12. Learning to Serve

Mirabelli, in "Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers" was asking just how rhetorically demanding waiting is.  In the introduction he addresses a lot of stereotypes that have been formed about waiting as an occupation.  He mentions the claim that to wait requires just a ninth grade education.  The ethnography basically serves to counter these sorts of claims by saying that waiting tables requires a variety of different types of literacies.  Waiters must be able to read the customers as well be familiar enough with the menu to answer any question asked about it.  Mirabelli conducted all of his research at the diner where he worked for some time.  He studied  conversations between the waiting staff and the customers and carefully broke down the various techniques used to construct meaning.  The main thing that he found was that waiters are required to practice a lot to acquire the linguistic skills and knowledge of the kitchen's capabilities to succeed in the field.

11. Proposal: Discourse Community Ethnography

I'm planning to write my Discourse community ethnography about the juggling community.  This refers to anyone engaged in the study and practice of juggling.  In blog post 10 I explained how the juggling community, according to Swales' 6 criteria, is a discourse community. To reiterate, the juggling community agrees on a specific set of common public goals. The most important common goal is each member's personal skill development.  Another goal of the juggling community is to invent new juggling techniques. A third goal of the juggling community is to make the non juggling public more aware of what jugglers do.  The juggling community has mechanisms of communication between members.  Members of the juggling community are always trying to learn new types of juggling, so the most important type of communication is communications which can help a juggler to understand how a particular juggling pattern works.  Face to face communication and being able to physically see people's tricks is the best, so if you are willing to travel the necessary distance juggling conventions are the perfect place to communicate about juggling with other jugglers.  The internet with its capacity for showing videos as well as facilitating social networking allows for workable communications over long distances as well.  The juggling community mostly satisfies the third criteria, that participation is mainly to provide information and feedback to each other.  This information, the educational discourse can appear in all of the media that I just discussed. The online sources dish out feedback real directly through discussion boards and the like, and in person juggling communications are even more open to feedback what with the conversational nature of such interactions.  The juggling community utilizes a variety of genres in it's discourse as well.  There are the two major genres of juggling, sport and entertainment; as well as the subdivision of circus arts in the family such as diabolos, devil sticks, cigar boxes, contact juggling, kendamas, and so on.  Juggling has also developed it's own lexis through the plethora of props, trick names, and of course site swap notation.  Swales' final criteria for being a discourse community is that there are at least some members with a wealth of knowledge in the field to share with all of the novices and hobbyists.  While the infinite nature of juggling's possibility, no one is completely an expert, but anyone who knows how to do anything that a juggler hasn't yet figured out can be a teacher.

I've been learning to juggle for the past two and a half years, and I've become more acquainted with jugglers from all over the place since I began.  While attending University I stumbled across the local juggling club and joined.  Shortly thereafter I started watching juggling videos on YouTube.  People would post tutorials for juggling tricks, compilation videos featuring various techniques, performance videos, and sport jugglers put up a lot of their competition videos.  I've attended some juggling conventions, and in doing so, I've learned a lot about juggling that I never would have even imagined possible.  Now I'm the vice president of the juggling club and we are about to host a convention right here in Athens.

I figure I will be able to interview a few people at the convention for my Ethnography.  Jugglers from around the globe have told us that they will be there, so I can't imagine it being terribly difficult to find a relevant voice on the subject.

I have some printouts from a few workshop that I, and some friends of mine, have attended in the past.  I can look at the approaches to discourse used on them.  I will also look at a few examples of video tutorials.  There will also be a bit of discussion concerning the digital juggling animation programs that have been showing up on the interwebs lately.  I might even try to get my hands on a copy of The IJA's magazine about juggling to look at how the more traditional use of written discourse plays out in the juggling community.

