Inventing the University
Bartholomae uses the metaphor of community to discuss the idea that each discourse, as with a subculture, has outsiders and insiders. He says that student writers need to find a way to function both as the student and as a member of the discourse community and that teachers need to give their students access to the social and political communities enveloped by the discourse. If teachers fail to do this, students will not have the familiarity of an "insider" that would enable them to participate in the conversations of that discourse community. Lack of this familiarity would also disable them from “inventing the university,” or learning to speak the language of that discourse community. Specifically, Bartholomae says that “[Students] need to extend themselves, by successive approximations, into the commonplaces, set phrases, rituals and gestures, habits of mind, tricks of persuasion, obligatory conclusions and necessary connections that determine the “what might be said” and constitute knowledge within the various branches of our academic community.” He says that students need not only to “state their presence” within the field of a subject, but establish authority in the field and then identify themselves as informed to the bigger picture.