Review Project 1

We will review your Discourse Community Analysis project, and I’ll address questions or concerns you have.

What does conflict look like?

So far we’ve talked about discourse communities in ways that are relatively neutral; however, power, struggle, and conflict can also be a part of existing in and moving between communities. As people move between discourse communities where they practice new ways of engaging with people, texts, and languages, values and beliefs can sometimes be in tension. For example, Johns presents examples of people feeling alienated from their families as they become more literate or fluent in academic discourse communities; alternately, Johns offers another case of a person who left an academic community because they felt their home, or primary, discourse was not respected (pp. 64-6). Likewise, Gee discusses the conflict that can arise when learning a new, or secondary, discourse and claims that if the conflict is too intense it can negatively affect fluency in that discourse (p. 9).

Individual Writing

Review the excerpts of Johns (pp. 64-66) and Gee (p. 9) that I mention above. Identify a moment in your life where you felt conflict or tension when learning a secondary discourse or moving between different discourse communities. Try to use one of our assigned sources, Gee or Johns, when describing your experience of conflict within a discourse.

Group Work

Share your writing in groups. I’ll ask that each group report out something they learned from their conversation.

Play!

Technology wasn’t our friend today, so we played Discourse Community Jeopardy.

HOMEWORK

Watch this 2-minute YouTube clip of Dr. Vay in 2014 for a quick introduction to code switching and code meshing as a way to frame his article “Should Writers Use They Own English.” We’ll pick up on this next class.

Take time to think about what discourse you will write about for the Discourse Community Analysis project. You may want to review your writing for BP1 for help. Consider what genre or artifact from your community that you will read as part of your analysis. Have a sample artifact available for next class.

Works Cited

Gee, J.P. (1989). Literacy, discourse, linguistics: Introduction. The Journal of Education, 171(1), 5-13.

Johns, A.M. (1997). Text, role, & context: Developing academic literacies. Cambridge University Press.

Young, V.A. (2011). Should writers use they own English? In L. Greenfield & K. Rowan (Eds.), Writing centers and the new racism (pp. 61-72). Utah State University Press.