‘Rude speech’ and ‘ignorant audience’: power of ignorance and language politics at an Aotearoa/New Zealand school

In studies of minority language education, researchers tend to base their arguments on the assumption that knowledge empowers and ignorance disempowers. In this article, however, I show two alternative dynamics of knowledge and relations of dominance by drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork at a secondary school in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1997–8. First, by analyzing the ways some Pākehā (white) parents complained about Māori speeches at school by saying ‘not everyone understands it’, I argue that relations of dominance can create the legitimacy even in ignorance and work to marginalize an already repressed minority language. Second, by showing how other Pākehā accepted the speeches even though they did not understand them, I argue that an acknowledgement of ignorance can be an act of embracing the unknowable cultural others by abandoning a sense of entitlement to know. From these observations, this paper suggests a reformulation of the understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power and calls for investigating various contours of ignorance situated in specific relations of dominance.     

‘I've never done a dissertation before please help me’: accommodating L2 students through course design

This article considers how course design accommodates the adaptation of L2 students into the early stages of the master's dissertation (Social Sciences and Humanities) at a UK university. I present a contrastive process-oriented analysis of two students' experiences on different courses, extracted from a 13-month ethnographic study in which students' self-reports (journals; interviews) were triangulated with their assignments, interviews with lecturers and classroom observation. I identify two ‘literacy events’ in the early stages: discussing the topic and preparing the proposal. In order to make visible these events, I deploy Lave and Wenger's Community of Practice model, while taking a post-structuralist view of learning as a dynamic between language, identities, power relations, affordances and agency. Findings show unequal support for these events on the two courses; I argue that this exemplifies significantly different ideologies relating to the accommodation of L2 students, and discuss implications for course design.     

Language,discipline and ‘teaching like a champion’

This article presents an analysis of various language policy mechanisms currently circulating in secondary schools in England, with a particular focus on those that intermingle ‘language’, ‘standard English’ and ‘discipline’. Although the connections between language, ideology and behaviour are well established within critical educational linguistics, this has not been explored in relation to current education policy in England, which is characterised by an overt focus on standardised English and behaviour ‘management’. In a grounded approach, I explore how the disciplining of language correlates with the disciplining of the body, based on ethnographic-orientated fieldwork undertaken in a London secondary school and drawing on a broad range of policy mechanisms such as curricula, textbooks, classroom artefacts and Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion industry. I show how the current linguistic conservatism found within government policy gets reproduced in school-level policies, pedagogies and classroom interactions, and highlight these relations within a network of policy actors and key terms associated with so-called ‘zero-tolerance’ and ‘no-excuses’ schools. I show how teachers are positioned as language policy managers who work within a system of surveillance, compliance, coercion and control. As such, this article contributes to current thinking within critical language policy and the sociology of education by offering an expanded view of language ideologies in schools, whereby connections between language and discipline are explicitly illustrated and critiqued.     

The Role of Language &; Discourse in the Investigation of Privilege: Using Participatory Action Research to Discuss Theory,Develop Methodology, &; Interrupt Power

Rooted in feminist philosophy, critical race theory, and participatory action research (PAR), I partnered with four faculty and four students at an elite, private, college preparatory day school for boys in order to examine bullying. In this article I closely examine the role of language and discourse when conducting counter hegemonic research with people who are predominantly privileged and within institutions designed to reproduce those privileges. I briefly describe the co-construction of our theory and instrument to illustrate that our close attention to language in regards to bullying both helped us understand our work and changed how we went about conducting the study. I describe how our strategic use of language to broadly define bullying helped us capture interesting data and interrupt power. And finally, I discuss our political use of language to others and suggest that while it paved a safer space for us to conduct our work it also may have restricted our work from having the power to resist co-optation and promote sustainable, systemic change.     

