Discourse In Educational And Social Research

WINNER: 2004 AESA Critics' Choice Award "With wonderful clarity Maggie MacLure shows how deconstructionism opens new avenues of critical inquiry and understanding for educational researchers. In exposing the hidden, ideological side of terms like clarity, certainty, mastery, and relevance she allows us to see schooling and educational policy in new ways. In so doing she allows us to imagine classrooms as liberating, pedagogical places, as places where new forms of desire, knowledge, and learning take place" Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign This book is both practical and provocative. It demonstrates the insights and the challenges of a discourse-based orientation to educational and social research. Drawing on a variety of educational and social science 'texts' - including press articles, life history interviews, parent-teacher consultations, policy debates and ethnographies - the author shows how knowledge, power, identities and realities are constructed and problematised in discourse. The book also deals with research itself as discursive practice, examining the texts that qualitative researchers produce and consume: reports, monographs, journal articles. Practical examples are included for researchers and graduate students wishing to 'interrogate' their own data from a discourse perspective. The author develops a critical awareness of the researcher's role as writer/reader of texts. The book makes the case for 'discursive literacy' in research. While its primary allegiances are to poststructuralism and deconstruction, it draws from a wide range of disciplines, including interaction sociology, feminist ethnography, literary theory, critical discourse analysis and art history. What holds the book together is the persistent question: how to do educational research and social research within a 'crisis of representation' that has unsettled the relationship between words and worlds?

This collection addresses concepts and theories of change, contexts and functions of reform discourses, and fields of change in educational research. It examines a wide variety of issues such as girls’ education in France, educational neuroscience, the professionalization in Child Protection, and mathematics discourses. It pays attention to the pervasiveness of crisis rhetoric in American Education Research, to the current university climate, and to perspectives for teacher education. The volume presents in-depth studies that integrate the perspective of history and philosophy of education. Educational research has been typically carried out within a discourse of change: changing educational practice, changing policy, or changing the world. Sometimes these expectations have been grand, as in claims of emancipation; sometimes they have been more modest, as in research as a support for specific reforms. This book explores the answers to such questions as: Are these expectations justified? How have these discourses of change themselves changed over time? What have researchers meant by change, and related concepts such as reform, improvement, innovation, progress and the new? Does this teleological and hopeful discourse itself reflect a particular historical and national/cultural point of view? Is it over promising for educational research to claim to solve social problems, and are these properly understood as educational problems? In doing so, it challenges prevailing ideas about the application of philosophy and history of education, and demonstrates the relevance of philosophical and historical approaches for the practice and theory of education and for educational research. This publication, as well as the ones that are mentioned in the preliminary pages of this work, were realized by the Research Community (FWO Vlaanderen / Research Foundation Flanders, Belgium) Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education: Faces and Spaces of Educational Research.

What are the influences that govern how people view their worlds? What are the embedded values and practices that underpin the ways people think and act? Discourses We Live By approaches these questions through narrative research, in a process that uses words, images, activities or artefacts to ask people – either individually or collectively within social groupings – to examine, discuss, portray or otherwise make public their place in the world, their sense of belonging to (and identity within) the physical and cultural space they inhabit. This book is a rich and multifaceted collection of twenty-eight chapters that use varied lenses to examine the discourses that shape people’s lives. The contributors are themselves from many backgrounds – different academic disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, diverse professional practices and a range of countries and cultures. They represent a broad spectrum of age, status and outlook, and variously apply their research methods – but share a common interest in people, their lives, thoughts and actions. Gathering such eclectic experiences as those of student-teachers in Kenya, a released prisoner in Denmark, academics in Colombia, a group of migrants learning English, and gambling addiction support-workers in Italy, alongside more mainstream educational themes, the book presents a fascinating array of insights. Discourses We Live By will be essential reading for adult educators and practitioners, those involved with educational and professional practice, narrative researchers, and many sociologists. It will appeal to all who want to know how narratives shape the way we live and the way we talk about our lives.

