The importance of understanding our roles as educators in light of recent discussions of discourse communities cannot be overemphasized. Students are expected to achieve at high levels using "schooled literacy," but many have difficulty entering and acclimating themselves to university discourse communities, because they are ill-prepared to negotiate the terrain.

This paper, then, relates my own process in uncovering various alternatives to such a problem. First, I accepted with "resigned realism" the ideas of E.D. Hirsch and the suggestion that we must simply enculturate our students into the vocabulary, typifications, and schemes of a relatively static and singular university discourse. More research, however, has changed my perceptions. Theorists like Patricia Bizzell, Joseph Harris, Greg Myers, John Trimbur, Stanley Fish, and Carolyn Miller suggest the problems with a foundationalist approach (such as Hirsch's), show anti-foundationalism (as practiced by Berlin) to be equally ineffective, and offer instead suggestions of a new rhetoric that prepares students for dissensus, variety, and instability in the various discourse communities in which they will ultimately partake.

I cite theoretical suggestions of the potential for such a new rhetoric, but remind the reader that practical applications must come from the individual teacher in the individual classroom. To suggest otherwise, in fact, would be to contradict all that such research theory indicates.