their highly specialized genres into genres that give them a place in the wider society and "adapt their research to it" (p. 191).Similarly,Myers (1992) looked at science textbooks to see the comnzodz~cation of scientific knowledge as it functions in education. And at the furthest reach of commodified expert knowledge, Myers (1991) examined a scientific controversy (sociobiology) in popular magazines and newspapers and a debate over a specific public policy issue (regulation of a nuclear power plant) to see how the rhetoric of science extends to the genres of "public" discourse (Myers, 1996), where core researchers participate only indirectly. (The commodification of expert knowledge in expanding systems of activity also occupied Fahnestock, 1986, who analyzes the changes in "information" as it passes from one activity system to another in increasingly commodified form.) MacDonald (1994) analyzed representative research articles from three disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to connect highly specific grammatical features (e.g., substantives, nominalization) to the epistemology of a disciplinary subfield (Renaissance New Historicism, Colonial New England social history, and child-caregiver attachment research in psychology). The textual differences, she showed, are more than differences in "jargon," in formal features. Textual differences are constructed by and construct the epistemology of the subfield, its ways of cooperating to identify and solve problems; to make and remake knowledge; or, in the case of literary criticism, to realize an epideictic rather than an epistemic motive. Other studies have examined workplaces less directly related to academia. Yates (1989) chronicled the rise of modern organizational communication from the early 19th century through the 1920s. She examined its functions (control of far-flung organizations such as railroads), technologies (typewriter,rotary press, carbon paper, and the most powerful of all, the vertical file), and genres (memos, letters, reports, company newsletters, printed forms, timetables, and so on). Yates and Orlikowski (1994) combined Giddens's structuration theory and a genre perspective to critique contemporary management communication theory (including genres of e-mail; Orlikowski & Yates, 1994). Studies of the genres and genre systems of a range of workplaces have followed. McCarthy (1991) examined the epistemological and textual consequences of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry's charter document, on a psychiatrist's evaluation of a client. McCarthy and Gerring (1994) traced the negotiations that led to DSM's revision. They followed the working group on eating disorders for 3 years, documenting the struggle to create a new diagnostic category, Binge Eating Disorder, and the stakes involved in the decision: status,

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research funding, and so on. The recognition of a new disorder by the profession was an intensely rhetorical and political process. Berkenkotter and Ravotas (this issue) continue that line of investigation as they follow the construction of categories in the written genres of clinicians. Van Nostrand (1994, 1997) traced the genres of research and development in the U.S. Department of Defense, charting the recursive flow of knowledge between customers and vendors through six genres, such as the Request for Proposal. A similar historical interest is evident in Berkenkotter and Huckin's (1995) studies of changes in a professional organization's convention program, the evolution of a scholarlyjournal, and the complex cycles of peer review in a scientific journal. Haas (1996) used activity theory to investigatethe relation between writing as amaterial cultural tool and one kind of writing tool: computer technology. She located literacy in embodied actions of human beings. She compared readers' performance on paper and screen, the impact of computers on writing processes, the mental representations arising from different material conditions for writing, the local history of one educational computing system, and the wider implications of technology for the teaching of writing and cultural and cognitive changes mediated by computers as cultural tools for literacy.

TRANSITIONS TO WORKPLACES: GRADUATE EDUCATION AND INTERNSHIPS

The research focused on the transition from writing in formal schooling to writing in workplaces falls into two broad categories: studies of graduate students and studies of interns. Both emphasize how idiosyncratic, gradual, and "messy" it is to learn to write. In the: seminal study of graduate students' writing, Berkenkotter,Huckin, and Ackerman (1991) followed the rhetorical development of one student during his 1st year in a prestigious Ph.D. program in rhetoric. Their quantitative discourse analysis of his five course papers written that year showed that "Nate" (co-author Ackerman) gradually came to produce texts that used more and more of the conventions of the discipline: its expository patterns, syntactic complexity, avoidance of hyperbole, and sentence subjects referring to the disciplinary object and not to himself. Yet he had difficulty producing consistent cohesive ties, logical connections, and thematic unity. The authors traced this difficulty to his unfamiliarity with the discipline's activity system. And they examined, through qualitative methods, his tactics for learning to write the genres of research, through reading in the field and interacting with faculty. Nate drew on his history as a teacher of composition, where expressive, personal genres are valued, to learn the much more impersonal, formal genres of expository social science writing. He reached back, through informal writing in notes to himself and memos to professors, to generate ideas and, crucially, to wrestle with issues of identity and motive. He finally came to (uneasy) terms with the necessity to adopt the observer stance of the discipline and its social scientific detachment from the student writers it studies. This article announced a central theme in future work: that newcomers to a gemelactivity bring their cultural history to their writing, and take an active role in learning as they wrestle with new genres. The studies of graduate students' writing that followed also suggest that disciplinary enculturation may be less a gradual absorption or assimilation and more a messy struggle.

