25 Discourse Communities: Your Major as a Discourse Community

You may have been asked or are asking what you will major in during your time in college. This decision is not an easy one. It is wrapped up in your aspirations (i.e., What will you DO after college?) as well as your identities (i.e., Do you identify as a scientist, a philosopher, a dancer?). This decision has reverberations that connect who you have been, who you are, and who you will be, and that connect the identities and belonging that you have created with the identities and belonging that may have been thrust upon you.

To further complicate this decision, in this chapter, we show you how majors are also infused with their own set of values, norms, diction, and genres—all of which create differences in how texts are to be read and written.

Your Major as a Disciplinary Discourse Community

People often assume that when they study a particular major, they are learning content: the canonical research, theories, and texts. However, you learn so much more than that. You also learn how to read and write in that discipline, and through that, how to become a part of that major. One useful lens for understanding how you develop in a major is discourse community theory. This theory, from John Swales, posits that certain communities (like your major) are discourse communities, and if they are, then their members have shared qualities.

With these 6 characteristics, we hope you can see that yes, your major definitely fits into it. We agree. And the more comfortable you are with understanding these shifts in discourse communities, the more adept you will be in moving between classes, majors, minors, and eventually onto graduate school or industry. Essentially, the way we read and write in our classes is constructed through human interaction, foregrounding the dynamic aspects of reading and writing in college classes.

We find this open access text from Dan Melzer particularly useful in teaching discourse communities.

In the following activity, we invite you to reflect on a discourse community that you belong to. Try to reflect on this concept in 100 words or more.

The Different Areas of Study

If our chosen majors are different discourse communities, then it means that, epistemologically, they make and share knowledge in different ways. This means that when you are asked to write a text in biology, the expectations will be different than if you were asked to write a text in history. The communities have different goals, they have different types of texts, they have different languages, and they have different ways of communicating. An entire field of education is dedicated to trying to unpack all these differences for writers like you.

Watch this video for a brief summary of this field (view time is 3:11):

Video 25.1. What is disciplinary literacy? by Literacy Teachers

In this video, you watched Cynthia Shanahan, a scholar, who published a piece with Shanahan and Misischia to understand the different values among chemistry, history, and math professors. They discovered that they read very differently based on their area of study, or what we would call their discourse community.

In summary, the three pairs of experts engaged in similar strategies but to varying degrees and in unique ways. In terms of critique, or critical reading, the mathematicians were most engaged with finding error, the chemists with seeking consistency with external scientific evidence, and the historians with weighing the implications of different perspectives and contexts. Historians were also always reading critically; mathematicians when presented with quantification; and chemists when reading texts in their area of expertise.

In the following activity, we invite you to reflect on the differences between history, chemistry, and math. Try to reflect on this concept in 100 words or more.

In the following activity, we invite you to reflect on your own major (as a discourse community). What do you think are the values in your major and how does that affect how you should read?  Try to reflect on this concept in 100 words or more.

Writing in the Disciplines

If we agree that different disciplines, or majors, are part of their own discourse communities, then, along with reading texts in different ways, we also will write in different ways based on shared values. This shift from writing classes to writing in your major is unsettling for most.

Luckily, there are many tools you can use to figure out new writing scenarios.

Rhetorical Genre Analysis

One useful tool is rhetorical genre analysis, which you can use to analyze any new writing situation you find yourself in. This could mean a resume you have to write for an internship application, or a lab report your professor assigns. To conduct an analysis like this, you need to follow 2 steps. First, find sample or mentor texts.  Second, use the heuristic we provide to analyze the texts (similar to Shanahan et al.)  Let’s go through this together with this science article abstract from female-identified Saint Mary’s College scientists.

Example 1

Bisphenol A (BPA) is an endocrine-disrupting chemical used in the production of plastics, and is linked to developmental, reproductive, and metabolic disorders including obesity. Manufacturers have begun using ‘BPA-free’ alternatives instead of BPA in many consumer products. However, these alternatives have had much less testing and oversight, yet they are already being mass-produced and used across industries from plastics to food-contact coatings. Here, we used human female adipose-derived stem cells (hASCs), a type of adult mesenchymal stem cell, to compare the effects of BPA and BPA alternatives on adipogenesis or fat cell development in vitro. We focused on two commonly used BPA replacements, bisphenol AF (BPAF) and tetramethyl bisphenol F (TMBPF; monomer of the new valPure V70 food-contact coating). Human ASCs were differentiated into adipocytes using chemically defined media in the presence of control differentiation media with and without 17β-estradiol (E2; 10 μM), or with increasing doses of BPA (0, 0.1 and 1 μM), BPAF (0, 0.1, 1 and 10 nM), or TMBPF (0, 0.01 and 0.1 μM). After differentiation, the cells were stained and imaged to visualize and quantify the accumulation of lipid vacuoles and number of developing fat cells. Treated cells were also examined for cell viability and apoptosis (programmed cell death) using the respective cellular assays. Similar to E2, BPA at 0.1 μM and BPAF at 0.1 nM, significantly increased adipogenesis and lipid production by 20% compared to control differentiated cells (based on total lipid vacuole number to cell number ratios), whereas higher levels of BPA and BPAF significantly decreased adipogenesis (p < 0.005). All tested doses of TMBPF significantly reduced adipogenesis and lipid production by 30–40%, likely at least partially through toxic effects on stem cells, as viable cell numbers decreased and apoptosis levels increased throughout differentiation. These findings indicate that low, environmentally-relevant doses of BPA, BPAF, and TMBPF have significant effects on fat cell development and lipid accumulation, with TMBPF having non-estrogenic, anti-adipogenic effects. These and other recent results may provide a potential cellular mechanism between exposure to bisphenols and human obesity, and underscore the likely impact of these chemicals on fat development in vivo.

In the following activity, we invite you to use this sample abstract as a way to understand further the values shared in the major. Try to reflect on this concept in 100 words or more.