Coaches can read, too

Establishing a territory:

Branick starts by explaining the importance of being a coach, whether it be for little league or the pros.  He then goes into talking about some important characteristics and traits that successful coaches must posse.  Branick also discusses the different literacies needed to be a successful coach, such as, reading the players, organizing plays, making and pursuing goals, and having a competitive edge.

Establishing a niche:

            He notes that it is quite easy for us to think about the work that the players put in to prepare for games and practices, but the work that the coaches put in is often overlooked. There are many factors that a coach must have in order to be successful.  These are things that people can’t really see.

Occupying the niche:

            This involves being able to put all the information you have about your players and your opponent to good use in developing a game strategy.  The coach has to not only have the knowledge of his players and their opponent, but he has to be able to make the right call when certain situations arise.  Because the coaches ability to take the knowledge he has of the game, his players and their strengths and weaknesses, the opponent, the opponents coach and the plays they run, etc. is crucial in winning.

Learning to Serve

Mirabelli's research question is “What is a menu and what does it mean to have a literate understanding of one.”   He states this in the last sentence of the sixteenth paragraph under the heading marked ‘the menu’ on page 544.  Mirabelli collected his data through direct participation, observation, field notes, documents, interviews, tape recordings, and transcriptions.  He was able to collect his data thorough direct participation and observation because he was a waiter and was able to experience it all first hand. Mirabelli finds that the waiter or waitress’s understanding of the menu to be a very important mode of communication in their success.

During Mirabelli’s research process I believe he found many things out about the importance of the menu and having a literate understanding of it.  He tells us that the menu is a genre all on its own and that the words used on it tend to be jargon specific to the particular restaurant you’re in.  He explains that often times same or similar words do not mean the same thing at different restaurants. 

Proposal

I plan examining the discourse community of a high school soccer team.   I was a member of this discourse community for four great years, but would no longer consider myself a member in the way that I was before.  I still attend a lot of games as a spectator and see many of my old teammates there to watch the game as well.   I know many of the girls who are on the team now; they were some of the same players who used to come to every single one of our games.  The same young girls who would be so excited to get to stand on the sidelines during our games with extra soccer balls to give us whenever one went out of bounds.  Our team motto has always been “one goal, one heart, one team,”   I intent to use this motto to help me in explaining the team dynamic.

I plan to examine this community in greater detail in my final paper and focus on authority, who has it and how they get it.  I will also focus on how the time commitment affects the players.  Which things people have to give up to be a part of the community.  It takes a very big time commitment there are daily practices, team bonding events, and several games throughout the season.   

As far as references go, I plan on using John Swales article, “The Concept of Discourse Community.”   I plan to use this to set up my paper and use the six characteristics of a discourse community to explain why the soccer team example is a discourse community.   I also plan on using James Paul Gee article, “Literacy Discourse, and Linguistics,” to talk about how people fall into dominant and non-dominant discourses and primary and secondary discourses.   I intent to take this a step further and explain how the community has several closely related discourse communities.  For instance the teams’ fans are a big part of the community, but they don’t quite fall into the community.  Instead the fans almost fall into a discourse community of their own that closely shadow the discourse of the team. 

I intend to incorporate Ann Johns article, “Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice.”  I will use this to talk about the players cost of affiliation in being a part of the team.  All that must be given up to be a full fledge member of the team and how it affect the players.  Mostly focusing on how during season all other friends take the back-burner to your friends on the team because those are the only people you have time to spend time with.  I would also like to use Wardle’s article, “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces,” to talk about how authority works within the community.  There are many different things to consider when figuring out who has authority, whether the player is a freshman or a senior, the level of soccer experience the player has, the players skill set, etc.  I would like to bring many of these up and maybe try to rank this in a hierarchy of the most authority to the least.

Identity, Authority and Learning to Write in New Workplaces

In Elizabeth Wardle’s, “Identity, Authority and Learning to Write in New Workplaces” she describes three ways that newcomers try to belong in a new community.  These three modes are: engagement, imagination and alignment.

Engagement is simply the interactions that the newcomers have with an “old timer” in the workplace in order to develop interpersonal relationships.  Waddle say that engagement can be positive, however it can also be negative and lead to newcomers feeling lost without a sense of identity in the workplace.  When applying this to a soccer team, the new players must be able to show their skill and ability to help the team.  The engagement occurs during practice when playing against one another.  The skill a player has speaks for itself and in order for new players to fit in they must show their ability to add something to the team.

