Browsing by Subject "Discourse Analysis"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Conceptions of Student Success Within an Urban Alternative Learning Program
    (2015-12) Mitchler, Jenna
    Success is a term that is often used in educational contexts, but it can be elusive and difficult to define. Furthermore, articulating what student success is, and who has agency over it, can influence the efficacy of the social actors charged with impacting it. This qualitative, grounded theory study pursues two research questions: 1) How is success conceptualized at an urban alternative secondary school? and 2) How is student success depicted to those outside of that school? My analysis of the data that I collected revealed that teachers’ conception of success inside of the school was quite different from the external narrative depicted by the school website and within programmatic, informative materials like the student enrollment application and the student handbook. Furthermore, the tension between this internal conception of student success and the differing external narrative framed a struggle for the teachers, one that they felt that they were continually engaged in, a struggle to build and maintain their collective efficacy and to legitimate their work as professional educators to those outside of the school.
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    Después del arresto: Una aproximación interdisciplinaria a la criminalización de las madres inmigrantes
    (2015-10) Hernandez, Luz
    Keywords: Immigration, Deportation, Discourse Analysis, Gender, Social Identity, Agency This research presents a comparative discourse analysis of the discourse of Guatemalan and Mexican women who changed their immigration status from undocumented to documented or from undocumented to deported due to an immigration raid in 2008. The corpus data analyzed consists on fifteen interviews, eight interviews with deportee women and seven interviews with women who regularized their immigration status. The analysis focuses on identifying the discursive strategies that these women use to make sense of the experience of changing their immigration status. The interviews are analyzed using discourse analysis as a method along with an interdisciplinary approach using Linguistics, International Migration, Migrant Rights and U.S. Immigration Law. Data analysis demonstrates that deportee women and women who regularized their immigration status use the same discursive strategy, utilizing the pronoun one to talk about changing their immigration status. Deportee women express how they endure this legal punishment and the resulting lack of employment and basic goods. Women who regularized their immigration status explain how their labor rights were denied while undocumented but are granted to them as documented workers. Both use the pronoun one, which reveals that they view and present the experience as a collective experience that they have undergone as part of a social group. This discursive strategy of using uno also discloses how identity is constructed socially. Immigrants are defined and identified as part of a group in society: undocumented, documented or deportee. Contrasting this similarity using uno, women who regularized their immigration status also utilize the pronoun I as a linguistic strategy to indicate that they have more agency in their daily life. In addition, they employ narratives to explain how they solve difficulties and problems that affected them while they were immigrants without proper documentation. The discourse analysis of the discourse of these immigrant women shows how immigrants experience the immigration law that penalizes them. As well, it exhibits how migration and deportation are collective activities, and how migrant rights are granted based on the immigrant’s immigration status. Further data and conclusions are discussed.
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    Entering Silence: The Discourse of Noise Pollution
    (2019-12) Holien, Andrew P
    In this discourse analysis, I argue that the discourse of noise pollution in the United States is inadequate and that it belies the severity of noise as a latent public health crisis; moreover, I argue that the discourse often fails to examine the corrosive influence of noise on our collective capacity to think, reflect, and cultivate our interior lives.
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    Learning Locally: Place Conscious Education in an Urban Charter School
    (2015-08) Dahle-Huff, Kari
    This qualitative study explores how students’ and their teacher implement Place-Conscious Education (PCE) in an English Language Arts (ELA) classroom and their perceptions of PCE and learning. One ELA teacher and twelve 7th grade students participated in this study, which took place at a small, public charter school in a large urban school district. Data were collected from multiple sources including classroom observations, interviews with the teacher and students, and artifacts found both in the classroom and the school. Data were then coded and analyzed which allowed specific patterns or themes to emerge inductively. Using a conceptual framework based upon Gruenewald‘s (2003) critical pedagogy of place supported by the constructs of conscientizacao (Freire, 1970) and the development of narratives (Clandinin & Connelly, 2002), this study focuses on the experiences that lead participants to engage in certain characteristics of place-based education and their perceptions of that engagement. Narrative analysis and discourse analysis provided the methods for a close analysis of the students’ and teacher’s perceptions concerning PCE in their classroom. The teacher made an effort to include PCE and critical themes into her instruction in the hopes to connect to student’s lived experiences and to make learning relevant. The students dialogically connected what they were learning in the class to their own lived experiences. The findings of this study suggest that characteristics of PCE are found in an English Language Arts classroom that focuses on both project-based learning and critical thinking. These characteristics of PCE include a connection to students’ lived experiences, using a critical lens to discuss texts being read in class, and a deliberate connection between the curriculum in the classroom and the local community. The dialogic connection of PCE to learning allows for students to locate their learning in their own lived experiences and to make their learning relevant. Implications of this study suggest that using characteristics of PCE in the classroom benefits students’ learning experiences. Teachers using PCE make learning relevant, connected to student’s lived experiences, and framed locally. In order to use PCE, teachers need to examine the communities in which they teach and utilize the authentic resources that are available to them from the community. The walls of the school should become transparent so that community and school are collaborating in education and students are then able to see their own connections and place.