Literacy,schooling and ideology in a multilingual state

In this article I argue that current government policy for teaching literacy in schools in England is part of a broader ideology of homogeneity which is visible in other dominant-culture institutions. Despite the multilingual nature of England and its schools, the dominant discourse is one which values English at the expense of other languages, leading to the ‘misrecognition’ (Bourdieu, 1998b: 131), by majority and minority language speakers alike, of English as the sole language of symbolic capital. While the first part of this article outlines the monolingual ideology of current literacy policy in schools in England, and locates this in the context of a similar ideology evident in discourses beyond education, I also suggest that this process of symbolic domination is not inevitable. Schools need not be sites of social and cultural reproduction. They can challenge existing relations of power in society, and put in place structures and practices which question and even reverse the coercive relations between majority-culture schools and minority-culture communities and their children. I propose some ways forward in the development of structures which can enable schools to become sites of social and cultural transformation, rather than reproduction.     

Exploring women faculty's experiences and perceptions in higher education: the effects of feminism?

This study analyses women faculty's discourse about feminism, themselves, and their professional experiences as scholars in the North American university context. This case study pushes at the boundaries of what we believe we know about ‘the gender question' in the academy, opening a discursive space for scholars to examine university policies and practices. Poststructuralist emphasis on the complexity and changing nature of power relations offer a framework that makes sense of the ways in which women are simultaneously affected by power relations and engage in power relations. I use feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis to analyse women's talk about their experiences in order to carve a path for moving beyond the deconstruction of discourse in order to unpack how it marginalises and silences women, even within and to themselves.     

School bullying and bare life: Challenging the state of exception

Despite a vast amount of research into school bullying and the widespread implementation of anti-bullying policies and programs, large numbers of students continue to report that they are routinely subjected to bullying by their peers. In this theoretical article, I argue that part of the problem is that there has been a lack of critical discussion of the theoretical foundations upon which such studies are based. Drawing on recent theoretical contributions within the field of school bullying, the work of anthropologist James C. Scott, and the work of philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, I take particular issue with the notion of power that has long been a foundational pillar of bullying definitions. Utilizing a Foucauldian understanding of power, I argue that rather than focusing on the power imbalance involved in bullying relations, focus instead needs to shift onto the role that bullying plays in power relations. Reimagining Agamben’s figure of homo sacer as a victim of school bullying, I consider the ways in which some individuals are reduced to bare life and forced into a state of exception whereby social laws are no longer deemed applicable. The article concludes with a discussion of how this state of exception might be challenged.     

论批评话语分析

本文论述了批评话语分析的基本理论，原则和方法。批评话语分析的出发点是对语方和话语本质的重新认识：语言不是中立客观地再现真实的手段，语言和话语的有效建构，调节并控制知识，社会关系和机构。本文分析了话语、权利和意识形态之间的关系，通过语方实例从几个方面讨论了批评话语分析的语言机制和方法，并指出批评话语分析的意义和提高语言批评意识的重要性。     

Research and policy on the language of instruction issue in Africa

Since 1995 I have been engaged in consultancies and since 2001 in research dealing with the language of instruction policies in Africa. To what extent are the policies being implemented? What is the role of research and consultancy when it comes to language policy? What happens when researchers or consultants come up with recommendations which do not please donors or the people of power? My paper builds on a consultancy on the language policy of Namibia from 1995, the stock-taking exercise of ADEA/GTZ/UIL of 2006, as well as on research results and experiences gathered within the LOITASA (Language of Instruction in Tanzania and South Africa) project. In the first part of the article I give two examples where the policy recommendations by the consultants/researchers have not been followed up. I give an example of a consultancy that has had some impact on the policy formulation in some African countries. Recommendations from only one of the four studies/consultancies looked at have been thoroughly followed up. These recommendations were in line with what the donors wanted, but did not logically follow from the research done. In the second part of the article I deal with the challenge of making policy research relevant for those most greatly affected by the policy. This means working for a paradigm shift in the research and consultancy on language policies in Africa. It also means looking at the power of misconceptions held by lay people. Towards the end of the article I discuss changing a belief system which has become common knowledge. I show examples of how Tanzanian colleagues in the LOITASA project are trying to do this.     