Imagination occurs after engagement and is where the newcomer begins to form their own identity and finds where they may belong within the community.  I guess an example of this would be when the team rosters are announced and the freshmen see if they made the team and if they did which team they made.

Alignment involves being able to find common ground and negotiate with “old timers” to define your visions.  It’s where the newcomer starts to feel comfortable enough to point out observations and where they start to align with the “old timers” point of view.  Aligning can sometimes lead to the loss of identity.  Again, applying this to a soccer team, the newcomers or freshman usually must begin to see things in the perspective of the seniors or old timers.  Doing so allows them to be accepted by the “old timers”.

Literacy, Discourse and Linguistics

In James Gee's article, "Literacy, Discourse and Linguistics," he talks about the tests and gates within discourse communities.  These tests are giving by the members of the discourse community to see if other members are native to their community.  If they do not pass the test the gates are used to exclude the non-natives.   This can be seen in pretty much any series of classes here on campus.  In order for you to enroll in a class you must meet all prerequisites and in order to meet the prerequisite you must have passed all required classes.  This is set in place to keep students who don’t understand the material well, the “non-natives”, from continuing on in the class series.  If they are able to pass the class and do well on test and quizzes then they have meet all requirements and are free to take the next class in the series, these students are like the natives to that discourse.   Discourses also often pay close attention to the “correctness” of others, rather than the meaning.   This is because it is quite easy to pick up on someone who doesn’t belong or is not ready to make it to the next step, or secondary discourse.  By the language they use alone it is easy to distinguish whether or not they belong.  Using the same example, when giving a presentation in class it is easy to distinguish whether or not the person know the subject matter well.  If they do not they won’t get the good grade needed to pass the class and help them advance to the next one.

The Concept of Discourse Community

A discourse community, as described by John Swales in “The concept of Discourse Community” has six defining characteristics:

1) “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.”

Each discourse community has common purpose or goal that they are trying to achieve; this goal must be know by everyone in the community.  

2) “A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.”

   The discourse community has to have a way for its members to communicate with one another.  This communication can include all kinds of communication whether it be formal (i.e. weekly meetings or gatherings) or informal (i.e. emails or newsletters).  For example a sports team may hold a weekly or daily practice and a fraternity will hold a weekly chapter.  While a group of gamers might meet in a more informal way in a game room to play against one another.

3) “A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.”

I take this to mean that one must be actively involved in the community in order to be considered a part of the discourse community.  You can say that your apart of a particular discourse community, but if you don’t take part in their means of intercommunication whether it be attending their meetings or reading their newsletters, then you are not truly a part of that community.  You have to know what is going on and stay involved.   

4) “A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.”

The genres are texts specific to the discourse community.  These genres create a set of expectations for how the members of the community should interact and communicate with one another.  This must be done before the community can be recognized as a discourse community to others.

5) “In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis.”

A discourse community may have its own jargon or technical language that must be understood by all of its members.  For instance on the class blog when it is said to read something in WAW, that isn’t a term used by everyone, people who aren’t in our class who may read that will have no idea what that means. Just as people in the medical profession have technical jargon that they use.   

6) “A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discourse expense.”

Membership will inevitably change over time, but the community cannot function and continue without a reasonable number of people who have been involved for a while and know how the organization is run stay involved. For instance a company who didn’t treat their employees well couldn’t function if all of their employees up and quit on the same day.  There would be no one to teach newcomers how the job is done.

From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies

Sometimes Baron seems to shrug at technology and suggest that it's hard to imagine new technologies as fundamentally changing the shape or nature of writing. Do you agree that this seems to be one of his messages? If so, why do you agree with it?

After reading “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies” by Dennis Baron, I partially agree with you when you say that he “seems to shrug at technology and suggest that it's hard to imagine new technologies as fundamentally changing the shape or nature of writing.”  I do agree that he suggests that it’s hard for him to imagine new technologies that will arise.  However, I don’t think that he suggests that these new technologies won’t fundamentally change the shape or nature of writing.  In fact I think he suggests that changes in technology will absolutely change writing.  Baron says that writing on paper is a technology and then the computer came along and word processing fundamentally changed the way we write.  I don’t see him arguing that new technologies will not fundamentally change the way we write.  I just think he seems to suggest that he doesn’t want to waste his time imagining which technologies being researched will eventually be made public and change the way we view communication.  Although he does seem to suggest this kind of when he gave the example that Samuel Morse the creator of the telegraph didn’t see the use in Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone or how it would shape the way we communicate.  So, maybe I do agree with both of these points.