“Transition in and between Discourse Communities: One Nurse’s Struggle”

by Terri Cole | Xchanges 9.2

Methods

I began my research around March, 2012. Lena and I conducted several interviews, some were informal conversations and others were more formal, such as recordings and emails. Below is a list of questions that I emailed to Lena just to provide an example, although there were many others:

• What kinds of writing do nurses do?
• How does writing help nurses get their jobs done?
• What are some of the challenges you faced learning this writing on the job, if any?
• Can you explain in detail the kinds of academic writing you did and the kinds of writing you do in the workplace today?
• What challenges have you faced in writing for different audiences (nurses, doctors, etc.) in the workplace?

I also contacted the nursing educator at Sherwood Hospital, Caroline Horton (a pseudonym), for an interview. I spoke with her informally, mainly inquiring about the types of nursing literacy practices and their function in the workplace. She provided insight into expectations of nurses, as well as the effects technology had on nursing documentation, which resulted in reducing documentation from a substantially narrative structure to mainly check-boxes that contain a small free-text box at the bottom of the page. Horton claims that this free-text box is “usually no longer than 2-3 sentences and [written in] when an unexpected event happens.”

Lena was able to provide me with two forms of documentation: the Progress Notes and the SBARP. In one way, the SBARP serves as a vehicle of information from one nurse to another but also as a reminder to the nurse on shift to maintain accurate documentation. Lena explained that the SBARP is “for your eyes only,” meaning the nurse writing the SBARP is the only person who actually sees what is written. Therefore, nurses can write whatever they want; they can choose to include or negate information. In some ways then, the SBARP is almost a form of note taking for the nurse on shift so that she remembers which information to verbalize to the oncoming nurse during shift change.

Enculturation in Writing Studies

Current research in composition, enculturation studies, and literacy studies all confirm that writing influences and is influenced by society. Gee (1989) introduces us to Discourses (with a capital D) as “ways of being in the world” and asserts: “Discourse is a sort of ‘identity kit’ which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize” (p. 6). Therefore, although writing is socially constructed, writing also constructs social roles.

Other scholars such as Ketter & Hunter (2003), Anson & Forsberg (1990), Wardle (2004), and Michaud (2013) have conducted studies in enculturation, inviting us to engage in their research to try to understand how people transition from one discourse community to another and the effects the enculturation process has on identity. Wardle (2004) states: “Joining new workplace communities, then, is not simply a matter of learning new skills but also of fielding new calls for identity construction. This understanding of identity suggests that people enact and negotiate identities in the world over time: Identity is dynamic (Hecht, 1993), and it is something that is presented and re-presented, constructed and reconstructed in interaction” (p. 3).

Therefore, one’s identity in an academic discourse community must be negotiated with the identity in the workplace community and essentially a new workplace writer must “come to understand that the audience in [one] genre differs from that in [another]” (Ketter & Hunter, 2003, p. 321). Consequently, “in order [for the writer] to write at all, in order to produce texts to become transactionally real, writers must first be able to adopt a persona appropriate to their position in the workplace, acceptable to themselves, their superiors, and other eventual audiences of their writing” (Anson & Forsberg, 1990, p. 207). As we will see later, Lena adopts her preceptor’s (nurse trainer) method and documentation style until she develops her own.