The Idea of an Essay, Volume 2

41 Integration Paper Recently scholars of the composition community have become interested in the concepts of ideology and resistance that take place in various professional communities. There is much discussion over how communities use their genres to portray their ideology and how genre critique uncovers these belief systems. Furthermore, the idea of resistance to these ideologies has become a hot topic of debate, especially when it comes to Christians participating in secular communities. More research is needed in order to show how members of a community analyze their discipline in order to discover its ideology and then choose to resist these ideologies in a way that integrates their own belief system into their discipline. This is especially true for Christians, who often times find themselves participating in secular disciplines whose ideology, to some extent, disagrees with their faith. Therefore, this paper will be discussing the function of genre and how members, especially Christians, can effectively participate in a community whose ideology can be resisted, specifically in the professional field of Nursing. This will be accomplished by first discussing genre ideology, resistance, and analysis and then applying these thoughts to Christians in the discipline of Nursing. This will be done in order to prove that members of a professional community need to know the ideology of their discipline, how to resist those ideologies, the consequences of that resistance, and how they can be successful in integrating their faith into their profession. The main purpose of genre is to express unity in a discourse community by portraying the ideology of the group. Bawarshi states that genres are, “ideological configurations that are realized in their articulation, as they are used by writers (and readers)” (9). In this case, ideology is the shared goals and beliefs of the community, a community made up of readers and writers. Bawarshi describes discourse community as, “the social and rhetorical environment within which cognitive habits, goals, assumptions, and values are shared by participants who employ common discourse strategies for communicating and practicing these cognitive habits, goals, assumptions, and values” (5). In other words, discourse communities are unified through common ways of communicating, and these modes of communication allow the ideology to be expressed and