Discourse Reflection

I wrote a paper on my Discourse Community in RC 2001 this semester. A discourse

community is a group that someone is apart of that you, and only people within the community,

can relate to. My discourse community is the Middle Grades department within the Education

Department at Appalachian State University. The idea of our discourse community is that you

must go take classes and test to become certified to teach. Once you become a full time

teacher you have requirements and expectations you must met. These requirements and

expectations are explained in this paper.

I used sources that explain the students we interact with and how to best educate them.

Middle school students are different than Elementary or High School students so it was

important to find sources geared towards them. One source I used by Kieran Egan was meant

for elementary but I believed the quote “a child's imagination ought to be stimulated and

developed in education”, could be used for any student. If I were to find more sources I would

have looked for more middle grades ones. The deeper I got into research about the middle

grades discourse community I found more sources that would have been great for this paper.

A requirement of being in a discourse community is using a certain writing technique.

The first thing that came to my mind is writing lesson plans, which is a large part of the job. I

wish I would have added in other types of writing, like grading papers and other assignments.

When grading assignments you need to be thorough so students can better from their mistakes.

Another requirement for being in the education discourse community is to cross the

threshold of the community. To cross the threshold one must complete test, classes, and

student teaching to get a degree in education. If I was to redo this paper I would have spent less

time on the threshold and more time disguising the insiders and outsiders. An insider has to be

passionate about educating young minds and have patience. An outsider might not understand

why someone would want to work with crazy kids, and this is what makes them an outsider. I

loved this idea and focused on it in my Academic to Public Translation.