Investigating and theorizing discourse during analogy writing in chemistry

Explanations of the role of analogies in learning science at a cognitive level are made in terms of creating bridges between new information and students' prior knowledge. In this empirical study of learning with analogies in an 11th grade chemistry class, we explore an alternative explanation at the “social” level where analogy shapes classroom discourse. Students in the study developed analogies within small groups and with their teacher. These classroom interactions were monitored to identify changes in discourse that took place through these activities. Beginning from socio‐cultural perspectives and hybridity, we investigated classroom discourse during analogical activities. From our analyses, we theorized a merged discourse that explains how the analog discourse becomes intertwined with the target discourse generating a transitional state where meanings, signs, symbols, and practices are in flux. Three categories were developed that capture how students intertwined the analog and target discourses—merged words, merged utterances/sentences, and merged practices. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 771–792, 2011     

Constitution and bylaws eastern communication association

This essay investigates the operation of discourse and power in the constitution of social identity and reality, as represented in Japanese American internment narratives. The analysis identifies forms of subjectivity, discursive strategies and practices to gain insight into the lived experience of internees and into the process by which discursive closure is realized in cultural systems. The Japanese American subject is constituted as a “Radical Other” in internment stories through two interwoven threads: the Japanese American subject as (dis)loyal and the Japanese American subject as “enemy alien.” The essay concludes with a discussion of implications for public discourse, narration, and criticism.     

“We don't want your opinion”: Knowledge Construction and the Discourse of Opinion in the Equity Classroom

As educators who teach courses that examine social power, we often struggle with a specific form of resistance in the equity-oriented classroom: “That's just [the author]'s opinion.” This “opinion discourse” emerges when students study scholarship that unsettles dominant knowledge claims and methods or when students are themselves asked to situate their knowledge. The opinion discourse could easily be read as simply an example of the lack of critical thinking skills among students. However, we believe that opinion discourse is more than a facile response to new ideas. We want to take opinion discourse seriously. We argue that opinion functions as a discursive project of resistance in the context of the equity-oriented classroom by solidifying inequitable power relations between the knower and that which is known. Our goals are twofold: to explicate how the opinion discourse functions as a specific legitimization of existing power relations and to unsettle the discursive authority that opinion offers.     

A systematic form of Japanization in Okinawa: Japanese identity construction through a Japanization discourse in textbooks and a textbook guide

This research examines some modes of Japanization through education in Okinawa where Japanese influences on education have permeated after Japan’s annexation. I investigate how a book excerpt entitled Mizu no Tōzai, included in high school textbooks in Okinawa, constructs Japanese identity. Mizu no Tōzai functions as nihonjinron discourse, which is characterized by ‘Japanese culture,’ ‘Japanese uniqueness,’ and ‘Japaneseness.’ The ‘East-West’ dichotomy, depicted in this nihonjinron discourse, induces students to choose ‘Japan’/‘Japanese culture’ and become ‘Japanese.’ Practice sections of Mizu no Tōzai in textbooks as well as a textbook guide operate to be complicit in this Japanese identity construction. Through a critical analysis of discourse, I reveal that the nihonjinron discourse operating as official knowledge, in collusion with the other discursive texts, produces a position subjected to the discourse of Japanization within which Okinawans become ‘Japanese.’ I problematize these discursive texts as a systematic form of Japanizing Okinawans’ minds through education.     

A study of practical‐moral knowledge in science teaching: Case studies in physical science classrooms

This study further extends a conceptual framework that explores science teaching as a “practice” not reducible to the application of formal knowledge, but as informed by teachers' practical‐moral knowledge. A hermeneutic model was developed to examine practical‐moral knowledge indirectly by investigating teachers' commitments, interpretations, actions, and dialectic interactions between them. The study also aimed to analyze teachers' actions in terms of their interpretations and commitments as they realize “internal goods” of their practice. Ethnographic case studies of three science teachers were conducted through classroom observation, in‐depth interviews and dialogues, and artifact analysis. A commitment of preparing students for national exams was common to the three teachers but was manifested differently in classroom practices. This commitment originated from interpretations about the duty of “good” teachers not letting students and schools down. Other emergent commitments were commitments: to conceptual understandings, to “challenge” learners, and to social modeling. We present each with associated interpretations and actions. The concepts of practical wisdom (phronesis) and gap closing are used to characterize teachers' practical knowledge and its development respectively. Implications for teacher education are discussed. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 929–951, 2010     

