Gee offers two controversial “theorems” that follow from his new, social definition of literacy. (9-11). Paraphrase or put these theorems into your own words, then explain in what way(s) they might be “unsettling.”

Gee’s first theorem states that Discourses are not like languages in that you can’t have a partial understanding of them. Gee says that “You are either in it or you’re not” (9). This can be unsettling because I think it might make individuals feel insecure, that they could never really fit in with a group. Having that realization that you can’t have one foot in a group and the other in another can be unsettling. His second theorem states that primary discourses can never be liberating because it doesn’t contain a discourse to critique nor a set of meta-elements they can critique with. I don’t really know why this might be unsettling because I still don’t really understand how a Discourse can be liberating or what that entails. 

“‘Mushfake,’ resistance, and meta-knowledge: this seems to me like a good combination for successful students and successful social change” (Gee 13). Use evidence from the text to explain these three concepts.

Honestly, I have NO idea what these three things even have to do with Discourses and I don’t know how to begin answering this question. I get what each of these things are individually, but how they connect to Discourses and now students I’m unsure of. 

Imagine Gee and Fortin were to have a conversation. What would they be saying to each other, or how do they seem to comment on, connect with, or critique each other? Note: this is a conversation framing move.

Fortin’s report seems to give a real-life example to Gee’s claims that school discourses are often focused on giving children the “right” education for their social class. Their ideas seem to build off one other and support each other’s claims. 

How might you enter this conversation? Keeping your response to Gee’s and Fortin’s observations in mind, choose two passages (one from each reading) and use Barclay’s formula to write a paragraph that explains your thinking.

Both Fortin and Gee’s writing examines school Discourses and Fortin’s report seems to show what Gee talks about in theory. In Fortin’s “Access to Literacy is Not a Constitutional Right” she reports on a recent court case involving severely neglected schools in Detroit. In it, she quotes an attorney saying that “’Historically, access to literacy has been a tool to subordinate certain groups and certain communities and to keep those communities down,’” (Fortin 2). This quote is explaining how the neglected schools are a civil rights violation and why the neglect is a problem. In Gee’s essay “Literacy, Discourse and Linguistics: Introduction” he explains that upper-class discourses focus on superficial features of language because they, “are the best test as to whether one was apprenticed in the ‘right’ place, at the ‘right’ time, with the ‘right’ people” (Gee 11). Fortin is giving an example of students that won’t be allowed into certain Discourses because they weren’t taught and prepared for what those Discourses want. When Fortin quotes the attorney she is saying something very similar to Gee’s point that Discourses can bar the ‘wrong’ people from entering their Discourse by not giving them the tools to access it.