Know to Whom You Are Communicating: What Are Your Discourse Commnities?

In this post, I would like to discuss the importance of effectively communicating with your discourse communities. This term may sound like one found in an academic textbook or journal, and it is just that. English Professor James E. Porter, in an article orginally published in Rhetoric Review in 1986, defined a discourse community as “a group of individuals bound by a common interest who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated. An individual may belong to several discourse communities.”

These discourse communities can exist at work, at home, in your professional life beyond your workplace, and among groups of family, friends, colleagues, and beyond. Porter says that “a discourse community shares assumptions about what objects are appropriate for examination and discussion, what operating functions are performed on those objects, what constitutes ‘evidence’ and ‘validity,’ and what formal conventions are followed.”

For teachers, your most obvious and important discourse community is your classroom of students. But you may have others that are closely related to your classroom. These include your school principal and other administrators, your students’ parents, and your fellow teachers within your school and within your disciplinary area.

If you are a fifth-grade teacher at a public elementary school, you also may need to consider the larger community that your school serves. In addition, your discourse community could include other fifth-grade teachers in your school district and beyond, especially if you are involved in any professional organizations, like the National Council of Teachers of English, as just one example of a professional group for teachers.

Sociolinguist John Swales has defined discourse communities as consisting “of a group of people who link up in order to pursue objectives that are prior to those of socialization and solidarity, even if these latter should consequently occur. In a discourse community, the communicative needs of the goals tend to predominate in the development and maintenance of its discoursal characteristics."

Perhaps the most simple method of thinking about your discourse communities is to think about the groups you communicate with at your school and through your association with your school. For any given communicative goal, you are going to have a message that you are going to send to a particular audience. That audience is one of your discourse communities.

Again, for our example of a fifth-grade teacher, that educator's first discourse community is that educators classroom of students. The most basic question to ask yourself about your classroom when considering the topic of climate change is, What do they already know about climate change? To determine this information, you need to gain information about your audience. Teachers of rhetorical communication refer to this gathering of information about a specific group of people audience analysis. Depending the audience and your topic of communication, you may want to know your audience members’ ages, social-economic status, and other demographic information, along with some knowledge of your audience’s prior attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors concerning your topic.

For our fifth-grade teacher, let’s call her Ms. Smith, she will know her student are between the ages of 9 and 11, with most students being the age of 10. And unless she is in her first year of teaching at this particular school, she probably knows the socio-economic status of most of her students – the kinds of families who are typical for the area neighborhoods. But she might not know what her students know – if anything – about climate change. What do her students’ parents know about climate change, and perhaps even more importantly, what are their attitudes and beliefs about climate change. To be blunt, are they climate change deniers, skeptics, believers, or advocates? What will her fellow teachers within her school think about her interest in teaching her students about climate change? What will her principle, the school board, and the PTA think?

For now, let’s just consider the students and their parents. How could she learn what her students know, and if they have developed any attitudes or beliefs about climate change. The most obvious answer is to just ask. For your own classrooms, you could simply ask for a show of hands after you ask, “How many of you know about what I mean when I say climate change?” Look for a show of hands; ask several students to explain why they raised their hands.

For homework that evening, ask your students to do some research on the Internet and to write one paragraph of at least two sentences about what climate change is. Ask them to ask what their parents know about climate change, and write a paragraph of at least two sentences about their responses. Let me know what happens.

Best regards, AMD