|
Communauté discursive
This is a complicated term indeed. At first glance, French and American scholars are discussing the same thing: the discourse community, a notion introduced to composition theory in the 1980s in the United States and to didacticiens de l’écrit recently in France. But a closer look shows deep differences. Two other terms complicate the situation further, introducing other related aspects: constructivism and knowledge construction. I will try to clarify these concepts here, but the essential distinction in their uses is rooted in the social bent of United States composition theory and the research focus on post-secondary questions in the US as opposed to the comprehensive view taken by French scholarship, compounded by the language distinction between discourse and discours/discursive (the literal translation of communauté discursive is discursive community, not discourse community).
Definition(s)
For French “didacticiens” the discourse community references:
- social frames in which modes of thinking, saying, acting are ratified by a social group in which they make sense (Chanfrault-Duchet 2003).
- the social groups in which disciplinary knowledge finds its source (Dufays 2003).
- a community in which “…thinking, expressing oneself, constructing knowledge, arguing, explaining in writing all presuppose the possibility for the student to project him or herself into a space in which values can be shared and recognized, even if this sharing is done as polemic…” (Jaubert, Rebière and Bernié, 2004, pp. 56–57).
- a notion that permits us to introduce the social and discursive aspects of knowledge construction and to highlight that language is a way to semiotize disciplinary activity. This replaces the traditional version of knowledge as material facts that come to us fully formed, in order to recognize disciplines as ways of acting-thinking-speaking and not as “contents.” These modes of action come from the agreements made by a group. Each discipline has its discourse community and its language practices; the study of disciplinary languages, habits, and behaviors should thus be the natural domain of the members of these disciplines (Bernié, 2004).
Uses in la didactique
Particularly linked to schooling as a community endeavor, a co-constructing of the classroom community, and thus a co-construction of school knowledge (in my interpretation of what I have read about the discourse community idea in France), the concept offers a way to understand how a class builds community and how students appropriate and construct for themselves the knowledge in various subjects in their courses. That appropriation is understood as a cognitive construction in the vygotskian sense (see “constructivism”). Of course, based on this definition, we must accept the language choices and the modes of acting-thinking-speaking in question as put into place by the various participants in the world of school (teachers, Official Instructions, school-discipline knowledge, students…) while still of course related to the scholarly knowledge of reference.
For Jaubert, Rebière, and Bernié (2003), the discourse community is a space “Defined by the subject’s representation of the social space, the interlocutors possessing recognized means of expression (genres), cognitive values, deontic values, practical and/or intellectual procedures, recognized as relevant…” (p. 55). Notice in this perspective the student’s role as the representation he or she creates of the school space, and the implicit support for the reproduction of existing school values and procedures (such as the value of an integration or an acculturation into the school community).
The construction made possible by the interaction in the discourse community of the classroom is founded, among other things, on the possibility for a student to evolve in a proximal zone of development (as proposed by Vygotsky). We are here still in the frame of individual and cognitive development, although in interaction with the social. Unlike the social-constructivists (see below) in the United States, French scholars linking themselves to this line of thinking do not appear to be trying to identify and thus to solidify the features of a community and its role in the evolution of a student’s writing. In this perspective, according to Bernié, the student must institute (?) him or herself as “school Subject” (or construct enunciative positions for each school subject [Jaubert and Rebière 2004]), and the epistemological status of language is actually a condition of knowledge construction.
C. Fisher and C. Simard emphasized in 2004 that the discipline “French” exists as a community with its own ways of thinking-speaking-acting and that “the mastery of language develops through a diversified use of language in specific disciplinary contexts,” which means that we must treat French as not a universal but varied depending on context. They emphasized at the same time that inside the L1 French discourse community, subcommunities matter as well: grammarians, linguists, literary theorists, and the very specific discourse community of “French class,” influenced by various lines of thought. This definition does not distinguish, however, the difference highlighted by Savatovsky (1999) between French as school subject and as a scholarly discipline.
We could imagine that the description of a discipline offered by M. Foucault in 1971, cited in le Français à l’Ecole (Hatier 1999) would lend itself to the concept of discourse community, but this definition does not appear to include school subjects:
A discipline presents itself as “one of the principles of limitation, of frontier between discourses admitted as true in a given field of knowledge.” These “discourses admitted as true” are valid for a while. They constitute systems of formulation and of reformulation of rules, definitions, instruments, methods, objects in relation to acquired knowledge, advances and questionings of knowledge under construction. That is to say, a discipline is a network of discourses constantly being reconsidered as a domain of knowledge creates itself. (cited in Collinet and Mazière 1999)
The “discursive community” concept is currently evolving in France, and is frequently referenced in discussions and articles, but its future is not clear, as not all research groups accept its value. Bourdieu’s “habitus” and Bakhtin’s “spheres of activity” are among the concepts being proposed as alternatives.
edit Communauté discursive
|
Discourse Coummunity
This is a complicated term indeed. At first glance, French and American scholars are discussing the same thing: the discourse community, a notion introduced to composition theory in the 1980s in the United States and to didacticiens de l’écrit recently in France. But a closer look shows deep differences. Two other terms complicate the situation further, introducing other related aspects: constructivism and knowledge construction. I will try to clarify these concepts here, but the essential distinction in their uses is rooted in the social bent of United States composition theory and the research focus on post-secondary questions in the US as opposed to the comprehensive view taken by French scholarship, compounded by the language distinction between discourse and discours/discursive (the literal translation of communauté discursive is discursive community, not discourse community).
