This concept is deceivingly simple, and if possible when working with students on it I'd find a way to describe it as informed more explicitly by Activity Systems theory, though in staying true to experiential learning, the students will be mostly developing their theories of writing in practice, and this concept's complexity will unravel itself as students continue to use writing in various situations for various purposes. Writing, as I understand it, is not the activity itself, but a tool embedded in ongoing activity, and an infinitely malleable tool at that. Our uses with that changing tool and its ever-changing relations in activity is our subject of study.

But prior to entering the MA English program here at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi (TAMUCC), my theory of "writing" was admittedly singular, universal, simplistic, and not able to account for the complexities and challenges that come with entering new situations. Quickly upon entering the grad program did falter the misplaced confidence I had built during my undergraduate career in my ability to produce the academic "paper" in appropriate fashion. Had I not chosen the writing studies track concentration at TAMUCC, I worry I would have inherited and never questioned practices of teaching writing that rely on problematic curricula, activities, and expected learning outcomes. I might have continued to understand writing as a single process, as a basic skill one could study and master, or that writing is an activity performed by an isolated individual and ending with the submission of a final product. The metaconcept troubles all of these problematic but still widely-held notions.

During my time as a graduate student at TAMUCC, I've had plenty of opportunities to engage with the exploration that learning about writing entails, about the many ways writing-as-tool can be used and changed depending on situation, audience, and purpose. I've also had the unique opportunity to study along with others different ways writing as activity and subject of study can be theorized and practiced in a way that is useful to non-experts/WS folks through the implementation of meaningful writing activities, and as you will see during my reflecting on the remaining TCs, I even had the chance to put those designs to the test in my courses.

To the skeptic, you can make the counter to this claim in saying that, for example, I am currently engaged in the activity called "writing" as I type this sentence on my keyboard. Adler-Kassner and Wardle (2015) suggest such "shorthand descriptions tend to collapse the activity of writing into the act of a single writer inscribing a text," and so this idea of "writing" often is reduced to mode and tool--the physical clanking of keys to make words--and we miss the complexity of understanding writing as situated and involving many choices of composed/composing/recomposing knowledge to meet a defined purpose. This metaconcept seems to illustrate that the more we complicate "writing"--the more we situate it--we begin to realize just how much more we have to learn (also a TC) about this subject of study as we zoom out in distance and move across various activities and writing's part in them. For me, I admit that it's quite humbling and oftentimes difficult to continually defer meaning and allow oneself to be open and hospitable enough to enter new spaces and embrace new uses of writing in activity.

And this is how the metaconcept has troubled my modus operandi, the very way I am in the world. Adler-Kassner and Wardle (2015) state that this metaconcept "is troublesome because it contravenes popular conceptions of writing as a basic, ideology-free skill. When teachers and learners recognize writing as complex enough to require study, and recognize that the study of writing suggests they should approach, learn, and teach writing differently, they are then invited to behave differently and to change their conceptions of what writing is and their practices around writing that extend from those conceptions" (p. 16). To conceive of yourself and inquire about the world increasingly in situ means, I think, to question your perception, the composed knowledges and material conditions which affect what decisions you can conceive and carry out. Writing is then an ethical enterprise.

I recall taking a full load of classes last Summer 2018 semester as I sought to get a jump start on my graduate courses in the MA English program. My courses included Dr. Garza's class on visual rhetoric surrounding the southern US border; Dr. Blalock's Writing Studies II course; and the Coastal Bend Writing Project Summer Institute (SI). I was in for a shock initially as I realized I wouldn't be writing "papers." How could I be an English/writing studies major without "writing papers"?

Dr. Garza allowed students including myself to engage in original research, interviewing individuals with direct experience living at the border. Also reading a Deleuzian-informed new materialist rhetorical (NMR) analysis of the Obama Hope image and its wide-ranging effects across various times and spaces, as well as an activist account of Enrique Morones, I noticed how our discussions of writing were markedly different than those I had had in my undergraduate courses; I was analyzing writing as it entered various complex activities. As the metaconcept suggests, I was beginning to see "writing" not simply as one particular kind of activity, but something happening in many activities, interconnected, and that what I had thought I knew about writing as a subject of study had been grossly limited to the study of a particular aesthetic object--a deity of "English" proper--as if its accepted value systems transcended all other activities.

Dr. Blalock's course introduced me to writing studies, and the SI allowed me to collaborate with esteemed educator Dr. Usha Gurumurthy in creating and trying out a class activity whereby we could have discussions about writing studies with fellow educators who might be otherwise hostile to suggestions for change in practice in the teaching of writing. In the SI, I found Bob Fecho's Bakhtin- and Dewey-influenced text Teaching for the students quite helpful as I revised and redrafted said class activity at least ten times before trying it with the SI class at the end of the semester. As I revised and embraced the many failures that come with revision (see TC), I began to understand the class activity as an activity in which I would use writing to achieve a specific purpose, with a specific audience, etc., and that the only way I could construct the procedures of a meaningful writing activity for writers was to envision the writing that would take place in the classroom in situ, and along with revision of the procedures I was imagining, also to revise and align with the axiological, pedagogical, and epistemological knowledges of the class activity in its complexity (Fulkerson 2005). And even following the class activity, I continued to revise based on feedback. Writing as a subject of study, then, never ends; there's always something new to learn to use writing to do in emergent activities.

During the Fall 2018 semester I continued to explore and further develop the metaconcept as I took Dr. Sorensen's course on Feminist Theory, Dr. Lee's Sociolinguistics class, and Dr. Etheridge's Rhetoric. Surely I was engaging in all sorts of writing as activity, but in understanding the complexity of "activity" through the scholarship of Russell and Bazerman, I began seeing texts differently: the assigned texts in literature courses, the texts used in the curricular design for the classes themselves, and important texts we constructed that many might not even consider "writing," such as my notes or multimedia projects beyond "the paper." I was still learning about writing as a subject of study, even though I was not per se in a class dedicated to learning about writing. I think this stems from my continued inquiry based on heuristics to which I continue to return, questioning all facets of a text and the various motives/interactions with said text in ongoing activity. In Lee's Sociolinguistics course, this was evident in Discourse Analysis and Conversation Analysis projects. I would transcribe myself and others in conversation, and I would not only investigate what the linguistic codes might mean, but also how my investigating what they mean involves a recognition and alignment of activities for a current purpose. Doing this, I think, complicates simplistic interpretation that is oblivious to its own inclinations based on situation and acting ideologies/motives. Sorensen's Feminist theory course challenged me to see writing as such a complex activity in course activity designs. One project involved engaging in a fictional dialogue with theorists, and establishing myself as a scholar in relation to these voices. And Etheridge's reading on Bakhtin (and Burke) suggested the richness of the term "dialogue" in describing this positioning of self in relation to others in writing and in activity.

As you can see there's quite a bit to investigate with this seemingly simple metaconcept. But let's move on to TC 1, which you can access via the drop-down menu above, or by clicking here.