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Drawing heavily on Bakhtin's theory of speech genres, Paul Prior's (in press) studies of graduate students' development in applied linguistics, sociology, geography, and American studies extended the analysis to "the ways historical activity is constituted by and lays down sediments in functional systems that coordinate with various media with different properties" (p. 36). He looked at the interactions of persons, artifacts (semiotic systems and material artifacts), institutions, practices, and communities to analyze the messy flow of graduate students' literate activity over time in multiple "streams of activity" (p. 229; see Prior, 1991, 1994, 1995a, 1995b, this issue). In Prior's accounts, the multiple and often conflicting motives and goals of participants in graduate programs, their personal and disciplinary histories, shape their mutual appropriation of tools and their dynamic representations of writing tasks. Students and their teachers engage in a process of "genrification"-reclassifying texts, attributing resemblance-in the process of "aligning" themselves with others. Agency is distributed in streams of activity as participants appropriate voices in the networks of disciplinary practice. Their images of authorshipchange as they negotiate authorshipamong themselves in their oral and written interactions,redrawing disciplinary boundaries as they redraw their personal boundaries and align themselves with-and sometimes reject-powerful disciplinary social practices. In these "microhistories" of mediated authorship, Prior (in press) traced the "multi-leveled processes of alignment, atunement, and coordination in and through which artifacts, practices, institutions, persons and communities are being produced, reproduced, and transformed in complexly laminated social worlds"-where writing in dynamic genres is central (p. 229). Ann Blakeslee (1992, 1994,1997) built on the work in situated cognition (e.g., Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1991) to analyze graduate students' learning to write experimental articles in physics-focusing on their failures. She pointed to the limitations of situated cognition theory's emphasis on the weakness of intentional or prescriptive pedagogy. Blakeslee (1997) argued that indirect support "often seems insufficient to newcomers who have no previous experience engaging in the tasks they are asked to perform" (p. 145). Newcomers have residual writing practices and approaches to learning drawn from formal schooling that they appropriate-often unsuccessfully and unreffectively-to genres of research writing that have subtly different motives and conventions. Students' lack of authority makes it hard for them to fully engage in the domain's practices or challenge its direction, even "though they may be completely competent intellectually" (Blakeslee, 1997, p. 156). Blakeslee suggested that explicit, direct support; reflective mentioning; making goals and motives explicit; and an earlier sharing of authority may usefully support engagement in the domain's practices. Casanave (1992, 1995) also told the story of graduate students wrestling unsuccessfully with writing demands, this time a Hispanic sociology student who could not reconcile the conflict of disciplinary and personal values played out in her attempts to write assignments in theory courses. "Everyday" English and Spanish "came to be less valuable to her over time as tools for communicating her ideas about her work with friends and family in that they were not valued as resources for communication within the [sociology] department" (Casanave, 1992, p. 161). Moreover, contradictions within sociology between positivist and hermeneutic approaches (made salient in the writing assignments) left her unable to reconcile the motive that drew her into the discipline-helping women, minorities, and educators in culturally mixed neighborhoods-with the motive of the most powerful wing of sociology.Alienated, she dropped out to become a researcher in a nonprofit Puerto Rican educational organization in New York. But she regretted leaving because she felt she would have less power to make a difference if she didn't stay with the more

