Examining "Coaches Can Read, Too"

Brannick utilizes Swales' 'CARS model' to effectively introduce his paper. He spends four pages establishing the territory, or content, that is relevant to his paper. He examines the role and actions of a coach while referencing other academic material on the subject of coaching. It's important for him to spend time on the first aspect of the 'CARS model', because it outlines the 'conversation' surrounding this topic, and allows him to move to the next step of the model: establishing a niche.

After examining present material on the subject of coaching, Brannick finds that there is a clear gap or lack of research with regards to the player-coach relationship, and how it affects both party's performance, and how it affects the game. He notes that "there have been many articles written on the X's and the O's (specific strategies)" of football, but he also finds that "scholars have yet to study a coach's ability to read his players and the game as a form of literacy". In about a page, Brannick makes the transition from outlining the 'conversation' in question, and identifies a niche for potential enlightening/worthwhile examination.

Brannick makes his move to occupy the niche he finds in a unique way. Instead of outlining his purpose, or announcing principle findings, or indicating the structure of his research article, he performs a meta-move by posing a question, and referencing, while offering, his article as an answer to the question.

I don't like this way of 'occupying a niche', or otherwise communicating the central purpose of an article, because it seems too self-reflexive. However, many authors in different fields regularly do this. One can't use a word in the definition of the same word, and I believe the same principle applies to articles in the context of 'academic conversations'.

Learning to Serve

It seems that Mirabelli's aim for his research is to fit in the paradigm of the "work in this book [that] argues that literacy extends beyond individual experiences of reading and writing to include the various modes of communication and situations of any socially meaningful group or network where language is used in multiple ways." He doesn't seem to explicitly state his research question, but he states his goal again, asserting "there is something unique and complex about the ways waiters and waitresses in diners use language and literacy in doing their work." I think his research question would be something like 'are interactive service workers learning a unique literacy, if so, how does it work?'

Mirabelli collects data from two different restaurants, one privately owned and one a chain place. He said he used direct participation, observation, and transcriptions, among other items, to document the interactions in these restaurants.

One of his big conclusions is that meaning via communication is and can be constructed through various types of non-text conduits. Another interesting bit he found was that waiters and waitresses must be mutable when it comes to authority, because it's a useful tool in customer interactions, while they are more subjected TO it when talking in the kitchen. I do remember this two-facedness necessary for food service workers, as I used to wait in a little diner, and it was hard.

Discourse Community Ethnography

The discourse community I will examine for the ethnography project is a black market; the network of people who distribute and consume a certain illegal substance recreationally. My friends have had experience with this community for a few years, and I have learned about different genres of communication, types of identities, and the common goals that members of this community share.

This type of community is quite unique, because it’s members are influenced by a number of external pressures. The first and most obvious is the law. As the primary function and activities of this community are illegal in most of the United States at this time, one common goal is to keep the network and community structure secret. This facet of this community affects it’s members’ identity is numerous ways, and also affects their ability to integrate with other types of discourse communities.

Being a sort of ‘secret society’, it’s hard to accurately measure statistics about the membership of this community, but I can safely assume certain things, through anecdotal evidence, to estimate the size and spread of this group. This community is certainly global, and operates in a tier system. The size of this community is also certainly massive, and like any other massive group, has smaller groups that may operate independently from each other. For this reason, I’ve decided to focus my examination on the discourse community I am familiar with, one that is more local.

I feel that it would be extremely liberating, for both the discourse community of academia and for the one that I will examine, to have a serious and honest look at how this community and it’s modus operandi affect the individuals involved, either indirectly or by proxy. I also feel that my examination may shed some light on the nature of black markets and the people involved, and help adjust our view of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, as it often comes down to large discourse communities pitted against one another with different (or, perhaps more similar than one would believe?) motives and beliefs.

I hope to learn more about how membership in a particular discourse community affects an individual’s identity and ability to participate in other communities. The discourse community I will examine is certainly a non-dominant Discourse, and rarely is it ever a primary discourse. In this case, identity in a black market community will be at odds with other identities that an individual must assume when functioning in other aspects of their lives; even more so than other non-dominant Discourses, like Judaism, because being a Jew isn’t illegal (although perhaps we may draw parallels between persecution of a non-dominant Discourse at different periods of time?).

I feel like I can add much to the conversation in terms of the role discourse communities have on identity formation, or in this case, identity splicing. Participation in this community comes with a limit. Entering the community demands a certain type of saying-doing-being-valuing identity kit combination. However, the longer one stays in the community, the more it will replace one’s primary discourse, and the harder it will be to re-integrate into one’s original primary discourse, or for that matter dominant discourses. There is also an obvious psychological/behavioral altering element that comes hand in hand with membership, and while this won’t be the focus of my examination, I will allude to it when necessary, as it definitely has a formative influence in an individual’s identity formation within this group.

I expect to use Gee’s article Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics to help define and prove this group as a discourse community, to help examine identity formation, and in comparing different discourse communities. I also plan to use Swale’s article The Concept of Discourse Community to challenge the notion of a discourse community. Finally, I plan to use Wardle’s article, Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces to help conclude how different notions of identity are connected with miscommunication in groups.