What’s wrong with CHAT?

Editor's Notes

• #2: Thank CCCC research committee, Dylan Dryer, and respondents.
• #3: please allow me a personal milestone. In 1996, 20 years ago, I published my first article on CHAT (Spinuzzi 1996). No, please don’t read it. It’s not particularly good work and it gets some things flat wrong. But it does reflect early interest in CHAT in composition circles. Why did we become interested in CHAT? It’s not just because of our well-known love for triangles (cf. Kinneavy 1971). Rather, it solved a methodological problem that we faced. To understand that methodological problem, let’s recall the writing studies milieu in the mid-1990s—and the crisis that we faced at the time.
• #4: In this milieu, composition studies in the US was struggling to define itself as a field. Recall that through most of the 20th century, composition in the US was generally not considered to be a field of study—rather, it was considered to be a pedagogical specialization, and an uninteresting one at that. James Kinneavy: “Composition is so clearly the stepchild of the English department that it is not a legitimate area of concern in graduate studies, is not even recognized as a subdivision of English ... , in some universities is not a valid area of scholarship for advancement in rank, and is generally the teaching province of graduate assistants or fringe members of the department" (p.1).
• #5: Over a decade later, Kinneavy’s colleague Maxine Hairston, CCCC’s chair for 1985, delivered a fiery speech in which she hailed composition’s gains, but argued that those gains would be minimal as long as compositionists remained bound to their colleagues in literature, the “intimate enemy” they faced. Hairston exhorted us to enact that separation by developing our own theories—and by doing research that could support and extend those theories.
• #6: That is, for composition studies to emerge as a discipline, it needed to develop a research orientation. To extend Hairston’s point, composition studies had a broad research object, which was composition. But a research object was not enough to anchor a field. It also needed a paradigm within which to understand its research object and the boundaries of its investigation. It needed one or more methodologies that could underlie, motivate, and guide research. It needed rigorous methods that fit within those methodologies and that could lead researchers to investigate phenomena consistently. And it needed rigorous techniques for implementing those methods. Unfortunately, there was no unanimity about what this research field should look like. Several research agendas sprang up, drawing from different bodies of knowledge but without an agreed-upon paradigm for validating and connecting research. Not coincidentally, a rash of framework essays appeared in the composition literature (e.g., Berlin 1988; Faigley 1986; Kent 1993), each attempting to categorize different schools of thought in composition studies.
• #7: To understand these schools of thought, let’s look at the framework essay by Hairston’s colleague Lester Faigley (1986). Like the others cited here, Faigley sums up three competing camps: expressivists, cognitivists, and social constructionists. The expressivists, who focused on individuals’ authentic expression of their innermost feelings, had a comparatively thin, anecdotal research tradition. The cognitivists, in contrast, systematically investigated and compared individuals’ writing processes, drawing on information-processing cognitive psychology; they tended to draw on experiments and think-aloud protocols to map out processual structures that writers had in common. Finally, the social constructionists applied the proposition that “human language (including writing) can be understood only from the perspective of a society rather than a single individual” (p.535). They drew from social sciences such as sociology and anthropology as well as humanities disciplines such as philosophy.
• #8: The struggle for a research paradigm, then, had been joined by the mid-1980s. Expressivism, which lacked a strong external empirical tradition, was an early casualty. That left two contenders, each of which drew from established research traditions rooted in other fields. Cognitivism drew empirically from cognitive psychology, while social constructionism drew empirically from sociology and anthropology. Exchanges grew more heated, leading to fights across the two camps (Berkenkotter 1991) and even “sweeping generalizations about the character or ethos of researchers in general,” as Faigley’s colleague Davida Charney put it (1998). Meanwhile, composition studies began to develop research methods textbooks, but these textbooks tended to be paradigm-agnostic, presenting different methodologies as legitimate but paradigmatically separate ways to investigate research questions (Kirsch & Sullivan 1992; Lauer & Asher 1988). The methodologies sat uneasily next to each other, barely interacting, like shy teenagers at a dance.
