“For Your Own Good” and “Less Is More”: Manifestations of a Discourse of Social Inequality—From National Policy to Classroom Dynamics

• In Event: Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: Habits of Spoken or Written Discourse for Academic Success

Abstract

This paper addresses two discourses, “For Your Own Good” and “Less is More,” permeating national education reform policies and speeches, i.e., RTTT and how they manifest in local school context. Ecological systems and critical social constructivist theories guide analyses of racialized and class-coded national discourses’ local reproduction. Critical discourse analyses (CDA) of official written/verbal texts and observational/conversational data from a school-based ethnography reveal “key words,” e.g., “rewards-tough choices” “good-bad teachers,” “successful-unsuccessful students,” “high/low minority/poverty schools,” and how these discursive policies, 1) naturalize the sanctity of rewards and punishments, 2) (re)construct and reposition teacher-student-school identities, and 3) emerge in discursive practices in an independent school. Important discursive analyses and relations amongst national policy, local school practices, and identity construction are discussed.

Author

• Enora R. Brown, DePaul University