Deans, b

Deans, Tom. "Shifting Locations, Genres, and Motives: An Activity Theory Analysis of Service-Learning Writing Pedagogies." The Locations of Composition. Ed. Christopher J. Keller and Christian R. Weisser. Albany: State U of New York P, 2007. 289-306.

Deans argues that looking at the location of writing (classroom to community agency) is less useful than looking at the activity system of writing because we then begin "thinking about the interactions and contradictions between two activity systems (the university and the community partner organization)" (290). An activity system is like a discourse community, but one that is perpetually dynamic, in flux (291). The activity system provides a vocabulary for analysis of relationships: tools/genres, subjects, rules, objects/motives, community, and division of labor. This type of analysis is more multi-faceted than place-based analysis: e.g., genre analysis, looking at explicit and implicit motives of multiple agents, the contradictions from student perspectives (working for a grade vs. working for agency's betterment) and faculty perspectives (the agency/power of professor vs. that of the site supervisor).

Deans

Deans, Thomas. Writing Partnerships: Service Learning in Composition. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000.

A comprehensive overview of relationship between composition and ASL. Sees ASL as an extension of Dewey's experiential ed. and pragmatism and Freire's notion of critical praxis. Classifies ASL projects into three camps: writing FOR the community (often genre-based, with the advantage of providing real rhetorical situations), ABOUT the community (reflection-based, emphasis on some combination of personal growth and analysis), and WITH the community (encompassing collaborative-based work often involving hybrid discourses). Deans resists advocating one of these, instead suggesting we use his schema as a heuristic for asking what our own pedagogical goals are.