I Refuse: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Viral Refusal Letters to High-Stakes Testing

• In Event: 21.062 - MTCC Roundtable Session Six
  In Roundtable Session: 21.062-4 - New Methods: Discourse, Narrative, and the Politics of Evidence

Abstract

Situated as a Critical Discourse Analysis, I collected publicly available, refusal letters to answer the following question: How were parents and teachers construing their refusal of standardized testing in publicly posted letters? I used the notions of master and counter narrative to initially code the data, asking where a master narrative or counter narrative was posited in the language used in letters. I used genre theory to look at how the refusers created and accessed powerful genres to create the new genre of the refusal letter.

Author

• Stephanie Lynn Abraham, Rowan University