Definition(s)
For composition theory, the term references:
- a group of individuals who share language practices, stylistic practices (that help to manage social interactions) and epistemic practices (canonical knowledge that manage points of view, beliefs, modes of interpretation of experience) (Bizzell, 1992).
- a community that must have work in common that cannot be accomplished individually. The language of the community becomes, according to Bizzell, a function of the group’s social behavior, a function of the maintenance and transmission of the group’s knowledge, and an epistemic function—language is constitutive of group knowledge and in fact constructs this knowledge (Herzberg cited in Bizzell, 1992, p. 223). In the academic community, one is “written by” its content, by all of the already-said in the community’s history, its tropes, its commonplaces, its genres, the developments peoduced by its members as they collaborate, etc.
- a group for whom the organic conventions, constantly reinvented, are not imposed but born out of shared work and the fact that participants spend time together. These participants are thus enmeshed in interpretive activity: the discourse community incorporates a world view, a doxic version of the world that will necessarily prejudge other available perspectives.
The notion of discourse community is, however, clearly a false friend when we take a closer look. The differences include the institutional level at which the term has evolved, the understanding of “disciplines” as scholarly groupings in the United States or school subjects in France, and the sense of the community’s construction and the inherent power relations it invokes.
Uses in the United States
Here “discourse community” is a concept specifically linked to the university and to composition courses, both in general and in terms of individual disciplines and their discourses. It is directly linked to scholarly knowledge, to the work of the discipline or the academy, to the construction and deconstruction of knowledge in a field by its members, as described by B. Latour, C. Bazerman and others. This concept has been used to explore spheres of professional activity, intercultural interactions, etc. It is, today, one of the most deeply entrenched concepts in composition theory and teaching, in spite of the fact that it has been contested since its inception for a variety of reasons. For P. Bizzell, the relationship between the individual and the social was central. The individual is capable of learning language and forming thoughts that interpret and organize experience. The use of this thinking occurs in social situations, in interaction with others. This interaction modifies the logico-discursive abilities of the individual. Groups can become used to modifying in certain ways the logico-discursive activities of all those involved; these familiarities can become conventions that create a discourse community, whose purpose is to accomplish a certain kind of work in the material world (1982, p. 76).
The discourse community is thus a community with norms, rules, conventions, ways of being, thinking, even living, in common and its knowledge is (entirely) discursive, socially constructed and unstable. The concept of discourse community enabled scholars to frame and to model the way writing courses work for students in the context of the institution of higher education—to imagine and to analyze this world in a way that, in the 1980s, was original. It allowed composition theorists and teachers to better understand the socio-discursive relationship between the teacher and the student, to oppose teaching writing as a simple transmission of competencies, and to question the underlying approaches and ideologies. In particular, the world of higher education was understood at this time as a world with shared objectives, conventions, ways of being constructed by the expert members; the student arriving to this world and seeking to integrate into it needed to appropriate these conventions, create for himself an I-participant (“invent the University,” D. Bartholome said in 1987). The work of teaching thus became a work of accompanying the student in this effort. The entry into a specific discipline was framed in the same way, a next step into a narrow community with its own ways of being and conventions.
All analysis of such a community needed thus to lend itself to elucidating and understanding these practices and ways of being: the adoption or creation, by the participants, of shared stylistic conventions, preferred syntaxes, commonplaces, acceptable evidence, common stocks of words, even argumentative rites and ethos specific to a discourse (p. 36, p. 225). The ethnographic-sociologic methodology for studying the life of different spheres of activity (to borrow Bakhtin’s term, and taking as example B. Latour’s analysis of science laboratory life) was particularly useful.
But fairly quickly, this acculturating version was replaced by a version resisting the effort to render students’ acculturation fluid and smooth, and instead focused on examining students’ integration process, to explore what is gained or lost and to study and even encourage or affirm students’ resistance to the ideologies inherent in higher education and in the writing course. Bizzell proposed that scholarly research should include the analysis of the powerful influences of a given discourse community on the formation of these perspectives, in order to develop a critical meta-awareness of the framing nature of a community and its ideologies—in short, a perpetual questioning of any community’s points of view. M.L/ Pratt’s “contact zone” concept appeared as an alternative to the “community” model. At the same time, many scholars and teachers came to understand that writing could not be taught in isolation, without accounting for the university-level disciplinary aspects of writing instruction’s content and—woven in—its ways of being expressed. In addition, perhaps most importantly, scholars began exploring the interaction between those “entering” the community and the community’s construction, suggesting that each influenced the other in an ongoing dynamic process.
edit Discourse community
|