形象建构的内涵、类型与话语实践

形象一直以来是哲学、社会心理学、文学等学科的经典话题,但相关研究往往采用宏观视角。受社会建构论思潮的影响,形象研究迎来了“话语转向”,形象建构与传播开始引发话语分析、语用学等领域学者的关注。尽管越来越多的研究者基于话语分析或会话分析探讨形象建构问题,但这些研究因缺乏合适的分析框架而总体显得片面、主观。为此,本研究在现有文献基础上,以形象的话语建构观为理论导向,尝试对形象建构的内涵、类型和话语实践方式作系统考察,以期能够为未来的形象研究提出一个可操作的分析框架。     

B Is For Burqa,C Is For Censorship: The Miseducative Effects of Censoring Muslim Girls and Women's Sartorial Discourse

In this article, I add a discursive analysis to the discussion about Muslim girls and women's dress in non-Muslim educational contexts. I argue that a law or policy that prohibits the wearing of khimar, burqa, chador, niqab, hijab, or jilbab in the context of public schools is a form of censorship in educational contexts. This sartorial censorship is miseducative in the sense that it impedes the achievement of important educational goals, especially in public education. I consider the public nature of public education and discuss three sets of miseducative effects: First, the examination of discursive processes, including the production of social norms, is limited. Second, the critical uptake of the banned discourse by female Muslim students themselves is foreclosed, and their agency hindered. Third, a metadiscourse arises that translates individual sartorial discursive acts into generalized terms (such as “veils” and “headscarves”) without noticing what is lost in translation.     

Social Justice and Education as Discursive Initiation

In this essay Krassimir Stojanov attempts first to reconstruct the “heart” of Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics, namely the so‐called “principle of universalization” of ethical norms. This principle grounds Habermas's proceduralist account of social justice via equal access of all concerned to the practices of deliberative validation of norms. Stojanov claims with regard to this account that it could only be implemented if the social actors are involved in a process of education as discursive initiation. After using R. S. Peters's educational theory to distinguish discursive initiation from a traditionalist understanding of educative initiation, he discusses some central social prerequisites for the development of discursive skills in growing individuals; to identify these prerequisites, he draws on Axel Honneth's conception of the intersubjective origins of individuals' development of rational autonomy. In the final part of the essay, Stojanov briefly explores some implications of his elaborated account of discursive initiation and its social preconditions for schooling and pedagogy.     

Camila,the earth,and the sun: Constructing an idea as shared intellectual property

Recent research has challenged traditional assumptions that scientific practice and knowledge are essentially individual accomplishments, highlighting instead the social nature of scientific practices, and the co‐construction of scientific knowledge. Similarly, new research paradigms for studying learning go beyond focusing on what is “in the head” of individual students, to study collective practices, distributed cognition, and emergent understandings of groups. These developments require new tools for assessing what it means to learn to “think like a scientist.” Toward this goal, the present case study analyzes the discourse of a 6th‐grade class discussing one student's explanation for seasonal variations in daylight hours. The analysis identifies discourse moves that map to disciplinary practices of the social construction of science knowledge, including (1) beginning an explanation by reviewing the community's shared assumptions; (2) referencing peers' work as warrants for an argument; and (3) building from isolated ideas, attributed to individuals, toward a coherent situation model, attributed to the community. The study then identifies discourse moves through which the proposed explanation was taken up and developed by the group, including (4) using multiple shared representations; (5) leveraging peers' language to clarify ideas; and (6) negotiating language and representations for new, shared explanations. Implications of this case for rethinking instruction, assessment, and classroom research are explored. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:619–642, 2010     

Political assumptions underlying pedagogies of national education: The case of student teachers teaching ‘British values’ in England

Teacher education in England now requires that student teachers follow practices that do not undermine “fundamental British values” where these practices are assessed against a set of ethics and behaviour standards. This paper examines the political assumptions underlying pedagogical interpretations about the education of national identities through documenting how a group of student teachers uphold the institutional demand of promoting fundamental British Values in relation to their discursive constructions of Britishness. Empirical data exemplifies potential political understandings guiding educational practices. Analysis suggests that pedagogies of national education are mediated by (i) educators’ understandings of the nation as an essential entity or a social construct and (ii) their understanding of national identities as being open or closed to competing interpretations. The paper concludes by examining implications of different political and pedagogical positions for practice and research.     

