Writing is a crucial element in research and developmental projects of higher education. The planning of writing in educational settings has been mostly examined as an individual or social process of construction that produces a kind of writing ability or strategy (e.g. Björk, Bräuer; Rienecker & Jörgensen 2003; Kostouli 2005). The cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström 1987) offers a possibility to approach writing and planning of texts, not as objects in themselves, but within the activities that give rise and use to them (Bazerman & Russell 2003).

In Helia School of Vocational Teacher Education a research and developmental project, in which a new writing genre in Finnish universities of applied sciences is in the process of being developed (Lambert & Vanhanen-Nuutinen 2005). Teachers have realized the need for a new genre because the traditions of academic writing and project reporting have not made it possible to promote the transfer of new instruments and models to other educational institutes and working life.

The project has been carried out by applying a methodology called Developmental Work Research (Engeström 2005), in which developmental interventions, related to the learning and transformation of activities are an integral aspect of the methodology. In these interventions the creation of new tools and artefacts within the dialogical spaces provided by the researchers plays a central role.

In this research project, a new tool for writing, called the Writing Plan (Lambert 2005; 2006a) has been developed together with teachers (Table 1). The Writing Plan refers to the plan that persons involved in a project construct together in order to link their writing into the research project. The Writing Plan fulfils a twofold task, First, it is a tool for writing within research and developmental projects that: a)brings the participants together to design the writing within the project, b)opens up new possibilities for writing within the project, c)constructs the meaning of the writing into the project and the object of development, and d)makes the writing visible in the project. Second, it is an intermediate, conceptual tool (Engeström 1995) for analysing the new emerging writing genre in universities of applied sciences. The Writing Plan makes it possible to analyse the writing genre inside the project, and “on the terms” of the texts.


TABLE 1. Writing Plan of Project