As established by Swales (1990), a discourse community, to be recognized as such, should meet six requirements which will be mentioned below with some examples taken from the article Beyond reflection: teacher learning as praxis (Hoffman-Kipp, Artiles A., Lopez-Torres L. 2003) where it is clear the goal of working on teacher professional development.
A discourse community should achieve certain objectives and have specific interests. In the case of teachers, one of the objectives could be that of reflection on their teaching practice.
Moreover, a discourse community should be able to provide information and feedback and one way of doing it is through the publication of articles.
Furthermore, information exchange is also a requirement fulfilled in the development of the online journal by which teachers can critically dialogue.
A clear example of a community-specific genre and highly specialized terminology is seen in the following extract:
The purpose of this article is to outline a vision of teacher reflection that is constitutive of teacher learning as praxis. The theoretical basis of this discussion is framed by (a) the legacy of Freire's education for freedom and (b) cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) (Engestrom, Miettinen & Punamaki, 1999 as cited in Hoffman-Kipp et al., 2003).
Finally, the members of a discourse community can show their high general level of expertise by naming and judging other works that experts on their area may have published.
In conclusion, meeting the six requirements stated by Swales (1990) would make teachers become a member of a discourse community and develop into better professionals.
References
Hoffman-Kipp, Artiles A., Lopez-Torres L. (2003). Beyond reflection: teacher learning as praxis. Theory into practice.
