Abstract

academic discourse community has become a commonplace in discussions of writing across the disciplines. The purpose of this article is to critically examine this commonplace. Specifically, I argue that while many students may be unfamiliar with the specialized conventions of different disciplines, an image of our students as uninitiated outsiders fails to recognize that students are already longstanding members of the culture of school and are highly literate about how classrooms work. This image fails to account for the powerful legacy of school experiences that students bring with them every time they step into the classroom and undertake a writing assignment. That is, as Stanley Fish reminds us, our students are already in possession of (or more often