Academic Discourse Community Rolf Norgaard
The following is excerpted from various sections of Composing Knowledge: Readings for College Writers
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so no one present is qualified to retrace all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you.…However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows later, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form Entering the Conversation When you enter the university, or enter advanced course work in your major, you are entering the sort of parlor that Kenneth Burke describes. While the conversation can certainly be engaging, and the ideas stimulating, the experience of entering a new setting can be quite unsettling. Who are these folks who are deep in conversation, and what are they getting so worked up about? On what basis are they taking sides? What does it take to join the conversation and become one of “them”? And what are the “moves” involved in having a voice in the conversation and in having that voice heard? We would do well to think of the university as a kind of Burkean parlor or rather a set of overlapping parlors, for no one parlor could ever be sufficient to capture all of the conversations that go on in various disciplines or on campus. Although we may think of a college or university as a collection of buildings, or our own education as a list of courses completed or of expertise gained, the conversational metaphor is actually quite apt.
The university is a house of argument. The university represents an ongoing conversation about questions that are genuinely at issue. An essential part of your college education is not just learning facts but also learning how to make sense of and join that conversation—a conversation that is not limited to classrooms but also extends to larger civic spaces. To enter and take an active role in Burke’s parlor, or in the conversations on your campus and in your disciplines, you’ll need to figure out the implicit, unstated rules for how people go about talking and arguing. In college, as in the professional world, much of this conversation occurs in and through written texts. Although there are surely general patterns or guidelines to academic conversations, you’ll need to alert yourself to the subtle but telling differences between how conversation partners handle themselves in different contexts or disciplinary spaces. Beyond the obvious differences in topic, conversations in the science parlor proceed in a slightly different way than those in the humanities parlor. All the more reason, then, that you read the conversation before you step into it. “Reading the conversation” means reading texts in what might be new and unfamiliar ways. The academic conversations you are now entering into require something more: savvy reading, rhetorical reading. You’ll need to read texts as conversations, noting not just what is being said but also how and why the conversation proceeds as it does. Discourse Communities The word community comes from Latin for “common” or “shared.” Communities develop and maintain themselves through the activities and interests we share and through the ways our lives intersect with each other. That very intersection also helps us understand how communities overlap, how we live simultaneously in several communities. Communities have internal tensions and disagreements, and where they overlap with other communities these tensions can become more apparent. College is no different. The arguments made in classes and on campus are shaped by that habitat and by the more particular habitats of departments and disciplines. Communities sustain themselves through language, an important link apparent in words themselves: communication coming from the same Latin root as community. This relationship is nowhere more important than in university communities, where language use (and its accompanying behaviors and rituals) becomes especially prominent. You may have come to college thinking that you were going to study biology or sociology. But a lot of what you end up studying is how biologists and sociologists speak about their work.
Little wonder, for you are initiated into communities in good part through the language you learn. Likewise, language can be a barrier or gatekeeping device to restrict people from communities. Communities can facilitate communication, but they can also erect barriers to communication and thus fragment the university community as much as draw it together. But only through learning a language can we understand the common, but unspoken, assumptions and the hidden attitudes and beliefs that hold a community together. And in so doing, we hope to enter that community without immediately being singled out as the newcomer, the foreigner. The Academic Discourse Community As a college students, you too are joining a community or, to be more precise a whole host of communities – some disciplinary, some social, each overlapping with others. The process is at once exciting and challenging, all the more so because to join these communities you must learn their languages. Here, too, no one wants to be singled out as the newcomer, the foreigner. The common language seems to be English: the academic version of English. You expect to be inundated with new technical vocabulary, especially in the sciences. But what may come as a particular surprise is that each disciplinary community, even composition, has something of its own language. It would be relatively easy if learning this language were simply a matter of learning the buzzwords, the jargon. But at a deeper level, the languages you are encountering carry with them new attitudes and behaviors, new assumptions and values, new ways of thinking about and seeing the world. Discourse [or language] communities are not static. Recall that at some point every participant in Burke’s parlor slips in and slips out. But the conversation continues – and evolves. The norms or ground rules for the discussion are not set once and for all but take shape in and through the conversation. Learning the Language = Learning Ways of Thinking To join a disciplinary community is, in part, to master a body of knowledge. But that knowledge does not exist “out there,” independent of those who control it, just waiting to be acquired. Knowledge belongs to groups of people who have some shared stake in exploring, preserving, and expanding it. The outsider must acquire knowledge from insiders, usually through some form of an apprenticeship. Perhaps we should not, but we draw institutional boundaries around knowledge by locating it in communities defined by experts and by those novices who are trying to learn what experts know. We call those communities by different names – subjects, fields, areas, majors, departments, disciplines. They often overlap, and they consist of subcommunities that also overlap. That these names cut up the pie so differently only reflects the unruliness of communities. Whatever we call these fields and however we define them, the knowledge they bound is colored by the values, conventions, and styles of the communities that make that knowledge the object of their interest. While the novice is committed to mastering the knowledge that the community thinks is important, the novice is equally committed to acquiring the ways of thinking that characterize that community, the tone of voice that identifies one member to another, the required silences whose violation instantly identifies the outsider. However true it is that Shakespeare is a famous writer who wrote many plays, it is usually inappropriate for those trying to join the ranks of literary experts to express that sentiment, either in writing or in speech. We might think that our days are filled with the demands of teaching and learning what might be called “domain content” – the factual information of any one field. But beyond or underlying that explicit and visible education is a more subtle but telling one: You are learning the moves of thinking and writing so essential to success in college and in your chosen field. You are imitating, practicing, and trying out – on your own and with each other – a variety of dance steps that show a mind in action. “Inventing the University” – A Teacher’s Perspective on Learning Academic Discourse Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion – invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English.
