If a student chooses to pursue a career, they need to make more of an effort outside of just learning the skills and knowledge needed. A student must further learn how to play the role, to a degree that others in that career will be able to recognize it. On the other hand, a student can obtain the needed knowledge of the career without being able to perform the role of their career to a degree where others in the career recognize the student as  well-developed in the career. An example of this would be a lawyer preparing for court. The lawyer may know all of the laws and arguments to be brought up in court, but not know how to present their arguments to the judge and jury because they don’t know, or fully know, how to speak like, act like, and be a lawyer to a degree where they are able to win a case. In order for a student to prosper in their chosen career, they need to study the patterns, action, values, beliefs, and attributes of the career that characterize their chosen career.

These combinations of traits, according to linguist James Paul Gee in his work Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics, can be called and characterized as Discourses (7). According to Gee, Discourses are the “saying-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations” of a person’s identity (6). Gee describes Discourses as “a sort of identity kit” (7), they have a specific behavior or style to each that makes it easy to spot who or what they are. For example, a waiter would be easy to spot because they typically have a set uniform and behavior they have to follow.

Along with Gee’s explanation of what a Discourse is, he also explains how someone might obtain one.

Apprentices working to get into the lawyer Discourse are likely to fall off their path of becoming a lawyer, forgetting why they wanted to be a lawyer in the first place, or deal with hard criticisms from peers or anyone else. According to Gee, one strategy for maintaining a Discourse would be to surround yourself around others in the same Discourse for help. I explore these challenges and scenarios in Letter to a Law Student Interested in Social Justice by William P. Quigley. The source, Letter to a Law Student Interested in Social Justice, is a letter written from a social justice lawyer to a student committing to becoming a social justice lawyer. The letter addresses the challenges the student will face with staying on their chosen career path, and not following the mainstream route. As a result, I argue that the best strategies for sticking to chosen Discourse are “enculturation into social practices” (7), because they help a student with mastering their chosen Discourse. This is important for social justice lawyers to know because it’s easy for them to get lose themselves in the process of becoming a social justice lawyer.

James Paul Gee argues that Discourses are “ways of being in the world” (6), like an “identity kit” (7), which can be seen in a person’s reason behind choosing their Discourse. A person’s values can push them to choose a Discourse where what they value can be used as their identity. In this case, a social justice lawyer who might value helping people will have the identity of helping people because their Discourse as a social justice lawyer is to help people. So when Quigley writes to the student, he quotes an anonymous source that says “The first thing I lost in law school was the reason that I came” (9), the first thing a social justice lawyer loses in school is what they valued in the first place. Everyone who chooses to go to law school follows the same path as those before them. Their path is nicely laid out for them to make it as a well-paid lawyer, and everyone follows the same path. Lawyers who choose to follow the same path as everyone else have a main interest in money. Quigley states lawyers who are looking to make a lot of money “is a very mainstream, traditional goal and many have gone before to show the way and carefully tend the roads” (10). With students in law school taking two different paths, this ends up creating a sort of tension between the Discourses. On one hand, you have most law students taking the easy path to becoming well-paid lawyers; and on the other hand, you have law students that are choosing a path where what they value plays a major role in their career or Discourse. The tension ends up being that students looking to become social justice lawyers have to remove themselves from those who are looking for money, which is inherently hard to do considering it is a “mainstream, traditional goal” for students to pursue law for money (10).

Gee presents a strategy that social justice students can use in the face of this challenge. Gee explains this possible strategy as an “enculturation into social practices through scaffolded and supported interactions with fluent members of the Discourse” (7). What this means is that a person looking to enter a Discourse has to gradually become apart of that group, that’s the “enculturation into social practices”, with the help and support, “through scaffolded and supported interactions”, from someone who already has that Discourse, “fluent members of the Discourse” (7). A student looking to be a social justice lawyer can use this strategy by surrounding themselves with people who are already social justice lawyers, or with people who are on the same path as them. This will help these students with staying on their path to become a social justice lawyer and not falling off and taking the mainstream path.