I have always wanted to be a barista, the person behind the counter at that cute little coffee shop who would make the drink that gave me life. When I was given that opportunity of course I took it as soon as I could; I had always felt like I was already a part of that community with all of the hours I would spend in coffee shops and having the knowledge of what all the drinks were. But on arriving at my first day of work at River City Coffee I quickly realized the life and community behind the counter is a completely different world than the one I had been living in.
River City Coffee is a discourse community. In an article discussing the concepts of discourse communities John Swales says that, “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals… mechanisms of
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If you were to walk into River City you would immediately notice the varying levels of skill and proficiency in the workplace. It would not be uncommon to see an employee observing the work of another, this is called shadowing and it’s a common tool used to help train new hires. While I was at work I interviewed the manager, Jessica, after I asked her about hiring new employees she told me, “We always have a few new people, I like employing students from Boise State and because of that we get a lot of people coming and going, and then we always have the few that stay around long enough to teach the new kids how it’s done.” (Jessica) I experienced this myself, when I started working at River City about 6 months ago I had a girl named Danielle teach me basicly everything, she had been working there for a while and was very good at her job so I was thankful to get that sort of hands on hands training rather than having to go learn how to be a barista off of the internet. And now it’s come to the point where often I’ll be the one teaching the