The students has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. Or perhaps I should say the various discourses of our community, since it is in the nature of a liberal-arts education that a student, after the first year or two, must learn to try on a variety of voices and interpretive schemes – to write, for example, as a literary critic one day and as an experimental psychologist the next; to work within fields where the rules governing the presentation of examples or the development of an argument are both distinct and, even to a professional, mysterious. The student has to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and he has to do this as though he were easily and comfortably one with his audience, as though he were a member of the academy or a historian or an anthropologist or an economist; he has to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language while finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, on the one hand, and the requirements of convention, the history of a discipline, on the other. He must learn to speak our language. Or he must dare to speak it or to carry off the bluff, since speaking and writing will most certainly be required long before the skill is “learned.” And this, understandably, causes problems. Academic Literacy By familiarizing students with academic discourse, professors seek to help students understand and participate in the conversations that shape the university. The goal here is to “learn the language” and master the secret handshake of this community. Yet the term academic literacy remains highly contested even inside the ivory tower.
- How broadly or narrowly can or should one define academic writing?
- Can a focus on academic writing draw on your own experiences beyond the academy and on other avenues for literacy development, such as civic discourse or home and community discourse?
- How can one accommodate disciplinary differences in academic writing?
- And does an interest in socializing you to academic literacy amount at some point to exerting undue influence on or authority over you? What is Literacy and Who Gets to Define It?
Literacy is one of those mischievous concepts, like virtuousness and craftsmanship, that appear to denote capacities but that actually convey value judgments. The labels literate and illiterate almost always imply more than a degree or deficiency of skill. They are, grossly or subtly, sociocultural judgments laden with approbation, disapproval, or pity about the character and place, the worthiness and prospects, of persons and groups. A revealing exercise would be to catalog the definitions of literacy that lie explicit or implicit in the pages of this collection, definitions that motivate judgments, political not less than scholarly, about which people belong in literate and illiterate categories: the numbers in each group; why and in what ways literacy is important; what should be done for or about those who are not literate or are less literate than others; and who has the power to say so. It would be quickly apparent that there is no uniformity of view, since the values that surround reading and writing abilities differ from argument to argument. Instead, there are competing views, responsive to the agendas of those who characterize the ideal. Invariably, definitions of literacy are also rationalizations of its importance. Furthermore, they are invariably offered by the literate, constituting, therefore, implicit rationalizations of the importance of literate people, who are powerful (the reasoning goes) because they are literate and, as such, deserving of power. Asking such questions requires not just literacy in the usual sense but a “critical literacy,” one that helps you become aware of how authority and power work in and through language. Literacy is inherently tied to membership and belonging, with all their implications regarding exclusion and access. To be critical of the heated discussions in Burke’s parlor, one still has to get inside the door and join the conversation.
Works Cited Information: Norgaard, Rolf. Composing Knowledge: Readings for College Writers. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. In-Text Citation: “…one still has to get inside the door and join the conversation” (Norgaard 3).
Respond to the following: totally 200 words
- What is the meaning of Burke allegory (about the “conversation” in the “parlor”) at the beginning of the article?
- What are the advantages of entering this “conversation”?
- How does Norgaard define discourse communities?
- What does Norgaard mean by “inventing the university”?
- How does the definition of academic literacy proposed here differ from traditional definitions of academic literacy or writing?
