Browsing by Subject "Critical discourse analysis"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Cooperating teachers' lived expectations in student teaching; a critical phenomenologicale exploration of identity infusing arts-based research
    (2014-09) Weiss, Tamara Rae
    Through an examination of the identity of the cooperating teacher, this study interrogates the relationships that exist between the pedagogical and the practical in pre-service teacher education, specifically within the phenomenon of student teaching. An investigation of the lifeworld of the cooperating teacher, exclusively through her use of language, reveals the experience of living one's expectations for another (the student teacher). Through a close examination of the identity of the cooperating teacher as mentor, a complex and dynamic relationship between two people is revealed, comprised of a myriad of power implications. To understand what it means to be a cooperating teacher is to understand the meaning structures that have come to restrict, challenge, or question the nature of mentoring and, consequently, student teaching. This study takes investigative and analytical methodologies towards a more nuanced approach to performing research, specifically through Mark Vagle's post-intentional phenomenology, Gunther Kress's multimodal discourse analysis, Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis, and critical arts-based research in the style of Postcolonial activist artist, Jean Michel Basquiat. The result becomes multimodal critical discourse analysis- visual critical paintings that: 1) Challenge the dominant notion of research as that of written or spoken language and 2) Interrogate the power positions revealed in and through the language of the cooperating teacher participants.
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    Dueling discourses: an examination of administrator, teacher, and parent talk about English language learners
    (2015-01) Vecchio-Smith, Margaret Joanna
    The purpose of this critical theory study is to examine the perceptions of English language learners and their families at "Patna Elementary" through the talk of native English speakers and native speakers of other languages. Emergent themes for native English speakers are organized by level of equity awareness, and emergent themes for native speakers of other languages include the impact of cultural capital. This study uses critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine the discoursal patterns of native English speakers. The study found, among other things, that educators who were highly focused on equity were aware of the diversity of lived experiences of EL families, were metacognitive about equity, and used significance-building techniques to describe their work; educators who were highly focused on equity increased the level of equity at Patna Elementary.
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    Producing "science/fictions" about the rural and urban poor: community-based learning at a medical college in South India
    (2014-08) Arur, Aditi Ashok
    This dissertation is an ethnographic case study of a community-based teaching program (CBTP) in public health at a medical college in South India that explored how the CBTP produced particular ways of seeing and understanding rural and urban poor communities. Drawing from critical, feminist, and postcolonial scholars, I suggest that the knowledge produced in the CBTP can be understood as "science/fictions", that is, as cultural texts shaped by transnational development discourses as well as medical teachers' and students' sociospatial imaginations of the rural and urban poor. I explored how these science/fictions mediated medical students' performative actions and interactions with a rural and an urban poor community in the context of the CBTP. At the same time, I also examined how knowledge produced in students' encounters with these communities disrupted their naturalized understandings about these communities, and how it was taken up to renarrativize science/fictions anew.Data collection and analyses procedures were informed by critical ethnographic and critical discourse analysis approaches. Data sources includes field notes constructed from observations of the CBTP, interviews with medical teachers and students, and curricular texts including the standardized national textbook of public health.The findings of this study illustrate how the CBTP staged the government and technology as central actors in the production of healthy bodies, communities, and environments, and implicitly positioned medical teachers and students as productive citizens of a modern nation while rural and urban poor communities were characterized sometimes as empowered, and at other times as not-yet-modern and in need of reform.However, the community also constituted an alternate pedagogical site of engagement in that students' encounters with community members disrupted students' assumptions about these communities to an extent. Nevertheless, institutionalized practices of assessment, and epistemological and ontological understandings of the nature of science tended to privilege the standardized curriculum and popular cultural stereotypes as scientific knowledge thereby excluding the place-based narratives of local communities, medical students, and teachers. This study, therefore, argues that interactions with local communities in community-based education and development programs cannot democratize knowledge production in medical education without a simultaneous engagement with post-foundational epistemologies in the social sciences and humanities.
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    Shifting the Lens: A Critical Examination of Diversity Discourses in College Recruiting
    (2015-08) Hakkola, Leah
    This dissertation examines how diversity is constructed in college recruiting, with a focus on how discourses, language and images regarding diversity influence the college choice process for students and impact the goal to increase diversity in sustainable ways. Use of Critical Discourse Analysis highlights how recruiters' interpretations of diversity are practiced and aligned with those represented in institutional language and messaging in college admissions. Methods include an analysis of college viewbooks and recruiting events and exploring how recruiters understand and give meaning to "diversity" in their engagement with students. Admissions and college recruitment are important sites of study because the leaders and practitioners in these units develop and implement practices and policies that enact certain meanings about diversity in higher education. This research demonstrates how distinct representations of diversity support or reject particular diversity and identity characteristics, which affect recruiting and influence the college choice process. This study also illustrates why the shaping and positioning of diversity from individual and institutional levels matter in supporting accessible, equitable and culturally responsive programming for prospective college students.