2.3.2 Defining Community of Discipline
Community can be a ‘reference point’ (Hyland, 2012, p.22) to explain how individuals enact and articulate their languages to identify and negotiate who they are (or not) in groups.By following Cohen (1985), Hyland (2012) refers to the concept as a symbolic construct, and suggests that the idea of community ‘offers a way of bringing interactants and texts together into a common rhetorical space, foregrounding the conceptual frame that individuals use to organise their experience and get things done using language’ (p.11).While supporting Hyland’s proposition that community is ‘a more helpful account of how individuals create a sense of themselves as belonging in a particular setting of relationships and interactions’ (p.11), the current discussion raises a concern about how a community of discipline can afford meaning-making resources in this way.
The very first sense of a community of discipline is about the real existence of its physical site, such as an educational institution that can be easily determined by its institutional name, the organisation of faculty members, or the routine institutional activities.But if one would like to understand or identify the identity construction of the institution, it is vital to view it as a construct of social phenomena in a way to see how its fundamental components, that is, disciplines and members, mobilise certain resources and ongoingly engage in institutional events.On the one hand, the constitution of disciplines varies in terms of cultural, geographical, and social scopes.On the other hand, individuals in disciplines can rarely escape from mutual interaction.They have to gather in different groups, meeting and sharing things with each other physically, ‘rhetorically and strategically’ (Hyland, 2012, p.11).Hence, it is through the enacting of an accumulation of repeated disciplinary practices that a community of discipline is constructed, co-constructed and re-constructed.
The fact that individuals usually distinguish between the similarities with and differences from others makes it important to account for the imagined community of discipline in the sense of ‘inclusion and exclusion’ (Hyland, 2012, p.11).With regard to this level of meaning of imagination, Anderson’s (1991) remarkable explanation on a nation as an imagined community is helpful here to explain the sense of community of discipline in imagination.A nation, according to Anderson (1991), ‘is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (p.6).This view stresses the importance of imagining a nation as a specific community in which individuals recognise each other as group members in spite of the existence of human races, cultural and geographical variations.
Imagined communities afford imagined identities, as Anderson (1991) points out.The idea of imagined community is important for those individuals who desire to construct positive identities in a community of discipline.It is possible that the connection between discipline and identity may not be interpreted immediately, since individuals’ unique experiences constituted from participation in the other communities may create certain spaces to limit their participation in the current one.However, language and identity are mutually co-located.If individuals decide to sustain or resist coherent selves in the participation of message exchange or discursive practices in a particular community, they are most likely to manage how far they engage in interaction.This in turn influences how far the individuals construct individual and social identities.Similarly, in a community of discipline, individuals are supposed to bring in personal experiences and meaningfully interact with others in the role of legitimate members, such as teachers or students.Once solidarity could be reached through high engagement in interaction, the imagination of a community of discipline will be powerfully coined, which enables individuals to enact their agency within social structures (Anderson, 1991; Wenger, 1998).
Norton (2001) introduces Anderson’s imagined community into her conceptual idea of a language learning community.She argues that particular communities in many language classrooms are not only reconstructions of past communities where relationships are historically constituted, but also are communities of imagination.Ideal communities will provide identity possibilities in the future, though this will raise the questions of what resources can contribute to the construction of identities of an ‘ideal’ community and in what way it can be recognised and identified.While addressing this concern in the next section, a caution should be put forward at the same time:imagined identities are not statically constructed in individuals’ mind, but in a way of negotiation that organises identities as social, historical and cultural processes and products by using discourse (Anderson, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Wodak et al., 2009).