Rhetoric of your Discipline (major)

For Tuesday, April 12, I asked you to bring some general material to class.  Make sure you have it all when we begin:

• A list of the journals in your field (the library is the best place to go; besides, you have to find and xerox an article out of one, so you might as well go there and peruse)
• An article from one important journal
• A list of the experts on campus (that is almost surely professors and other teachers)
• A list of the historical figures in your field (Psychology, for instance, would list Freud, Jung, Adler, and others).  You can find this in a textbook or on the internet.

Seem to me that a discipline is like a very long story, spread out over a lot of generations, with big events that are still talked about, just like a family recalls (and revises!) big events in their own history.  People who are in the discourse community of your discipline are always proposing new ideas to talk about -- so many that it gets dizzying sometimes.  But there are themes.  Remember when in education the big focus was on Ebonics and Whole Language?  It was all anyone could talk about and write about. To take a somewhat silly example, we got some ducks last week and that is all that anyone can talk about: How should we build a pen? Do they need to be kept warm? Will the dog eat them if he gets a chance? Who left the pen open? Will we eat them?  Can you eat duck eggs? Do they taste like chicken eggs?

......you see the parallel.  Discourse communities get wrapped up in certain questions.  The article you find for class Tuesday, for instance, will most certainly be wrapped up in a certain obsessive question that the field is dealing with (if it were an unimportant question, it wouldn't even get published!)  Our job is to find out WHAT you folks write out in your discourse community and HOW your people react to the problems.