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powerful core of the disciplinary practice. "Having a Master's in sociology is not enough to get people to listen to the ideas of a young Puerto Rican woman" (Casanave, 1992, p. 173). Chin (1994) traced the material conditions of communication-phone access, office placement, and so on-for graduate students in journalism. Their "failures" to write the genres research-oriented professors demanded of them arose from the sociologicof their ambiguousdangling between the activity systems of working journalists and academics. The most in-depth treatment of interns writing-the second category of schooling/workplace transition research-is Winsor's (1996) 4-year longitudinal study of four engineering students. Taught by their discipline to ignore the rhetorical character of their education and work, they nevertheless gradually appropriate the genres of professional writing and come to realize the importance of rhetorical expertise in the complex textual negotiations through which their profession and the large corporate organizations it serves are dynamically reconstructed. Each student follows a different path in his or her appropriation of written genres, paths laid out by his or her different personal histories and reflected in the very different professionalroles and identities within engineering that each finds. What is competent writing at one point in his or her education, at one position in the vast activity system of the engineering, may be radically different from competent writing at some other point, some other node in the professional network. Given this very local and variable character of writing, would-be insiders have great difficulty stepping back to understand and critique the rhetoric of their discipline, though Winsor found such critique emerging in these young engineers. The most comprehensive research on interns is carried on by a group of Canadians who are exploring the transition from formal schooling to work in banking (Dias, Freedman, Medway, & Park, in press; Freedman & Smart, this issue; Smart, 1993, in press), finance (Freedman, Adam, & Smart, 1994), law (Freedman, 1990), social work (Dias et al., in press; Park, 1993, in press), engineering (Beer, in press), architecture (Dias eta]., in press; Medway, 1994, in press), and other related professions. They combine North American genre theory, situated learning, distributed cognition, and Y. Engestrom's (1987) systems version of activity theory to trace the profound ways that school writing differs from workplace writing and the ways that studentsbecome professionals writing. Beginning with the notion that people learn to write through activity-with-others, social engagement, Freedman and Adam (in press-a, in press-b) described school activity, the collaboration of teachers and learners, as Facilitated Performance, where the goal of the activity itself is learning. In nonschool workplaces, writing "occurs as an integral but tacit part of participation in communities of practice, whose activities are oriented towards practical or material outcomes," which they called Attenuated Authentic Performance, modifying Lave and Wenger's (1991) categories (Freedman & Adam, in press-b, pp. 40-41). This difference profoundly affects people and their uses of texts in a host of ways: the psychology of instructor-learner interactions, the sociologics of power relations, the genres people write and read, the nature of assessment and sorting, and the writing processes they use, with improvisatory learning and "document cycling'-feedback and revision loops-being much more important in nonschool workplaces. Smart and Freedman's work on banking explored the ways cognition in organizations is "enacted, preserved, communicated, and renegotiated through written texts," in systems of genres that mediate the routine actions of bankers and economists (Smart, in press, p. 19; see also Freedman & Smart, this issue). They looked at interns (Dias et al., in press), senior managers learning a new genre (Smart, in press), staff analysts (Smart, 1993), and others.

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Park's studies of social workers in hospitals (Dias et al., in press) and legal settings (Park, 1993) also suggested the extraordinarily broad range of genres and uses for writing and the ways that genres mediate power and authority. Within a hospital or a court system, a large number of professions organize their work around shared written records, and in the writing and use of those records Park traced competing and often contradictory motives. Social workers must negotiate various administrative,financial, legal, and medical interests and accountabilities-along with the interests of individual clients-in the routine but always changing genres of written records. Fledgling social workers, in internships and practicums, struggle mightily to find and create their place among these professional communities in writing, where even the most seemingly trivial phrases in reports can have life-changing consequences for clients. However, newcomers are guided by traditions of induction that support them, in tacit ways, as they learn what to write and do. Medway's (1994, in press) studies of architecture students emphasized another theme in North American genre research (as well as some CDA research; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996):the relation of alphabeticized text to other media of inscriptions. Medway (in press) traced the ways students use a wide range of genres in alphabeticized text that are informal and private (jottings on drawings, notes, and so on) in conjunction with genres of graphical signs and diagrams that have a spatial as well as syntactic arrangement. In the "unofficial texts the students are rehearsing both the ideational content and the rhetoric-the terms and argumentative structures--of the discipline" (p. 29). These qualitative studies of the transition from schooling to work get at the microlevel relations between school and society, in Dewey's phrase (Russell, 1993, 1997), and put into a wider-and starker-perspective the debates over transfer of learning and explicit versus implicit instruction (Freedman, 1993).

