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Discourse CommunityThis is a complicated term indeed. At first glance, French and American scholars are discussing the same thing: the discourse community, a notion introduced to composition theory in the 1980s in the United States and to didacticiens de l’écrit recently in France. But a closer look shows deep differences. Two other terms complicate the situation further, introducing other related aspects: constructivism and knowledge construction. I will try to clarify these concepts here, but the essential distinction in their uses is rooted in the social bent of United States composition theory and the research focus on post-secondary questions in the US as opposed to the comprehensive view taken by French scholarship, compounded by the language distinction between discourse and discours/discursive (the literal translation of communauté discursive is discursive community, not discourse community). Definition(s) For composition theory, the term references:
The notion of discourse community is, however, clearly a false friend when we take a closer look. The differences include the institutional level at which the term has evolved, the understanding of “disciplines” as scholarly groupings in the United States or school subjects in France, and the sense of the community’s construction and the inherent power relations it invokes. Uses in the United States Here “discourse community” is a concept specifically linked to the university and to composition courses, both in general and in terms of individual disciplines and their discourses. It is directly linked to scholarly knowledge, to the work of the discipline or the academy, to the construction and deconstruction of knowledge in a field by its members, as described by B. Latour, C. Bazerman and others. This concept has been used to explore spheres of professional activity, intercultural interactions, etc. It is, today, one of the most deeply entrenched concepts in composition theory and teaching, in spite of the fact that it has been contested since its inception for a variety of reasons. For P. Bizzell, the relationship between the individual and the social was central. The individual is capable of learning language and forming thoughts that interpret and organize experience. The use of this thinking occurs in social situations, in interaction with others. This interaction modifies the logico-discursive abilities of the individual. Groups can become used to modifying in certain ways the logico-discursive activities of all those involved; these familiarities can become conventions that create a discourse community, whose purpose is to accomplish a certain kind of work in the material world (1982, p. 76). The discourse community is thus a community with norms, rules, conventions, ways of being, thinking, even living, in common and its knowledge is (entirely) discursive, socially constructed and unstable. The concept of discourse community enabled scholars to frame and to model the way writing courses work for students in the context of the institution of higher education—to imagine and to analyze this world in a way that, in the 1980s, was original. It allowed composition theorists and teachers to better understand the socio-discursive relationship between the teacher and the student, to oppose teaching writing as a simple transmission of competencies, and to question the underlying approaches and ideologies. In particular, the world of higher education was understood at this time as a world with shared objectives, conventions, ways of being constructed by the expert members; the student arriving to this world and seeking to integrate into it needed to appropriate these conventions, create for himself an I-participant (“invent the University,” D. Bartholome said in 1987). The work of teaching thus became a work of accompanying the student in this effort. The entry into a specific discipline was framed in the same way, a next step into a narrow community with its own ways of being and conventions. All analysis of such a community needed thus to lend itself to elucidating and understanding these practices and ways of being: the adoption or creation, by the participants, of shared stylistic conventions, preferred syntaxes, commonplaces, acceptable evidence, common stocks of words, even argumentative rites and ethos specific to a discourse (p. 36, p. 225). The ethnographic-sociologic methodology for studying the life of different spheres of activity (to borrow Bakhtin’s term, and taking as example B. Latour’s analysis of science laboratory life) was particularly useful. But fairly quickly, this acculturating version was replaced by a version resisting the effort to render students’ acculturation fluid and smooth, and instead focused on examining students’ integration process, to explore what is gained or lost and to study and even encourage or affirm students’ resistance to the ideologies inherent in higher education and in the writing course. Bizzell proposed that scholarly research should include the analysis of the powerful influences of a given discourse community on the formation of these perspectives, in order to develop a critical meta-awareness of the framing nature of a community and its ideologies—in short, a perpetual questioning of any community’s points of view. M.L/ Pratt’s “contact zone” concept appeared as an alternative to the “community” model. At the same time, many scholars and teachers came to understand that writing could not be taught in isolation, without accounting for the university-level disciplinary aspects of writing instruction’s content and—woven in—its ways of being expressed. In addition, perhaps most importantly, scholars began exploring the interaction between those “entering” the community and the community’s construction, suggesting that each influenced the other in an ongoing dynamic process. |