Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis in Educational Research

First, educational practices are considered communicative events; it therefore stands to reason that discourse analysis would be useful to analyze the ways in which the texts, talk, and other semiotic interactions that learning comprises are constructed across time and contexts. Second, discourse studies provide a particular way of conceptualizing interactions that is compatible with sociocultural perspectives in educational research (Gutiérrez, 2008; Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007). A shared assumption is that discourse can be understood as a multimodal social practice. That is, discourse reflects and constructs the social world through many different sign systems. Because systems of meaning are caught up in political, social, racial, economic, religious, and cultural formations which are linked to socially defined practices that carry more or less privilege and value in society, they cannot be considered neutral (see Blommaert, 2005; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997). A third area of commensurability is that discourse studies and educational research are both socially committed paradigms that address problems through a range of theoretical perspectives. Critical approaches to discourse analysis recognize that inquiry into meaning making is always also an exploration into power. Many of the problems that are addressed, particularly in a globalized world system, have to do with power and inequality. CDA provides the tools for addressing the complexity of movement across educational sites, practices, and systems in a world where inequalities are global in scope. Because of the reflexive tendencies of critical discourse studies-rooted in the constitutive relationship between discourse and the social world-the field continues to grow and change, responding to problems with different ways of looking, understanding and, as its practitioners hope, acting.