ALAIN ET LES INSTITUTEURS (1)

In the past decade, US==A reforms discourses link strategies of professionalizing teaching with pedagogical research practices. This article explores the different reform practices as the effects of power. It focuses on educational policy and research as governing through the reasoning inscribed in the knowledge generated for action and participation. Political rationalities are inscribed in pedagogy as “a culture of redemption. Pedagogy is to save the child for society and to rescue society through the child. The saving of the child embodies norms about social/cultural progress that makes the science/scientist as the prophet.

The first section examines turn of the 20th century USA practices to professionalize the teacher and redefine pedagogy. Pedagogy embodies a concept of progress that revisions the child from a religious entity beholden to God to one that embodies certain collective social norms related to political rationalities. The child is to be a self‐motivated participant in a liberal democracy. The teacher is also revisioned as a redemptive agent but now in the worldly name of progress and a populism. Professional knowledge is interpellated in service of a liberal democratic ideal.

The second section focuses on the revisioning of the redemptive culture in contemporary USA educational science and reform discourses. Examining two seemingly different ideological discursive practices ‐‐ a state‐sponsored discourse of “systemic school reform” and a “post‐modern” critical pedagogy ‐‐ the author argues that similar redemptive images of progress, expert‐knowledge and populism are utilized. The redemptive discourses focus on the teacher fand child) who participates, collaborates, and constructs (makes) knowledge within a “community” rather than as a participant in social, collective norms. As with the redemption at the turn of the century, contemporary educational sciences inscribe principles of order that relate to changes in the governing systems for constructing individuality, but these systems are different from those produced at the end of the century.     

“Being Healthy”: The discursive construction of health in New Zealand children's responses to the National Education Monitoring Project

In this paper we examine the discursive resources that year 4 and year 8 students draw on to construct meanings for health. Drawing on students' responses to tasks in the New Zealand National Monitoring Project (Crooks & Flockton, Health & Physical Education, University of Otago Educational Assessment Research Unit, 1999) we examine what students have to say about health, and speculate on where these responses have come from and on the implications of these for health education pedagogy. The students' responses indicate that they are well versed in “healthism” discourses that link practices like eating, exercise, smoking, drinking and taking drugs with “health”. The students' responses also point to the construction of health knowledge as certain and static. Relatively little attention is paid to the social, cultural, economic or political contexts of people's lives. Indeed, the “typical” responses clearly point to the dominance of white, middle class values about health and fitness promoted in New Zealand society. We conclude by posing several questions generated for educators.     

Assessment as learning: Enhancing discourse,understanding, and achievement in innovative science curricula

An assessment‐oriented design‐based research model was applied to existing inquiry‐oriented multimedia programs in astronomy, biology, and ecology. Building on emerging situative theories of assessment, the model extends prevailing views of formative assessment for learning by embedding “discursive” formative assessment more directly into the curriculum. Three twenty‐hour curricula were designed and aligned to content standards, and three levels of assessments were developed and used to assess and enhance learning for each curriculum. These assessments included three or four informal “activity‐oriented” quizzes and discursive formative feedback rubrics supporting collective discourse, a “curriculum‐oriented” examination of individual conceptual understanding, and a “standards‐oriented” test measuring aggregated achievement of targeted standards. After two design‐research cycles, worthwhile scientific argumentation and statistically significant gains were attained for two of the three packages on the exam and test. Achievement gains were comparable to or larger than those of students in comparison classrooms. Many existing innovations could be enhanced and evaluated in this fashion; designing these strategies directly into innovations could have an even greater impact on discourse, understanding, and achievement. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 1240–1270, 2012     

Learning through culture: seeking “critical case studies of possibilities” in the history of education

Abstract

In Radical Education and the Common School (2011), Michael Field and Peter Moss argue for a radical alternative to the failed and dysfunctional contemporary discourse about education and the school with its focus on markets, competition, instrumentality, standardisation, and managerialism. They argue that it is necessary, if we are to progress “social alternatives” in education, to construct micro-histories of schools that have developed as “real utopias” through radically revising their practice. They call these micro-histories “critical case studies of possibilities”. In To Hell with Culture (1963), the art educator and anarchist Herbert Read returned to a theme he had been exploring since the early 1930s – the purpose of education. For him, “education” implied many things, but he saw modern practice as “socially disintegrating”. Instead, Read offered an alternative to the dominant discourse about education under capitalism in the 1960s which would create “that collective consciousness which is the spiritual energy of a people and the only source of its art and culture”. To what extent was Read’s conception of education an ideal, a dream unfulfilled? Following Fielding and Moss this paper will seek to trace “critical case studies of possibilities” drawn from the past which reflect the fundamental connection identified by Read between school learning, “collective consciousness”, art, and culture.     

