At the 1998 Genre conference, Peter Medway asked, "Is genre such a capacious concept that it is too fuzzy to do much analytical work?" In this chapter I look at a group of high school teachers from different disciplines who must, as part of the work of assessing student portfolios of writing across the curriculum, discuss genre, work with it, to decide which student texts meet the statewide criteria for a "good" text. In a broader sense, they must work with genre to decide what genres they will assign and teaching their (discipline specific) classes to help students meet the requirements of a statewide portfolio assessment and of their classes/disciplines and of rhetorical actions in the "real world", which the assessment is designed to improve ultimately.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david-russell/27/
This book chapter is published as Russell, David R. "The Kind-ness of Genre: An Activity Theory Analysis of High School Teachers' Perception of Genre in Portfolio Assessment Across the Curriculum." The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change. Ed. Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2002. 225-242. Posted with permission.