Discourses, Ecologies, Rhetoric

I think that you had us read these articles together because they seem to be three ways of going about looking at how to approach learning/ writing. Janet Boyd teaches us about employing rhetorical strategies- about how to change our writing strategies according to our purpose/ audience. Gee introduced the concept of discourses- ways of being- in the world and the ways in which we might approach entering into discourses that we are not born into. Cooper introduced this idea of writing ecologies, in which our writing should have more of a social purpose.

Gee claims that "You cannnot overtly teach anyone a Discourse, in a classroom or anywhere else." (7). He differentiates between primary and secondary discourses. One's primary discourse is the environment in which one was born, or, as Mr. Whicker put it, "how one acts at home." Secondary discourses relate to the way we behave in any other environment, where we do not have a natural notion of how to behave. The only way we can enter into these discourses in any way, according to Gee, is either by faking our way into it or by having a meta knowledge of how getting into discourses works.

Gee seems a bit extreme to me. I feel like he is comparing discourses in a way to the concept of old money versus new money. New money can never be old money because it cannot be inherited. But is the difference between old and new money really of matter anymore? Have we not come to the consensus that it is more admirable for a person to make their way against odds than to be handed something? This mentality doesn't really translate to the concept of discourses too well. I think that Gee forgets that the experts in certain fields of discourse didn't just pop up that way. They had to be acclimated, just like everyone does, into their field. Sure you have to fake it a little, and to fake it a little requires extensive meta knowledge. But what is the difference between "faking it" and merely "trying" to become a part of something? Gee sounds a bit like a man scorned. I think that taking this attitude of "oh, i'll never be genuinely part of this discourse- my life will be full of faking it" is really negative and will only hinder a person's progress. All new things are scary and you feel uncomfortable. The secret is to not get too overwhelmed by feeling like an outsider.

The difference between Gee's discourses and Cooper's ecologies is that, while the discourses divide into "in" and "out," the ecologies explore the way in which all writing affects the audience and the writer. She says, "The metaphor for writing suggested by the ecological model is that of a web, in which anything that affects one strand of the web vibrates throughout the whole. Cooper encourages collaboration in writing. I was taken by her description of the centuries old notion of the student- one who studies and writes in private, and comes out smart as all get out but isolated in his purposes. She proposes that, since we will all end up working with others anyway, that we should write and learn interactively with others. She proposes a new sort of consciousness for writers- that a writer should think about how his/her writing will affect that genre as well as those who read it.