Some Ideas from John Swales

John Swales talks about six defining characteristics of a discourse community. Here are the first three with some examples of how they apply to history professors.

• A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.

This rule definitely applies to history professors. The general goal is of course to provide the best education possible to students. History professors have to keep up on new developments and theories in their field and keep their students up to date on the new information. Another goal is just to keep history alive and viewed as an important subject. We can learn so much about the present and future just by studying the past.

• A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunications among its members.

History professors must have ways of communicating to continue to be on top of new information. This is true of almost every discourse community. In different fields, people may need more urgent means of communication, but for history professors, simple online trade journals and news stories do just fine. People in the history department at universities will also change the curriculum based on the new information shared over these sites.

• A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarly to provide information and feedback.

While history professors do provide feedback on trade journals and other news sources, I'm not sure that is the primary use of the participatory mechanisms. In my opinion, the primary use it just to get the information out there so universities can decide how to handle the new information and whether or not to add it to course curriculums.