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    Learning to Teach In Teach For America: A Case Study
    (2014-12) Covert, Louise
    There is a gap in research examining teacher candidates' perspectives of learning to teach in alternative certification programs and, in particular, Teach For America's (TFA) program. This interview case study used critical discourse studies (Gee, 2005) and examined how one TFA corps member (CM) learned to teach through TFA's training model and its influence on her early teacher development. The study participant was Josephina, a 23-year-old upper-middle-class White woman. Her TFA placement was in a small urban charter high school, where 100% of students were English learners, recent immigrants and refugees, and everyone qualified for free and reduced lunch. Josephina's case was one of six study participants. She was selected because her CM profile most closely aligned with media and research claims about CM identity and how CMs fared as teachers of record in United States' under-resourced public schools. The study sought to look beyond generalized characterizations about how TFA CMs learn to teach. Findings supported research claims that CMs were underprepared to teach. Concurrently, study findings countered claims that CM teachers of record indisputably complied with TFA's program expectations, were uniquely harmful or successful as teachers of record, entered education intending to be temporary teachers, and were unilaterally ineffective as teachers of record in relation to alternative and traditional certification programs at large.
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    Prescription drug brand Web sites: Guidance where none exists
    (University of Minnesota, College of Pharmacy, 2010) Glinert, Lewis
    This paper applies insights from linguistics and discourse analysis to prescription drug brand Web sites, with special reference to the 100 top-selling drugs. Such sites give the outward appearance of being a place to go for straightforward information about a specific brand. In reality, they present a confused mix of brand information, health information and hype, muddled organization, and poor indication of authority, creating an imbalance between benefit and risk content. In so doing, they breach the letter and spirit of the regulations governing direct-to-consumer advertising, which the FDA has by default applied to such Web sites but which were not designed for this special type of discourse. The many communicative difficulties proven to be caused by Web sites in general, in particular for the elderly and less literate, also pose ethical problems. A rethinking of the verbal and visual design of these drug sites is needed -- and new regulatory guidance, for which this paper offers recommendations. At stake is not just the quality of health information at brand drug sites but also their credibility.
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    Representing communism: discourses of heritage tourism and economic regeneration in Nowa Huta, Poland.
    (2008-11) Otto, Judith Emily
    This geographical case study of the `new town' of Nowa Huta - a Soviet-financed district of Kraków built for Poland's largest steelworks and its workers in the 1950s -- explores the representations of place produced for tourist consumption and their relationship to neoliberalizing discourses of economic regeneration. Since 1989, Nowa Huta has suffered from a tarnished image due to its associations with the repudiated communist regime. In the last several years, however, local entrepreneurs have begun to organize tours for Western visitors eager to see beyond the mass-market tourism of Krakow's Old Town, while local residents, dismayed by the image of their district in the popular imagination, have begun to find new ways of rebuilding its reputation. My project identifies alternative discourses about Nowa Huta that challenge its dominant representation as a dreary urban wasteland and a failed social experiment. Moreover, this struggle to control space echoes a much larger issue that resonates through all post-socialist countries: how the communist past is reframed to support specific representations of national identity. This case study makes clear the desires of the state (at multiple scales) to marginalize emphasis on the communist period in order to forge new national identities and to attract global capital. Understanding the congruence (or lack thereof) between tourist-driven entrepreneurship, grassroots identity formation, and economic development activity is essential in assessing the long-term viability of communist heritage tourism, and indeed, the potential for these states to rise out of positions of marginality within the European Union and the global economy.
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    Tracing the Ideologies of State Language Roadmaps: A Discursive Analysis of Education, Economics and Equity in Language Policy
    (2021-05) Karlsson, Ashley
    Over the last fifteen years, the Language Flagship, an initiative of the National Security Education Program (NSEP), has been working with education, business, and government partners to draft state language roadmaps in support of advancing multilingualism. So far, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Rhode Island, Hawai‘i, Wisconsin and Indiana have published roadmaps with the support of NSEP. While these language roadmaps ostensibly position multilingualism as a benefit to society, there has been limited research on the language ideologies that undergird the policy proposals present in these documents. This research study draws on several qualitative data sources, including the text of current language roadmaps, ancillary artifacts related to each state roadmap initiative, and interviews with key state actors who participated in the drafting of these roadmaps to conduct a critical discourse analysis of how particular language ideologies are reproduced in language education policy. The findings of this study demonstrate convergence across several themes, including sense-making around language awareness and conscientization, the reproduction of neoliberal discourse through the language of economics and the positioning of equity within the language roadmaps. The language ideologies and orientations present in these findings provide a point of reference for interpreting the policy proposals put forth in each roadmap. Ultimately, the recommendations offered by each state roadmap establishes a particular vision of multilingualism, including who is expected to benefit from specific policy efforts. This study is significant for its potential to guide language policy actors across multiple levels in drafting, revising and implementing state policies that respond to evolving discourse on equity and attend more directly to issues of language access and opportunity.