Journal Four - Michaela Dugdale

After reading James Paul Gee’s essay, “What is Literacy,” I noticed that the main keywords Gee used were: literacy, discourse, acquisition, and learning.  Gee defines literacy as “the ability to read and write.”  He defines discourse as “a socially accepted association among ways 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.’”  He defines acquisition as the “process of acquiring something subconsciously by exposure to models and a process of trial and error, without a pro-cess of formal teaching.”  And finally, he defines learning as “a process that involves conscious knowledge gained through teaching, though not necessarily from someone officially designated a teacher”. Throughout this reading I noticed many connections through all of these words as well as to our class discussion on discourse community.  Gee explains that many people, especially students, gain knowledge from acquisition and learning depending on the matter at hand.  In our class discussion, we talked about how most of our knowledge developed through personal experience, which ties into Gee’s theory of acquisition.  

The discourse community I am interested in researching is interior designers.  In this community, the designers research many places in order to gain knowledge about the culture, they then transfer that into a design for a home, apartment, or even hotel. Writing is used in this community because the designers must be able to explain their vision to their customers, as well as the hours and hours of research they do to find inspiration.  One can become a member of this discourse community by experience. 

This discourse community interests me because interior design and architecture is my major.  I want to continue my schooling in this subject after flu and hopefully move to New York. However, I was on the FSU library website and it was very difficult for me to find scholarly sources to use, so the community I want to research might change.