The discourse community that I will be examining is Camp Akita in Logan, Ohio. I began attending the camp the summer before 6th grade and was a camper every summer through high school. Starting the summer before my sophomore year I began a program called L.I.F.E. Guard where I volunteered at the camp for two weeks every summer for four summers. The summer before my sophomore and junior years of college I worked at the camp as a counselor. And starting this past April I began working in the kitchen. Through out these years I went to many fall and spring retreats and volunteered in the non-summer months to help keep the camp beautiful.
Because of the fact that I have attended or worked just about every job available at this location I think that I know a lot about this discourse community. I am a member of this community and have been since 6th grade. The very first time I ever went to Akita was in 3rd grade but I don’t think I joined the community at that time. Not only am I a member of this community as a whole, but I believe that I am a member of various smaller communities within the camp so I will be trying to explore a little bit of each of those communities.
I just want to learn more about how discourse communities operate and communicate. The concept of looking at a group as a discourse community is new to me so I think I will learn a lot from looking at something that I have known for so long in a new way.
I plan on citing Gee’s and Wardle’s articles in my paper as well as probably using ‘Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers’. I haven’t read the latter yet but believe that it will apply to my paper because I am going to interview one person from the kitchen at Camp Akita.
Good proposal Colleen,
ReplyDeleteYou've had a lot of experiences at this camp (from 3rd grade) and you obviously know a lot about how things work in different areas. I think this familiarity will definitely work to your advantage when you're working on the ethnography.
You also came up with a thoughtful goal for this project: to "learn more about how discourse communities operate and communicate." I think this is a good start. By the end of your data collection, you should be able to make some generalizations about how discourse communities influence how individuals use language and communicate with each other. But besides those general goals, it's good to have a specific research question too. A proposal like this contains multiple opportunities. One thing that might be interesting to study is the idea of apprenticeship, as articulated by Gee. Individuals learn Discourse through "socially-situated practices" and can't just pick up the Discourse without relationships and experiences in the discourse community. How does this play out at Camp Akita? How are new campers initiated into the community and do they ever become full members?
Of course, there are other specific concepts you might examine, but be sure to zoom in on something so that you can discuss discourse communities on a general as well as specific level.