Gee Reflection

In this blog, I wanted to address my question about secondary discourses? When I first read Gee, I understood that the family realm represents primary discourses, and a secondary discourse was like in a school setting. When I read Diane’s blog about the nurse as a secondary discourse, I was confused. If family is the primary, and school is the secondary, wouldn’t that make the nurse a tertiary? Upon more reflection, I realized that Gee mentions the conflicts and tensions of various secondary discourses and it sort of made sense. But another question arose about mastery of the secondary discourse: does one really master the secondary discourse as school? If so, how? I understand the concept of a nurse as a secondary discourse and mastering that through acquisition and learning.

I wanted to sort of bring in my own experience to relate to acquisition and learning and Gee’s points. My primary discourse is my family life as a middle working class Caucasian American. Through filtering I acquired English as my primary language and my cultural and traditional views involve going to school, finding a job, getting married, and starting my own family. As I moved to my secondary discourse in school, I learned and acquired various skills to in the future apply to another secondary discourse, which in my case, is a science teacher. Though I am only in the process of learning, with student teaching and field work I hope to acquire skills that will better place me within that discourse. One of Gee’s points is that acquisition helps a person better master that discourse, and I hope student teaching helps me to do that. Also, another point he makes is that I can mushfake a discourse to try and pretend I am fluent in it, and I compared this to my initial entry into school. I pretended to involve my self into the secondary discourse, and eventually through acquisition, I entered the school discourse.

Please feel free to respond to my question above. Thanks