My chosen discourse is building houses. The first artifact I chose was an article titled Who’s Who on Your Building Team by Pat Curry. My other article is A Step-by-Step Guide to the Home Building Process by Susan Bady.

Building houses is a long process that involves many different people. Being a builder can either be a primary discourse because you can learn it at home when you are young from your family, or it could also be  secondary discourse that you acquire from school or work. The discourse of building houses is also dominant discourse because it brings in social goods such as money, learning new skills, gaining experience, and even bringing in more customers when they see the great work your company is capable of. As far as identities go, there are a lot. You start with the homeowner and home building firm. Within the building firm there are developers, architects, sales consultants, construction superintendents, and many more important roles. The house building discourse is very unique because it uses lots of “language” that means one thing to everyday people, but a whole different thing to the workers. One example from the Curry article is the word elevation, which in the case of building houses, means the look on the front facade of the home. Because of all these homographs, and other unique words, I think it will be hard to mushfake your way through this discourse.

Gee defines a Primary Discourse as one that we acquire “through our primary socialization early in life in the home and peer group” (Gee 7). A Secondary Discourse, on the other hand, is something that we acquire through “interacts with various non-home based social institutions- institutions in the public sphere, beyond the family and immediate kin and peer group” (Gee 8). Building houses can either be a primary or secondary discourse, depending on the individual. For me it is my primary discourse because my dad has been a builder since before I was born and growing up, I was always around him, at the job sites, and exposed to the house building discourse. Gee says that Primary Discourses are acquired “not by overt instruction, but by being a member of a primary socializing group (family, clan, peer group)” (Gee 8). I came into the discourse from my dad (family). To someone else, the construction discourse would be secondary. With a Secondary Discourse “we are given access to these institutions [local stores and churches, schools, community groups, state and national businesses, agencies and organizations, and so forth] and are allowed apprenticeship with in them” (Gee 8). Building houses is a job that most people start sometime after school, so they are given access to the institution, and they have an apprenticeship under a master of house building, where they learn and will acquire their secondary discourse. 

According to Gee, Dominant Discourses “bring with it the (potential) acquisition of social ‘goods’ (money, prestige, status, etc.)” (Gee 8). In construction, whether it is your primary or secondary, you can get social good from it. In the article by Pat Curry, she says that the “goal: [is]  to deliver a high quality, pristine home...” and when companies build houses such  as these they earn a high status among other builders (Curry 5). Also workers get social goods in the form of getting experience, learning new skills, and getting paid. 

Gee defines Discourses as “saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations” (Gee 6). The “saying (writing)” part is very important for all discourses because the language used is what will separate the masters from the mushfakers. There are many terms in the construction discourse that, without knowledge, you would not understand. In the Susan Bady article, she used words such as footings, house wrap, dried in, r-value, HVAC, and many others. There are also lots of words that are homographs, or a word that has different meaning, depending on what discourse they are being used in. One example is “cure”, which most people think means restoring health, but in this case it actually is the time needed for a concrete foundation to harden before building can start (Bady 2). “Foundation” is another example becauses people could think it means the makeup product, when actually it is the concrete base of a house (Curry 4). Without having been in the discourse, ordinary people will not know the lingo that goes along with building houses, and will be very confused.