2.3.3 Classification of Disciplinary Identities
2.3.3.1 Discourse
The above two sections introduced that the construction of disciplines requires contextual contingency relying on the ‘local struggles over resources and recognition’ (Hyland, 2012, p.23).Therefore, there is a need of the cultural condition for the ongoing construction of identities in a community of discipline in which individuals affiliate with or distance from other members, discursively and ideologically.As Meinhof and Galasinski (2005) note:
‘Identity is a discourse of (not) belonging, which is continually negotiated and renegotiated within a localized social context.It is therefore an ongoing process of becoming:always provisional, always subject to change...Finally, identities are necessarily relational—as much as identity is about who ‘I am’, it is also about who ‘I am not’......It is only through the Other that ‘we’ can establish our own identity, through what we are not.’ (p.8)
Discourse is about language in use.It explains the happening of ‘the events that are going on around when people speak (and write)’ (Halliday, 1991, p.5) in context.People produce or interpret spoken or written discursive forms of language to communicate with each other (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000).Rather than a mere tool for conveying interpersonal understanding, language entails a social communication style (e.g., Fairclough, 1992, 1993, 2003) because it is ‘the foundation of human experience’ (Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999, p.1).Discourse instantiates language in a way that can be interpreted from the internal relationship between structure and meaning (e.g., lexical words, clauses, cohesion) and the coherent external communicative function or purpose of a social encounter (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000).The analysis of discourse, as Paltridge and Wang (2010) argue, is not only to explain language and use of language in certain spoken or written contexts, but also to enable the understanding of why people make particular language selections in social and cultural dimensions and what they mean by these selections.
It is through engagement in spoken or written discourse that individuals in a community of discipline learn and share knowledge.However, this is ‘not something achieved overnight or picked up easily, but something that is learnt both formally and informally’ (Hyland, 2012, pp.11-12).After all, ‘human communication relies quite heavily on context and on the shared knowledge that the interactants have with respect to a variety of contextual features’ (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000, p.6).Discourse of discipline is believed to be a learned form; the members are supposed to not only can do, can say and can mean but also can think.Once the discourse is accepted and enacted as a conventional mode of expression over time, it in turn strengths the individuals’ sense of self and group alignment within a context through the sharing of values, beliefs and practices.Therefore, engaging in a community of discipline, individuals need to consciously articulate the production of a community’s discourse in a meaningful way.Arguably, this can be addressed in the linguistic and interactional units which construe the individuals’ ‘own beliefs, categorisations, sets of conventions and ways of doing things’ (Hyland, 2012, p.11).
2.3.3.2 Individual in Groups
Each human being is granted with ‘the uniqueness’ (Edwards, 2009) of individual identities, which are most likely generated in a frame of experience that is mentioned in the previous section.A person’s identity is constructed by his or her sense of who he or she is and how he or she enacts and performs in this world.If a person linguistically became someone else based on his or her perception of another person whom he or she wants to be, it does not mean that the person constructs the identity for the accommodation of another person but for her or himself (Joseph, 2004).At the same time, the person’s particular social and individual identities are formed in terms of the depth and extent of accommodation of individual differences in the group interaction.Also, when individuals shift themselves across groups, their identities are correspondingly changed in accordance with the organisation of context and situation.
Individual and group identities embrace one another.An individual in a specific situated context tends to hold the perceptions of groups that are ‘not monolithic or monochrome entities’ (Edwards, 2009, p.153), but rather they may tie themselves together in groups out of their own interests.That’s why individuals in the same group will constitute acceptable myths, beliefs, faiths and values to share with, which lays the foundation for their future practices and actions.Individuals may also be loyal to those whom they like or are aligned to through the negotiation in interaction.In this way, individual identities can be partly built up by the depth and extent of a person related to co-members within the same group (Joseph, 2004).
2.3.3.3 Proximity of Possible Selves
The construction of disciplinary identities is about membership in the community of discipline; its constructive process involves a dual component of self and social identity.Self can be an intermediated representation between desire and willingness driven by the above-mentioned local contents, which reflect a collective identification of social identity through ‘habitualisation of behaviour’ (Hyland, 2012, p.36).Arguably, an individual is less likely to enact all parts of self in a given discipline.Therefore, a more concrete idea is needed to measure the relationship between the components of self and the construction of disciplinary identities.In this study, the idea of the proximity of possible selves is addressed to solve this tension.
Possible selves in the original concept refer to the future-oriented ‘cognitive manifestation of enduring goals, aspirations, motives, fear and threats’ (Markus & Nurius, 1986, p.954).Knowing what individuals thought is as important as how they were thinking.The concept forms a complicated mixture of specific hopes, fears, fantasies, aspirations, obligations or expectations to represent individuals’ idea of themselves as they might become, would like to become, and are afraid of becoming.Therefore, possible selves entail a potential system to create and sustain individuals’ own ‘thoughts, feelings, characteristics, and behaviors’ (ibid.).
Individuals are able to create, develop and maintain a variety of selves in the construal of ongoing experiences.They compare and highlight significant properties from particular historical and sociocultural contexts, and act according to frames and symbols supported by the immediate social experiences.As such, contexts enable individuals to construct not only particular salient possible selves but also the differentiated contents and the behavioural consequences of possible selves.Individuals negotiate a wide array of resources in contexts and generate different types of possible selves in the same events or circumstances to guide their feelings or behaviours.Possible selves consequently ‘are not independently owned and controlled’; rather, ‘they are socially contingent and conditioned’ (Markus, 2006, p.xi).
Every discipline clearly consists of individuals with diverse local contents such as personal backgrounds and experiences, investments and expertise, all differing in how far they are close to local contents such as goals, practices, methods and values.Individuals participate in regular disciplinary practices and act disciplinary identities alongside a genre of conventional framing of the “way things are”, which Hyland (2012) explains as such:
‘Not only do familiar patterns of discourse, values and other practices get laid down through repeated experiences so that individuals display membership through their proximity to them, but also this routinisation opens up space for deliberation and innovation…’ (pp.36-37)
Here, Hyland’s (2012) idea of proximity is a useful idea to explain the tension between self and social identity in terms of how individuals use and are mediated by the available resources in a way of negotiating nearness or distance from a discipline.Hyland (2012) refers to proximity as ‘the use of a disciplinaryappropriate system of meanings’ (p.27) that ‘ties the individual into a web of disciplinary texts and discourses’ (ibid.).He explains that:
‘The idea of proximity...not only suggests how individuals display an alignment with the group, making connections to the cultural models which are the discourse of a discipline, but also draw attention to the symbolisation of this discourse.Proximity helps reinterpret… that discourse can be seen as both an attitude towards the another and of the other, building and occupying a body of dispositions in the context of a social group.’ (p.34)
When individuals discursively negotiate value sharing and interaction in a community of discipline, they also bring in individual identities and parts of selves that are construed in their past experiences, preferences and expectations.In this sense, the idea of proximity helps explain how far the individuals in groups are capable or willing to commit to the continuity of themselves and the interaction with the others.On the other hand, the individuals also need to negotiate the similarities and differences among the group members to gain or contest for membership through the use of appropriate disciplinary discourse.They tend not to equally engage in all interactions while shifting participation in different groups.Most likely, they invest different amounts of attitudes, beliefs and feelings, and act differently on the front or back stage (Goffman, 1959) in order to perform and manage different impressions on different people.While aligning themselves with the culture of discipline, the students also commit to personal experiences and individual identification of the context to shape the situated culture in context.Therefore, the idea represents the way in which an individual talks about the world, controls and manages activities with others.