Speaking of “Disorderly” Objects: A poetics of pedagogical discourse

To interrogate pedagogical discourses relating to child behaviour as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” this paper features the analysis of three texts through the development and deployment of what might be called a poetics of pedagogical discourse. The principal text is a statement describing “problematic” behaviour in school. Of concern is how this particular statement functions—what does it do and with what effects? Here my analysis will be informed by the examination of two other texts. Each demonstrates techniques in the production of meaning; specifically, how performative language and intertextuality contribute to and enhance the constitutive properties of discourse. The aim is, first, to “try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects” through the interrogation of discursive practices that, in objectifying and subjugating individual school children, create the condition of possibility for the recognition and classification of disorderly behaviour and behaviour disorders, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. A second, but no less important, aim is to call attention to the dangers inherent to the ways in which child behaviour comes to be described in schools.     

Language,Gender and Education: a critical review linking social justice and power

Since the mid‐1970s studies of language and gender have been increasingly concerned with social justice issues. One aim of these studies has been to identify the role that language plays in the location and maintenance of women in a disadvantageous position in society. This article looks at the role that education plays in creating unjust gender arrangements in society through its language policies and the discursive practices that it legitimates. It begins by critically reviewing many of the studies that have found differences in the respective discourses of men and women. It then reviews the smaller corpus of studies that describe differences in the discourse of preschool and school‐age girls and boys. It then reviews the language policies and discourse practices that schools often adopt which seem to create and reinforce disadvantages for girls and women, suggesting how unjust power is exercised through the medium of school discourse and through taken‐for‐granted school language policies. The article concludes with recommendations for school language policy action.     

Racial sedimentation and the common sense of racialized violence: The case of black church burnings

I theorize how the common sense of racialized violence, manifest in public discourse, is engendered by the rhetorical process of racial sedimentation. This meaning-making process fashions a seemingly legitimate text from a reservoir of historically deposited fragments that congeal in response to racial crises as a means of explaining away the threat to the racial status quo and burying critical counterdiscourses. I demonstrate this sedimentation process by analyzing both the dominant and vernacular discourses that emerged in response to eight black churches that were burned in a ten-day period following the June 2015 AME church massacre. I also consider how these vernacular rhetorics mobilize fugitive fragments from what Karma Chávez calls the “undercommonsense” to form a survival discourse and what possibilities those radical (from Latin radix, “root”) meaning-making practices may hold. This essay advances communication studies scholarship by connecting discursive approaches to race and racism with rhetorical scholarship on fragmentation, ideology, and public memory. It offers a vocabulary for confronting civil society’s material rhetorics that mask the material realities of racism and racial oppression, and calls for rhetoricians to take seriously the common-sense racism that perpetuates these dynamics and how it might be revised or contested.     

English as a foreign language,globalisation and conceptual questioning

This text discusses the locus of English in globalisation discourses. Assuming that languages constitute discursive formations informing ways of knowing, discourses of English as a global language (EGL) are positioned in relation to teaching English as a foreign language in the glocal scene. We draw on post‐colonial theories and critical education, treating languages as social practices and conceiving of teaching EGL as a privileged context for discursive agency, especially when discourses of global English are critically engaged with through dialogue and conceptual questioning. We present a post‐method suggestion of procedures to promote conceptual questioning through construction of open spaces.     

Participation in adult and community education: a discourse of diminishing returns

The terms in which the dominant discourse of participation is framed systematically reinforces one particular view about the relationship between life and learning. It is one in which participation in learning is professionally and institutionally controlled and, consequently, defined largely in vocational, instrumental and individual terms. A significant absence in the dominant discourse is an understanding of participation which draws on the experience of the radical tradition in adult education. In a context where there is potential for greater participation in social and civic politics, as evidenced by the growth of social movements, reconnecting with radical ideas about participation in education can lead to rethinking the ‘problem of participation’ and its implications. We need to understand not only how the discourse of participation has generated knowledge but also excludes and limits what is known. A thorough critique is necessary and overdue and one that is critical of the ‘regime of truth’ which has been seeded, cultivated and harvested through the dominant professional discourse.