Accessible yet theoretically rich, this landmark text introduces key concepts and issues in critical discourse analysis and situates these within the field of educational research. The book invites readers to consider the theories and methods of three major traditions in critical discourse studies – discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, and multimodal discourse analysis -- through the empirical work of leading scholars in the field. Beyond providing a useful overview, it contextualizes CDA in a wide range of learning environments and identifies how CDA can shed new insights on learning and social change. Detailed analytic procedures are included – to demystify the process of conducting CDA, to invite conversations about issues of trustworthiness of interpretations and their value to educational contexts, and to encourage researchers to build on the scholarship in critical discourse studies. This edition features a new structure; a touchstone chapter in each section by a recognized expert (Gee, Fairclough, Kress); and a stronger international focus on both theories and methods. NEW! Companion Website with Chapter Extensions; Interviews; Bibliographies; and Resources for Teaching Critical Discourse Analysis.

This text is a collection of case studies and readings on the subject of doing research in education. It takes a personal view of the experience of doing research. Each author presents a reflexive account of the issues and dilemmas as they have lived through them during the undertaking of educational research. Coming from the researcher's own perspectives, their positions are revealed within a wider space that can be personal, political, social and refexive. With this approach, many issues such as ethics, gender, race, validity, reciprocity, sexuality, class, voice, empowerment, authorship and readership are given an airing.

This book in the NCRLL Collection provides an introductory discussion of discourse analysis of language and literacy events in classrooms. The authors introduce approaches to discourse analysis in a way that redefines traditional topics and provokes the imagination of researchers. For those who have limited knowledge of discourse analysis, this book will help generate new questions about literacy events in classrooms. For those familiar with this research perspective, it will map diverse new approaches. “Offers examples of classroom discourse with analyses that researchers and practitioners can use as the basis for pursuing their own analyses.” —Rob Tierney, Dean, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia “On Discourse Analysis provokes us to rethink discourse analytic approaches as generative tools that can open up new ways of seeing language and literacy events in classrooms. The authors richly illustrate the complexity and potential of discourse analysis studies with cases that orient us to foreground the local with broader cultural, historical, and social relations in ways that make evident what it means to be human. On Discourse Analysis provides a fresh approach to discourse analysis studies.” —Kris Gutierrez, University of California at Los Angeles

Beginning and well-seasoned researchers alike face significant challenges in understanding the complexities of research designs arising from both within and across methodological paradigms, and in applying them in ways that maximise impact on knowledge, practice, and policy. This volume engages educational and social researchers in a scholarly debate offering some crucial re-interpretations of established research methodologies in light of contemporary conditions and critical introduction to some contemporary research approaches yet to gain general recognition. This book is a contemporary vademecum for researchers, practitioners and graduate students on research methodologies and designs for educational and social change in today’s world. The chapters chart and analyse the conceptual and practical complexities of a variety research designs for contemporary educational and social work research. This anthology, taken overall, provides readers with the knowledge and understanding needed not only to design technically sound and coherent research studies, but also to develop methodologically innovative research projects that cross the boundaries between different methodological traditions to the benefit of scholarship, policy, and practice. The chapters cover nine research approaches: - Design-based research - Action research - Ethnomethodological research - Negotiated ethnography - Arts-informed research - Historical analysis and postcolonial scholarship - Policy analysis - Comparative research - Quantitative modelling of correlational and multi-level data The book provides a critical discussion of epistemological questions and methodological frontiers: - Knowledge and epistemology in scholarship, practice and policy - Digital knowledge and digital research - Emerging methodological challenges for educational research - Challenges and futures for social work and social policy research methods - Methodology and the knowledge industry

The authors of this volume claim that mathematics can be usefully re-conceptualized as a special form of communication. As a result, the familiar discussion of mental schemes, misconceptions, and cognitive conflict is transformed into a consideration of activity, patterns of interaction, and communication failure. By equating thinking with communicating, the discursive approach also deconstructs the problematic dichotomy between "individual" and "social" research perspectives.