Chris Jones

 

Professor Cathrine O’ Frank

 

English 122-C

 

November 11, 2017

 

Discourse Entry “Fake it til you become it” Project 2

 

Discourse is a group of people that use certain words, beliefs, actions, values, and body language to interact with each other. These are the things that make a group a group. If you’re part of a group your somewhat distinct, or special because you have something that allows you to be in that group. The point of being part of a  group is you all have something in common. Example is if you’re a lawyer you know what it’s like to talk to other lawyers and act like one while you’re doing your job. Being a lawyer is special because it takes many years to become one, in order to be part of that group takes time. When you’re born you become part of your own group aka “family” Discourse. How you fit in your “family” which is everyone’s first discourse, it’s the first “group” anyone is apart of. This is also called “primary discourse”.  As people age and evolve they can enter many Discourses. There’s lots of  different Discourses, some common discourses that anyone would recognize or can relate to are school, sports, work, home life, etc.

 

Challenges and paths of entering a discourse. Back to being a lawyer, the path to becoming a lawyer is a long term deal, you need high school, 4 years of undergraduate college, and 4 years of graduate school, and you need to pass a test that people study years for. This is a challenge many people face when attempting to enter this “discourse”

 

If you’re trying to become a violin player you can’t fake it til you become it. Not all discourses wrap into this mindset. Anyone, who has ever heard a violinist play can call out someone if they’re pretending to be a violinist. If you’re playing the piano (which you don’t know how to play) and even in your head you believe you can play the piano. This represents a “pretender” (the lack of fluency may very well mark you as a pretender to social role instantiated in the discourse” gee 10) . Unless you are an exception and some unusually gifted individual  “partial acquisition coupled with meta-knowledge and strategies to make do” (Gee 13)  I do agree with gee that someone can fake being part of a discourse by using some background knowledge, just not this specific discourse. An example of a successful “faking it til you make it” scenario. A lacrosse player who has never played football walks onto a varsity football team. This lacrosse player has “background knowledge” trains on and off the field, and knows how to compete and be part of a team, just like football players, and sports teams in general. Someone who has played high end sports their entire life, is much more likely to jump into a discourse without an any prior experience with that specific discourse than someone who doesn’t play sports at all.

 

An apprenticeship in my opinion is the most effective way in being let into a discourse. (“apprenticeship someone in a master apprentice relationship in a social practice (discourse) where in you scaffold their growing ability to say do, value, believe, and so forth, within that discourse, through demonstrating your mastery and supporting theirs even when it barely exists” gee 11) Gee could agrees with this notion due to the fact that having a mentor to guide you through the process of attempting to enter a discourse enables you to make mistakes and improve the most. When gee says “you cannot teach anyone to write or read outside any discourse there is no such thing unless it is called moving a pen” What I think Gee means by this is you have to say, do, value, believe in order to get into the discourse. You have to jump all the way in, you gotta go for it 100%. You cannot just move the pen if you’re going to write a piece of literature, you have to engage your brain and consciously think about what you are physically writing.