CONCEPT
Identity Kit
Gee's practical metaphor for a Discourse considered as resources — the tools, vocabularies, values, and recognized practices one picks up and performs to be recognized as a certain kind of person.
Gee used identity kit as an accessible way to describe what a Discourse is, concretely. To be a software engineer means having an identity kit: the programming languages, the technical vocabulary, the debugging practices, the habits of code review, the aesthetic preferences for elegance and simplicity, the patterns of Stack Overflow participation, the jokes, the shared war stories about production incidents. A practitioner performs these elements and, through the performance, is recognized by others as a member of the community. The kit is not a costume worn over an unchanged self. It is the set of resources through which a particular kind of self is constituted and recognized.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The metaphor's force comes from its concreteness. Talking about "Discourse" can sound abstract; talking about an identity kit makes the practices visible. A young lawyer learning her profession is not merely absorbing information. She is picking up a kit — the vocabulary, the habits of argument, the dress codes,