Where is The Classroom, anyway? Learning contexts as activity systems

David R. Russell

David R. Russell is Professor of English at Iowa State University where he teaches in the programs in Rhetoric and Professional Communication, and Applied Linguistics and Technology. His research interests are writing in the disciplines, international writing instruction and, recently, online multimedia case studies for computer-supported collaborative learning. His book, Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History, now in its second edition, examines the history of United States writing instruction since 1870. He has published articles on writing in the disciplines (WiD) and professions, drawing mainly on cultural historical activity theory and rhetorical genre theory. He coedited Landmark Essays on Writing Across the Curriculum, a special issue of Mind, Culture and Activity on writing research, Writing and Learning in Cross-National Perspective: Transitions from Secondary to Higher Education and Writing Selves and Societies.

Where is The Classroom, anyway? Learning contexts as activity systems

Written texts are central to formal education. Reading and writing them constitutes a great deal of our activity and forms the basis for assessment and sorting. Yet the relationship between texts and the contexts of education has not typically been a central concern of education, until rather recently, when metaphors of network and system have challenged the old metaphors of text as conduit of meaning, and context as a container of meaning - the bowl that holds the soup. This talk will explore the relationship between learning and context from the perspectives of Cultural-historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and North American (as distinct from NSW) genre studies. These offer new ways of seeing “the classroom” in relation to institutions and beyond. The possibilities these perspectives offer will be briefly illustrated from a study of higher education students in an online, multimedia simulation of a workplace which challenges students to critically examine both “the workplace” and “the classroom” in their reading and writing.

David is here from Iowa State University to present a keynote lecture at the Tertiary Writing Network Colloquium.

For further information about the presenter visit David's homepage.

Please direct queries about the seminar to Margaret Franken by email to [email protected] or by telephone 0800 924 5286 extension 6360.

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