understand extend understand text to text/question

Gee’s first theorem states that Discourses are not like languages because unlike in a language, you have to be fluent to be a part of that Discourse. In a language, you can know how to speak it, but that doesn’t mean you can be fluent in it. This same idea does not apply with Discourses, you either know it or you don’t. The second theorem states that primary Discourses can never be liberating literacies because they only contain themselves and not serve as a meta-language. These both are controversial because Discourses can overlap and blend together, so saying that you can’t ‘fake it until you make it’ doesn’t make sense.

 

Gee states that “Mushfake,’ resistance, and meta-knowledge: this seems to me like a good combination for successful students and successful social change” (Gee 13). Each of these elements are essential to Gee to having someone make their way into a particular Discourse. Mushfake is essentially making do with what you have, faking it until you make it one would say. Meta-Knowledge is when one person becomes aware of their own Discourse by trying to learn another, Gee states that, “Metaknowledge is liberation and power, because it leads to the ability to manipulate, to analyze, to resist while advancing” (13). Resistance to the stratified teaching of the middle class helps because that’s not how you get taught a Discourse. Gee talks about how students can be encourage to resist the superficial features of language but the problem with this is that they “cannot be taught in a regular classroom in any case; they can’t be ‘picked up’ later, outside the full context of an early apprenticeship” (12). So, we must either be born withit or learn from an early age.

 

Cuddy’s talk is about power posing, and making yourself confident and faking it until you make it. She explains how if you ‘power pose’ for two minutes your testosterone boosts and your cortisol goes down. She also takes a look at the gender grade gap at business schools and asks the question, “Is it possible that we could get people to fake it and it would lead them to participate more?” She also says that with power, if you feel it the more likely you are to do something, but if you fake it you are inclined to feel more powerful too. This connects to Gee’s statement about the word ‘mushfake’. He explains that “[this is] a term from prison culture, as making ‘do with something less when the real thing is not available’”(Gee 13). Although Gee is talking about a Discourse, he still is projecting the act of faking it until you make it like Cuddy stated in her Ted Talk.