Activity, Context, Interaction, and Authority

Situated learning theories offer useful insights into how learning to write can be supported and transacted through interactions between newcomers and experienced practitioners in academic and professional domains. Reporting the findings from a study of a mentoring relationship in physics, this article addresses how such processes work to teach composing in advanced academic contexts and what can make them more or less effective. The author identifies and discusses three factors that may constrain situated learning in such contexts and the transmission of authority that purportedly occurs through such learning. These factors include newcomers' existing skills for, and approaches to, composing, which may limit their acquisition and use of new skills; the implicitness of situated learning, which may pose difficulties for newcomers as they struggle to grasp the conceptual complexity entailed in composing disciplinary texts; and the location and distribution of authority in practitioner/newcomer relationships, which may inhibit newcomers as they struggle to acquire and establish their own authority by making original contributions to their fields.

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