Questions:
What skills or activities can we practice with our students to provide mentorship that brings them into a discourse community? What skills or activities could transfer across disciplines to facilitate this mentorship?
In what ways is the instruction of discourse communities part of a liberatory pedagogy?
Response:
Gee, Johns, and McCarthy’s works build on each other to extend the understanding and analyze the impact of (D)iscourse and discourse communities. Gee establishes a theoretical framework of what he calls (D)iscourses. Gee states that each person has a primary discourse, the discourse in which they were raised. This primary discourse can be within the dominant or nondominant discourse of society. Gee also develops the idea of secondary discourses, which function as a sort of add-on, or booster pack, to an individual’s primary discourse to increase the “(potential) acquisition of social ‘goods’ (money, prestige, status, etc.)” (Gee 8). Secondary discourses are acquired by becoming members of different discourse communities. Johns takes the idea of discourse communities and extends it by applying it to common gripes from faculty about students across the disciplines to highlight what professors are looking for in their students. McCarthy further extends the idea of discourse communities by using a student case study to examine how students function as outsiders trying to become part of these discourse communities. Together, they display the struggles experienced between students’ primary discourse and discourse communities as well as the disconnect between student performance and instructor expectations within these discourse communities. To truly achieve a liberatory literacy, instructors are in just as much need of learning first-year writing concepts as students.
The students who come into FYW are not a homogeneous group. They come to class with different histories and with different primary discourses, but they have similar goals: the attainment of secondary discourses and all the social benefits that these secondary discourses carry. Instructors of FYW are given the impossible task of teaching students to write like “academics” who comprehend “academic prose” across all disciplines or discourse communities. Faculty in the disciplines often complain “that these are general abilities we (FYW) should be teaching” (Johns 505). This displays a disconnect between the instructor’s expectations and the reality of writing and learning. Simultaneously, it highlights the gatekeeper mentality outlined by Gee (8). All the expectations of faculty across the disciplines discussed by Johns (506-509) highlight how instructors would prefer to keep the gate closed. There seems to be a subconscious or involuntary desire to hoard access to a secondary discourse, which makes sense because these secondary discourses, whether we realize it or not, are valuable resources with the potential for the acquisition of social benefits. So, while the instructors might know what their students need to succeed and gain access to their discourse community, they feel that this is not their responsibility to teach. McCarthy highlights this with an English professor who seemed to do everything wrong, with the most egregious offense being the attempt to totally isolate their students from one another, and ultimately the discourse community they were trying to gain access to (256-260). While this is just one professor, it is indicative of a larger problem, particularly since this was an English professor. McCarthy showed that where other instructors succeeded, it was because they utilized skills taught in FYW, even if they didn’t realize it, particularly those that focused on opening the gates and bringing students into a discourse community. Skills like responding to articles in the language of the discipline and peer discussion of these articles, as well as writing. These skills work together to immerse students in the discourse community and create a cognitive apprenticeship, which Gee describes as essential to the literacy process (13).
When instructors fail to mentor students in the participation of a discourse community, they achieve several disastrous things simultaneously. They further alienate students from education, particularly those from non-traditional backgrounds. Non-traditional students are already coming in with a primary discourse that is not aligned with the dominant discourse and the privilege that this affords. This reinforces discriminatory power structures. They diminish the value of education for all students. By failing to educate students in the discourse community and then grading them on this failure, students feel as if they cannot succeed. If they feel they cannot succeed, they will either give up or cheat. In the age of AI, this is particularly harmful. Students come away from their time in university with or without a degree, but with the same belief that they didn’t learn anything, and even worse, that instructors weren’t teaching anything. This is a dangerous conception of higher education and one that is unfortunately growing in popularity. It is in this sense that first-year writing provides a framework for liberatory literacy. FYW is foundational knowledge for all students, but it is the responsibility of disciplinary instructors to explicitly build upon these foundational skills. For this to happen, instructors across the disciplines need to understand these skills, coordinate with FYW, align their curriculum to these skills, and steep students in the skills and knowledge of the discourse community they instruct.
Works Cited
Gee, James Paul. “Literacy, discourse, and linguistics: Introduction.” Journal of Education, vol. 171, no. 1, Jan. 1989, pp. 5–17, https://doi.org/10.1177/002205748917100101.
Johns, Ann M. “Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity.” Text, Role, and Context: Developing Academic Literacies. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. 51-70.
McCarthy, Lucille Parkinson. “A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing Across the Curriculum.” Research in the Teaching of English, Oct. 1987, Vol 21, No. 2, pp. 233-265. National Council of Teachers of English.
Jordan Cagle 