Does Education have Independent Power? Bernstein and the question of relative autonomy

In this article, I focus on some of the ways Basil Bernstein's positions can help us understand the question of the relative autonomy of the school and of the 'class belongingness' of its cultural dynamics. In the process, I show how this differentiation of various social fields of power and of the complex ways in which class relations work within them enables a considerably more subtle perspective on 'who controls what' and on what that 'what' actually is. I also argue that we cannot fully answer the question of whether schools can 'create a new social order' unless we unpack the relations of outside to inside, of what constitutes the inside, and especially of what the specific power relations are both within what Bernstein calls 'the symbolic field' and between it and 'the field of production' and the 'field of the state'. Of particular importance here is the notion of the 'pedagogic device', Bernstein's apparatus for demonstrating the specific cultural configuration that enables us to uncover 'why things stay the same' and how they might be different. For Bernstein, the issue became not only explaining change, but also explaining what he saw as the remarkable stability and similarity of education among different political economies. I use as an example the pedagogic device in one specific nation and demonstrate how we can employ it to more rigorously focus our attention on the possible effects education itself has.     

从批评性话语分析看政治语篇中修辞手法的运用

批评性话语分析是最近20年来兴起的一种话语分析方法,它旨在透过话语的表面形式,揭露不平等的权力关系。政治语言是政治主体在政治活动中用来交流政治信息的语言,其主要功能之一是说服、控制,让公众接受自己的见解或主张,从而影响公众的意识形态。修辞的运用是政治语言的一个显著特征。本文从批评性话语分析的角度,分析政治语言中修辞手法的运用,揭示隐藏在政治语言背后的权力关系。     

Wolf cries: on power,emotions and critical literacy in first-language teaching in Sweden

Adopting a critical literacy perspective in teaching is about how experiences, social contexts, languages, learning and power relations interact in language development. In this article, we explore how students’ critical literacies are enhanced and hindered by emotional power relations in the classroom. We investigate what happens when emotionally charged texts – here texts about wolves in Sweden – are used in lower secondary schools. Drawing on two examples we illustrate different ways of enhancing students’ critical approach to the argumentative text type. The article highlights the affective aspects of teaching, and thus the unforeseeable aspects of classroom interaction. Emotionally, the wolf issue became very different objects for the persons occupying the classrooms. It invoked, e.g. homosocial relations, racist accounts and nationalistic outbursts. The article stresses the significance of teacher intervention but argues that to facilitate critical literacy in emotionally charged classrooms, the circulation of emotions, including teachers’ emotions must be brought to light.     

Modes of governmentality in an online space: a case study of blog activities in an advanced level Japanese‐as‐a‐Foreign‐Language classroom

This article discusses the validity of the incorporation of online communication in language education classes as a practice free of power politics. By examining blog activities in an advanced‐level Japanese‐as‐a‐Foreign‐Language classroom at a university in the USA, we show that the blog’s postings and readers’ comments evoke certain modes of governmentality – practices that shape one’s conduct – and define the space of a particular blog. This article illustrates two kinds of space created in blogs: that of language education in which ‘native speakers’ dominate ‘non‐native speakers’; and that of information exchange with less fixed relations of dominance, although participants’ behavior is regulated nonetheless. We suggest involving students in analyzing blog comments so that they can understand, and respond to, how the mode of governmentality works outside the classroom and how to transform relations of dominance that manifest themselves in online spaces.     

Subtractive Schooling and Identity: A Case Study of Ethnic Minority Students in Vietnam

This article examines the impact of subtractive schooling, including language use in education, on the identity of a group of ethnic minority students in Central Highlands of Vietnam. Drawing on semistructured interview data, a deeper look is taken into the ways in which these students identify themselves with their languages, cultures, and social relations. Findings reveal that the subtractive power of the school language and the institutional milieu profoundly influenced their identity construction by creating the conditions for (a) the devaluation of their language and cultural identity as a consequence of the invasion of their sociocultural territory by the dominant language and culture and (b) the segregation and disunity that affected their identity construction through social relations. Although subtractive schooling apparently facilitated students’ integration into the mainstream, its invisible power forced them not only to integrate but also to bear the full burden of constructing new identities to adjust to the school environment and the mainstream society.     