• #9: This state of affairs was problematic for a lot of scholars, including Charney’s future colleague—me. As a brand new PhD student in 1994, I read the framework essays and the exchanges in our field’s journals, and I felt torn. I was intrigued by the cognitive approach. It seemed critical to examine the development of individuals as they learned and integrated writing skills. But I also recognized the wisdom of the social constructionist perspective. We also needed to understand how people use shared language to meet social objectives. If only we could put these two together, yielding something …
• #10: … sociocognitive It was at about this point that David R. Russell visited a graduate seminar in which I was enrolled. He discussed a paper he had been working on, which was about CHAT. CHAT, of course, was and is sociocognitive. That is, it theorizes and investigates cognition as thoroughly social. In doing so, it offered one solution to the tangled methodological problem that composition studies faced: It addressed the social-cognitive divide by presenting a dialectical synthesis of the two. It was oriented toward individual and social development, making it a strong contender not only for pedagogical research but also for research into writing in other contexts (such as the professional contexts I wanted to investigate). It provided a way to integrate different methodologies. Thus it also allowed a way to reinterpret and integrate previous work in both paradigms. CHAT began to be taken up by a variety of composition scholars, including Bazerman (1997), Berkenkotter & Huckin (1995), Haas (1996), Russell (1995, 1997a, b), and Winsor (1999). It wasn’t the only one. But CHAT gained ground, especially in professional communication studies.
• #11: Why was CHAT such a good fit? It’s a very long story, but here’s the Cliff’s Notes version, courtesy of Yrjö Engeström (1996). 1GAT In the first generation, Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky developed the idea of mediation (Vygotsky 1978, 2012; cf. Engeström 1996, p.132), in which an individual could control her own actions using physical or psychological tools. NEW SOVIET MAN 2GAT in Leontiev’s work, the unit of analysis shifted to the cyclical mediated activity of a collective. He also developed the levels of activity (Leont’ev 1978; Leontyev 1981). 3GAT Engeström provided a graphical heuristic (and added a component, rules). he integrated contradictions, making them crucial to CHAT analysis. he expanded the analysis to activity networks, that is, two or more interacting activity systems. The result of this third generation of activity theory was a more focused examination of interpretation; interactions, especially disagreements; and a link to existing hermeneutic theory that had already been taken up in writing studies. Again, CHAT was not the only way to skin this cat. But it worked. But keep in mind that CHAT was attractive to us because it solved a particular methodological problem well. Now, over 20 years later, our methodological landscape has changed. We have other problems—and CHAT is arguably not as well equipped to solve them. I suggest that, 20-plus years on, CHAT faces at least three methodological problems in rhetoric and composition research: in application, in theory, and in phenomenon.
• #12: The first methodological problem, application, is also the simplest. CHAT was attractive to us in the mid-1990s because it offered a sociocognitive framework, one that unified both social and cognitive concerns under one framework. But in the intervening years, the “socio” has overshadowed the “cognitive.” in practice, it’s most frequently being used as a social framework.
• #13: In rhetoric and composition research, we have attempted to synthesize activity theory with, or at least bring it into dialogue with, other theories, including dialogism (e.g., Russell 2010). Yet the tension between dialectics and dialogics, monoperspectivism and multiplicity, modernism and postmodernism, remains latent in CHAT’s theoretical apparatus: deeply embedded concepts such as objective, contradiction, activity system, and activity network are arguably problematic.
• #14: second-generation activity theory was built around the cyclical transformation of an objective that, although it could be perceived differently, really had just one true essence. Third-generation activity theory adapted the approach, but in applying it to networks of intersecting activities, it legitimized objectives with multiple valid perspectives. As it was applied to further and broader cases, the shared objectives became further blurred and harder to describe using a single definition.
• #15: With these three challenges—in application, theory, and phenomenon—should we abandon, modify, limit, or reinvent CHAT? I think we can reinvent it. After all, it's been done before. Recall the three generations that Engeström portrays as building linearly on the foundation of Vygotsky’s work. Engestrom’s picture is simplified. These generations of activity theory did not actually develop in this linear fashion, with each building unproblematically on the foundation of its predecessor. It's more accurate to say that these generations represented significant pivots: points at which one argument lost traction and was in danger of fading, and had to be rhetorically translated in the Latourean sense to gain traction again.
• #16: When we consider the development of CHAT in this way—as an often-idealistic, often-opportunistic argument unfolding across time, developing cultural psychology across different rhetorical environments—the question is no longer that of whether we can stick with CHAT. It’s how we might participate in that ongoing argument in a new rhetorical environment.
• #17: People have pivoted it before. Let’s pivot it again.