# 9

Journal # 9

1.  1. Powell focuses on how students negotiate various genres in which they come across.  Through this close analysis of a tiny, religious, liberal arts college, she studies and then examines how students’ constructs of “self” are reflected within school genres and how their backgrounds, specific academic backgrounds and disciplines, and institutional goals that those construct.

2.  2.  In order to complete her study, she does the following: she uses the activity theory to examine possible competing goals within the activity system (which is the college itself) and, than, how those goals can affect student’s writings. Combining activity theory and theories of self-representation and performance, she than create a framework to explore how genres can simultaneously liberate and constrain and how students negotiate the various tensions they may encounter within an activity system.

3.  3.  The genre that students most use in forms of self-representation is autobiographies.  With this they also make use of resistance, contradictions, and conflicts within their writing.