Examining Discourse of School Administrators and Teachers Through Sociolinguistic Frames

• In Event: Using Theories of Language and Power to Investigate Pressing Aspects of Education

Abstract

The discourse of school administrators and teachers both shapes, and is shaped by, embedded social relations within the school, the larger education community, and society as a whole. This paper begins with the thesis that discourse and power are linked. This is for three reasons: (1) an utterance is always a response to something that came before (Holquist, 1990); (2) individuals’ discourse is always constrained by (and built out of) sociolinguistic conventions which are determined by history and social relations (Fairclough, 1989); and (3) power—defined diffusely—is always present in all aspects of social history and relations (Foucault, 1994). This paper uses these theoretical assumptions to uncover details of school administrators’ and teachers’ discourses and consider the power relations that shape and constrain them. The paper offers two connected empirical analyses—investigating the discourse of novice teachers first and school administrators second in order to raise awareness of educator discourses as a particular type of social action that shapes relations, structures, and practices in schools.

In the first analysis, the theories provided by Fairclough (2013), Foucault (1977), Bakhtin (Bakhtin in Holquist, 1990), Bourdieu (1991), and De Certeau (1984) are utilized to analyze novice teachers’ reflections. This analysis examines how sociolinguistic frameworks can help to better understand how new teachers, working in communities unlike ones where they grew up, are both producing and interpreting the “texts” within their classrooms. By examining the discourses that novice teachers utilize to describe their experiences of learning to teach diverse student populations, teacher educators and professional developers can begin to strategize how to better design programs that can address how diverse student populations are framed in our democratic society.

The second analysis, of school administrator discourse, first draws on Anderson and Grinberg’s (1998) application of Foucault’s framework of disciplinary power to the discourse of school administrators, highlighting the ways that seemingly beneficial discourses can work as disciplinary forces. It then addresses the role of argument in education, and specifically in school leadership, examining how our tendency as a society to see argument as inherently adversarial—metaphorically as ‘war’—may contribute to a combative culture in schools. The analysis then builds upon the metaphorical conception of argument as a discourse to examine the role of metaphor within administrator discourse, drawing on the work of Henze (2005) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980). If discourse and power are linked, administrators’ discourse is inextricably tied to their leadership and must therefore be critically examined.

Consistent with the AERA 2016 theme, Public Scholarship to Educate Diverse Democracies, this paper makes visible why administrators and teachers must engage in the language-focused work of critically acknowledging their own educational discourses, reflecting on how, exactly, their language use both results from and goes on to influence how other educators understand themselves and their work, and the role of language in moving their schools toward social justice for diverse democracies in public schools.

Authors

• Heather Schlaman, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Kirsten Standeven, University of California - Santa Cruz