ABSTRACT
The chapter employs a languaging perspective to generate maps of rhetorical action entirely different from the classical canons that have shaped millennia of instruction in writing and speaking. Integrating languaging with Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), the chapter introduces pedagogical CHAT (PCHAT), which focuses on literate activity across heterogeneous, dynamically developing lifeworlds and highlights processes of socialization (the entangled co-making of individuals and society). It then describes adopting PCHAT in a university first-year writing program and translating it to two eighth-grade language arts classrooms. Using narrative analysis to examine classes at both levels, the authors argue that a new rhetoric grounded in languaging retheorizes students’ understanding of, inquiry into, and engagement with writing for specific lifeworld activities.
