Erin Roberson

English 111
Lucia Elden
28 September 2015
Problems in Joining Communities
When I first hear the word community, I automatically think of my small hometown of
Shepherd. It is the type of town where everyone seems to know everyone and everything that is
going on. Parents and students come to all the football and basketball games. There are
fundraisers for athletics and club trips. Shepherd is a community in itself brought together by
location, with many smaller subgroups within it. Citizens of the town and students of the school
who regularly visit or who live here belong to this community. They take part in many of the
activities put on such as the Maple Syrup Festival by volunteering throughout the weekend
festivities. Many of the people in the town have similar interests when it comes to the health of
our people, the education, and wanting to see everybody do well. Abiding by the rules and laws
of the town is a requirement for being accepted into and staying the community. However, teens
at the school who do drugs are looked down upon and deemed more as outcasts because they do
not follow the laws of the community. They are not quite accepted, as many completely outside
of the community are not accepted. Joining a community is a challenge that everyone faces at
some point in their lives, either by moving to a new place and joining a new community like
Shepherd or joining small groups like a club or even groups of friends.
This last spring there was a fire downtown that completely destroyed three buildings. I
remember getting done with track practice and coming outside of the school to wait for my older
sister to pick me up and just seeing this giant, dark cloud in the sky in the direction of downtown

quickly coming toward the school and filling the sky. The air smelled bitter and unpleasant. At
that time I got a text that said the basket weaving store was on fire. When my sister arrived I had
her drive past the store to see if we could get a look. The smoke was thick even a few blocks
down where the police had blocked off the road and directing people away from the danger. We
could see many firefighters and police officers there trying to fight this massive fire that was
spreading to two other stores. The whole street was filled with people watching them work. Later
that night, I read many stories of how the local store owners had brought food and clean drinking
water for the brave men. There was a sudden feeling of closeness in school the next day, the
people grim.
Outside was another story. Strangers to our community talked about the fire in an offhand
way, like one might talk about a disaster in faraway country. Tragic, but what can you do. It did
not affect them as much because they did not live there. They did not see the weaving store, print
store, and the laundromat every day like the rest of us did.
Months after the fire all that remains is an empty cleaned up plot and a big, dingy wall
that faces the main road. The worry of that has since faded and the town is back into its normal
routine. The city council has contacted the art department at the school and currently classes are
developing designs for a mural that represent Shepherd and are preparing to present final ideas to
the council soon. The mural will be going where once a fire raged, bringing together students and
representing the community of Shepherd. In many of the designs I have noticed that students
have put things that represent Shepherd as a whole, and things that are easily recognizable about
it, such as the water tower, railroad track and Mitchells.
It made me realize that only students from Shepherd or those who have spent a great deal
of time there would be able to do a project such as this. The students had to be familiar with the

area and know history of the town and people otherwise they were noted as outsiders, such a new
student, who will be referred to as John, who recently transferred and did not know the layout of
town as well. It may be more difficult for him to join this community because he is in a new
town he is unfamiliar with, these are new people who may have already set prejudices against
him, and he has to learn new culture and customs.
John may have had to go so far as to learn a new way of behaving to belong. In his old
community, some actions may have been acceptable but are not acceptable here or because of the
prejudices set against him, John needed to act a certain way to disprove those thoughts. Brent
Staples is a writer for the New York Times who has written about his experiences with set
prejudices against him because of the color of his skin and how he fit into neither the community
that people viewed him nor the community that he wanted to be in because of these prejudices.
In his struggle to join and fit into a more intellectual, less threatening community, he went so far
as to whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composer.
(17) It took him many years to learn to fit in, unlike John who may take only a few weeks
because John has fewer prejudices set against him and it makes joining the community easier.
John does not have to overcome the color of his skin, only small town rumors. Joining is also
made easier if he starts by joining smaller communities that make up the larger community of
Shepherd.
The community of Shepherd is made of many subgroups such as art community, science,
football, basketball, drama, band, student and parent communities. These subgroups are brought
together by shared interests and similar characteristics that mold them into smaller more specific
types of communities. One community that has a strong influence here is the running
community. In the running community, everyone is working toward a common goal: to become a

better runner. By running more miles, dropping their times or ranking higher in a race, becoming
better is a shared goal.
Many interests specifically about running are talked about and shared in this community,
which requires they have a shared vocabulary. Topics such as college track and cross country are
popular among coaches and high school runners. David Bartholomae discusses discourse
communities in his article Inventing the University. He writes that students have to change
their tone of voice in writing for the occasion, which is depending on the course they are writing
for they may have to write a certain way. The student has to write for a certain discourse
community, the same as someone joining a new community would have to learn the language of
that discourse community. Bartholomae states He has to learn to speak our language, to speak
as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding,
and arguing that define the discourse of our community. Or perhaps I should say the various
discourses of our community.(4) Even if you are not the best runner, as long as you act and
talk the way a runner does, for example using terms that refer specifically to running, you fit into
the community.
A community thrives on the connectedness of the people. Tom Hanks wrote about his
experience in community college and how even though the people themselves were so different,
the one thing that connected them was the school. As with Bartholomae, Hanks would have had
to adopt a new vocabulary for each of his courses. He also would have had to learn the discourse
for the community college itself, such as commonly used college terms. He writes Classmates
included veterans back from Vietnam, women of every marital and maternal status returning to
school, middle-aged men wanting to improve their employment prospects and paychecks. We
could get our general education requirements out of the way at Chabot credits we could

transfer to a university which made those two years an invaluable head start (1). It was only
a common goal of trying to get a higher education in order to get a better paying job that brought
Hanks together with his other classmates. In his instance, it was easy to join a community of
because of a shared goal. These common goals bring together individuals into a group with
shared interests, qualities, goals and even shared experiences that create a community of many.
The running community also recognizes that everybody works toward a common goal that they
have set for themselves as an individual, for example a runner wanting to drop 10 seconds off of
their mile time, but also the common goals of the community as a whole, for example a cross
country teams goal to win states.
Joining a community is sometimes a difficult task, and one that often overlooked.
Communities can be big or small with either a little or a lot that keeps them together. As
mentioned by Bartholomae, learning the discourse has a lot to do with fitting in. You can learn
the vocabulary and look and act the part but not truly understand and still be accepted into a
community. This is easier said than done, especially for those who cannot easily blend in. Staples
compares it by stating that learning a discourse is sometimes not enough. Even learning a
discourse may not be enough if you do not look the part, and thus you might have to find a new
way to fit in, as Staples did with his whistling. Throughout a lifetime a person will join a
multitude of communities. These communities can be challenging at times to join but are well
worth it. A community is there to support a person with their goals even through difficult times.
A community can affect a person for life. At the end of his article, Tom Hanks remarks to his
children while driving past the community college he spent only two years at, That place made
me what I am today. (1) Being a member of a community means never being alone.

Works Cited
Bartholomae, David. "INVENTING THE UNIVERSITY." Journal of Basic Writing 5.1
(1986): 4-23. Web.
Hanks, Tom. "I Owe It All to Community College." Www.nytimes.com. New York Times, 14
Jan. 2015. Web.
Staples, Brent. Black Men and Public Space. Exploring Relationships: Globalization and
Learning in the 21 Century. Pearson Learning Solutions, 2013. 15-17. Print
st