WRITING IN UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION There has been comparatively little cultural-historical research on writing in undergraduate general education courses, perhaps because of the dominance of general composition courses in traditional writing research. Yet as undergraduates in North American universities move from course to course, discipline to discipline, they are like "strangers in strange lands," as McCarthy (1987) put it in one of the best cross-disciplinary comparative case studies of writing in undergraduate education. Her participant, Dave, experienced great difficulty when asked to write in radically different genres in biology, poetry, and composition classes, with little sense of the scholarly and research activities of the disciplines that motivated those genres. Russell (1991) traced the history of attempts to improve the writing of students in the academic disciplines, from the beginnings of U.S. mass (specialized) secondary and higher education in the 1870sthrough the WAC movement in the 1970s and 1980s. He found that genres of student writing have grown up along with the genres of disciplinary practice. The various genres of student writing--essay, research paper, laboratory report, case study, thesis, dissertation--each have a history, which reflects the development of the genres of professional disciplinary practice: scholarly essay, research article, experimental article, case study, and so on. Moreover, traditions of writing instruction have grown up in various disciplines to prepare and select newcomers for their activity systems. Yet these traditions have usually remained tacit, untheorized, part of the everyday conduct of disciplinary and educational activity. Writing only became an object of discussion and reform

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when changes in the local institutional or wider professional or national conditions changed such that reform was perceived as necessary. Russell (1991) traced a series of reform efforts focused on enlisting faculty in various disciplines to improve writing: the genesis of the now-tacit writing traditions of discipline-specific education in the late 19th century; various general education reforms beginning during World War I; the Deweyan "cooperation movement" of the 1930s; the "communications movement" in response to the influx of GIs after World War 11; and the contemporary WAC movement in response to open enrollments in the 1970s, which formed the largest and longest lasting reform effort and gave rise to the research tradition to which this special issue is devoted. In more recent work, Russell (1995) also used activity theory to critique the assumptions behind general composition courses. Geisler (1994) offered an activity theory critique of cognitive psychology's spatial modeling of writing processes-which dominated empfrical research in composition for almost a decade-by modeling writing processes in terms of temporal action. Expertise, she argued, is rhetorical. Experts don't merely know and apply rules, they constantly recreate and reinterpret them in dynamic social-historical conditionsusing writing and other semiotic means. She analyzed the development of expertise in the discipline of philosophy by comparing students in a general education philosophy course and graduate students in philosophy on the same writing task. The graduate students did much better on the task because they had appropriated the motives, goals, and genres of the discipline, which extend back to William James's curious shuttling between academic and nonacademic activities and genres in his philosophical writing. They wrote as insiders, even when they used personal material and narrative. The undergraduate students, in stark contrast, constructed the writing task in terms of more overtly personal motives and goals and wrote narratives closer to the genres of English classes, with which they were more familiar. Similarly, in a 4-year study of one biology student, Haas (1994) traced Eliza's growing sophistication as a reader of biology texts. Eliza gradually increased her involvement with a wider network of human agents and texts, "a growing cast of characters in the 'drama' of her interaction with texts" (p. 71). In her summer job as a lab assistant in a professor's lab, for example, she got a sense of the sociocultural settings of biology. As the importance of disciplinary activity comes to be more recognized among teachers and researchers, cultural-historical research in undergraduate general education courses may expand.

CONCLUSION This tradition of North American cultural-historical research on writing in workplaces and higher education helps practitioners, teachers, and researchers in many areas rethink their activities by making visible what is often curiously transparent-their use of inscriptions to mediate their activity. Many commercial and governmental organizations have invited researchers to help them describe and critique the ways they use writing. U.S. higher education, which has assumed writing is a single generalizable skill and organized composition courses accordingly, finds a challenge to that assumption in this research tradition and a tool for constructing writing supports across the curriculum. And in a much broader sense, this tradition of research offers to researchers in many disciplines a chance to reflect on the powerful but subtle effects these little marks on surfaces have in the way people structwe their work and their worlds.

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