Investigating Power in the Staffroom: issues in the study of power and gender relations in a professional group

This paper draws on a two year study of the power and gender relations between teachers negotiating the new design and technology curriculum for England and Wales between 1992 and 1994. In it I reflect on the experience of attempting to analyse gender and power relations between individuals and groups positioned in a variety of ways with respect to one another. Using a Foucaultian approach to power as multiple, distributed and subject to resistance, I consider the ways in which the study of power and gender impacts on and interacts with the researcher, research relationships and the research process. I then go on to discuss some specific issues arising from having the relationship between power and gender as a research topic.     

Asserting "Needs" and Claiming "Rights": The Cultural Politics of Community Language Education in England

Language education policy is a contested terrain on which political conflicts are played out and relations of inequality are symbolically articulated and challenged. Language policies involve a paradox: for "language" is invoked as a reified object associated with essentialist constructs of identity to stand for much more complex and changing patterns of language use. In this article, I consider this paradox from the perspective of a campaign led by Sikh parents to have Punjabi introduced into curriculum in secondary school in Leeds, England. The study explores how "rights talk" and "needs talk" were used as idioms for making political claims about the value of teaching and learning Punjabi at school. This use of Punjabi as a reified political symbol is contrasted with Sikh teenagers' patterns of Punjabi language use. The analysis brings into relief 2 processes for asserting and contesting the value of Punjabi for different purposes and to distinctive ends.     

Social Space,Gender Inequalities and Educational Differentiation

The spatial dimensions of social interaction and reproduction have received increasing attention from sociologists in recent years. However, these issues remain largely implicit in most studies of classrooms, schools and the education system. In this paper, I argue that the study of social space should be integral to analyses of the relationship between educational differentiation and social reproduction. After examining the position of space in Giddens's theory of structuration, I focus on how space is used in schools as a resource in the production of unequal gender relations. Space is viewed not simply as a context in which interaction occurs, but as a phenomenon which both produces, and is produced by, gendered power relations.     

A tale of the field: reading power and gender in the learning organization

In this article, I will argue that learning organizations that claim certain emancipatory promises in principle continue to ignore issues of gender, which, in practice are a distinctive and defining feature of our workplace contexts. Applying a feminist–Foucauldian interpretive framework, I intend to demonstrate and analyse the material workings of power, and how power relations work to produce both people and actions in organizations, which contributes to reproducing a patriarchal system, through a recounting of my own experiences as a Learning and Development manager implementing a change program at Xtrading Worldwide. In particular, by means of an auto-ethnographic account, I intend to illuminate the manner in which this patriarchal system not only contradicts the philosophy of the learning organization, highlighting its embeddedness within contemporary capitalist and managerialist discourse, but also how it works to produce both subordinated women and behaviours, which continues to exclude them from occupying levels of seniority in organizations.     

Friendship and Fandom: Ethnicity,power and gendering readings of the popular

This paper explores the relationships between knowledge of popular culture and power negotiations among young children's friendship groups and derives from a research project on the identity formations of 'mixed race' children. The paper begins with a consideration of existing work on music, ethnicity and cultural identities and how this is implicated in formations of 'imagined communities' (Anderson, 1991, Imagined Communities , Verso). Next, I look at the ways in which this work has been gendered with particular reference to the female music 'fan'. Throughout I use data from my research to show how the children engaged in friendship/power relationships that challenge much of this material. The paper centralises the way readings are used by friends in processes that are implicated in en/gendering identities and identifications - how likes and dislikes are mobilised differently among children who are becoming 'boys' and 'girls' who are friends, through use of the love/loathe discourses. The allegiance work is saturated with and constitutive of relations of power/knowledge which are both painful and pleasurable for children who are differently positioned within networks of learning and cultural expertise.     

Literacy,speech and shame: the cultural politics of literacy and language in Brazil

This article examines the relationship between shame, literacy and social relations by analyzing shame narratives told to the author by youth and adult literacy students during a 24‐month ethnographic research project conducted in two Brazilian cities. Employing Bourdieu’s theoretical framework and literature from the anthropology of emotions, the article asks: What is accomplished through the micropolitics of shaming? What can it teach us about theories of literacy, language and power more broadly? The article shows how speech shaming in Brazil contributed to the cultural production of inequality by individualizing, psychologizing and embodying responsibility or blame for illiteracy. It argues that sociocultural theories of literacy, language and power need to account for the influence of emotions in communicative interactions.