10. The Concept of Discourse community

I've been learning to juggle for the past two and a half years, and one thing that has struck me as interesting throughout that time is how much of a cohesive community jugglers around the world have formed.  It sort of went against the archetypal notion of lone self taught jugglers that I had come to expect in my childhood.  While attending University I stumbled across the local juggling club, and I was amazed.  It was a large group of people with members at a variety of skill levels all hanging out together building skills.  The learning process of juggling from the simplest motions to the far more complex tricks was visible for the first time and this inspired me enough to join.  When it got to be too cold for the club to hold meetings outside, we would still juggle every Friday in one of the school's lecture halls with high ceilings and giant projector screens connected to the internet.  While there I was introduced to the magical world of juggling videos.  On YouTube people would post tutorials for juggling tricks, compilation videos featuring various techniques, performance videos, and the sport jugglers have their competition videos.  These were my first glimpses of what is the greater juggling community.  There are several common ways to approach juggling, as a hobbyist, a competitor, or an entertainer.  All three of these categories come together though in juggling clubs just like mine in cities, and schools all over the place.  These clubs frequently hold conventions which bring in an even wider array of the juggling community.  Its a worldwide network of communicating individuals influencing each others development, and informing each other of their apparent innovations, but can this group be described in terms of the literary notion of a discourse community?

John Swales Defines a discourse community along six specific criteria.  According to Swales, a discourse community must agree on a specific set of common public goals.  The juggling community is made up of a bunch of members who each want to better their own juggling skills and most of which are perfectly happy to teach what they do know to others.  Having access to each other's advancements makes it easier for everyone to make their own advancements.  Another goal of juggling is to make the non juggling public more aware of what jugglers do.  Swales says that discourse communities all have mechanisms of communication.  Face to face communication and being able to physically see people's tricks is the best, so if you are willing to travel the necessary distance juggling conventions are the perfect place to communicate about juggling with other jugglers.  The internet and its capacity for showing videos of decent quality, as well as the many social networking sites allow for workable communications long distance as well.  He claims that members of discourse communities participate mainly to provide information and feedback to each other.  In juggling, the relevant information are the juggling methods which a juggler watching might someday want to learn.  This can be communicated via video, site swap descriptions, digital site swap generators, and verbal descriptions of what exactly is going on.  Feedback shows up on the internet in video comments and on both sides of any discussion about juggling.

The fourth criteria that Swales mentions is that discourse communities make use of one or more genres to reach its goals.  The two major genres of juggling are sport and entertainment.  There is even a great deal of contention between the two approaches.  Sport jugglers are always focused on doing the most difficult possible juggling tricks, whereas entertainment jugglers focus more on doing the most visually dazzling or unexpected tricks.  There are also a whole mess of circus arts which are in the family of juggling such as diabolos, devil sticks, cigar boxes, contact juggling, kendamas, and so on.  The prop being used by the juggler could very much be said to govern the genre of their juggling.  Another requirement Swales mentions is that the community must acquire some lexis.  Jugglers have the plethora of trick names that few people out side of the juggling community would recognize.  Every pattern has a name.  There is even something known as site swap notation which assigns a number to each of several types of throws.  A "3" is the type of throw you use for standard three ball juggling, a "4" is the type for four ball, and so on.  A "1" is a quick pass from one hand to the other, and a "2" is a 2 beat hold.  What the numbers actually mean is the number of beats between the ball's being thrown and it landing assuming that there is one throw every beat and that the throwing hand alternates between left and right.  Because the throws alternate, even numbers land in the same hand and odd numbers land in the opposite hand.  With site swap we are able to create patterns like 441, 56780123, and 97531.  To juggle said patterns you must first figure out the number of balls necessary which you can do by taking the average of the numbers.  The first pattern isfor three balls, the second for four, and the third for five.  You then find a comfortable beat by running the standard pattern for that number, and then start making each throw follow the sequence of said site swap pattern.  Swales' final criteria for being a discourse community is that there are at least some members with a wealth of knowledge in the field to share with all of the novices and hobbyists.  Juggling certainly has that.  There's no limit to what a juggler can learn.  No matter how good you are, you can always add another object, or learn a new variation, and there are people around the world on the cutting edge of that fractal.