Wegner, Diana

Instructors in every field are faced with the ongoing challenge of determining appropriate curricula, pedagogy, and evaluation criteria, and they must justify these choices to colleagues and administrators. In the hybrid field of workplace writing instruction, this undertaking can be particularly daunting because of shifting assumptions about the relevance of curriculum to workplace practice.<p>From first paragraph of article.

This paper reports on a study of the effects of the incorporation of altruistic "statements" (Foucault, 1972) in the collaborative development of a comprehensive plan to manage the natural areas of a municipality.<p>From first paragraph of article.

Part of the "Perspectives on Writing" series. This study follows a local environmental group as it shapes a civic identity, before and after a municipal election, towards taking up a speaking position within the participation framework of city governance. This is an exploration and analysis of the tense co-existence of conflicting, oppositional identities, of marginality and power, in the context of local environmental conflict. The central question revolves around how this local group participates in the construction of civic discourse and community knowledge to build its political capital, and how, at the same time, it retains its activist discourse and marginal identity. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to current interdisciplinary scholarship on the issue of public participation in government decision-making and discourse studies on marginal identities and identity development. In this context, it is an effort to provide an analysis of how discursive rhetorical strategy functions in civic identity development and how the management of available discursive resources can enable citizen participation without disabling an activist identity. --From first paragraph of book chapter.

This paper contributes to current research in communications, rhetoric, and discourse analysis that extends disciplinary interests into the study of citizen participation in public processes. The impetus for this study comes from the troubling consensus that many public decision-making processes tend to discourage authentic citizen participation. In order to investigate the degree to which citizen participation may be judged as authentic, talk analysis is applied to the interactions of a government-citizen group as they negotiate a policy for the management of natural areas.The investigation examines the interactive dimension of the context of situation, which offers evidence of participation that goes beyond evidence offered by texts alone. The hypothesis is that the contextual dimension of the participatory process should provide richer evidence of the interactive, moment-to-moment, strategic moves of participants. The theoretical framework for the study integrates the concepts of recontextualization and structure-in-action with recent developments in activity theory and theories of agency.The findings show that, in their meetings, participants agreed and disagreed as they worked toward a consensus on how to write policy clauses. Microanalyses of their talk show evidence of an interactive inclusiveness and meaningful participation that is not apparent in the textual dimension of the written statements the committee ultimately submitted. This method offers researchers in communications and language studies a way of expanding rhetorical analysis to include the interactive dimension of context in real-world processes of civic engagement. Keywords: authentic participation, recontextualization, structure-in-action, agency, public processes, decision-making processes

Drawing on rhetorical genre studies and recent work in activity system theory, this study focuses on the collaborative development of a new written form, a municipal plan for protecting and managing natural areas. The author advances a twofold claim: (a) that the written plan is developed in the absence of a stable textual model and (b) that the text, as part of the context, functions, in turn, as a mediational tool for solving the rhetorical problem of audience resistance. Findings show that as participants reconfigure the project into successive cycles of activity, they create corresponding zones of proximal development. This study contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of the text-context relationship and to recent elaborations of genre as an activity system that help explain the relationship between genre and learning.