Based on your reading of Gee's article, what keywords do you notice him using? In other words, what terms does he focus on? how does he define these terms? what are the connections among them? What connections do you see between our class discussion about genre, audience, and knowledge and Gee's article on discourse?
The author is focusing on Discourse, Criticism, and learning. He defines discourse as “a socially accepted association among \:vays of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or "social network." The author describes communities as defining criticism, “The discourse itself defines what counts as acceptable criticism.” The author defines learning as “Learning is a process that involves conscious knowledge gained through teaching) though not necessarily from someone officially designated a teacher. This teaching involves explan~tion _and an alt sis, that is, breaking down the thing to be learned mto its analytic parts. It inherently involves attaining, along with the matter being taught, some degree of meta-knowledge about the matter. I see our discussion combining these terms together and connecting them in different ways that were not seen before our discussion. For example, I did not think of a platoon of soldiers as a discourse community. These soldiers have their own community in which they live, work, and play.
Next, consider the discourse community that you are interested in researching for project two. What is the discourse community? What "ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting" (Gee p. 29) distinguish this discourse community from others? How does one become a member of this discourse community? What role does writing seem to play in this discourse community?
The discourse community I am interested in is investigative journalism. The things that distinguish this community from others is how they go to the source with little or no information and create a whole new source of information from it. The thinking of many of the journalists is that they will die to get a story that no one has gotten before. Many journalists would never go into a war torn country and go speak to an unstable rebel group that holds hostages and sit down and interview them. All journalists of this kind have their own ways of creating a persona however you have to be able to go out and get a story because it will never fall in your lap. In a sense this creates a certain group of determined people with similar ideas and reasons to go out and provide people with interesting material. Writing, film, and photography are the three key components to this community. All journalists are very experienced writers and most of the time write their own articles on their topics.
Finally, what interests you about this particular discourse community, and how can you use that interest to develop your research project? In other words, think about why you want to become a member of this discourse community and what you need to know and be able to do in order to join it.
What interests me is getting a story from a source with little or no interference from publishers. Many sources skew their information with biased political nonsense. However, a lot of documentaries and off-topic articles are not looked at as much and inherently are more true to a sense. I would love to become a member of this discourse community. I have always loved film and journalism. Although this is not my major it is always a backup. In order to join a community I would say the largest piece of criteria you need to join this community are the guts and connections to get a story. Many people get captured and killed doing this work because a lot of the time these stories involve murderers, guerilla-groups, and are in the middle of war-torn areas.
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