Dancing With Power: Advocacy Discourses in U.S. Bilingual (Teacher) Education as "Regimes of Post-Truth"

• In Event: 35.035 - Bilingual and Language Teacher Education in a Post-Truth Era: Critical Perspectives From Brazil and the United States

Abstract

b. Objectives: Historically, bilingual (teacher) education in the U.S. has been characterized by policy pendulum swings promoting restrictive or permissive approaches to educating minoritized bilingual learners (Gándara & Hopkins, 2010). This paper presents the results of a critical discourse analytic study (Fairclough, 2003) aimed at understanding the discursive strategies and socio-economic, educational, and political ideologies framing bilingual (teacher) education advocacy proposals for the past twenty years (1998 - 2018). In particular, this work provides an understanding of how scholars and politicians frame their advocacy proposals in light of competing ideologies emerging out of neoliberal/global market perspectives of competitiveness that tend to function as “regimes of post-truth” (Harkins, 2015, Peters, 2017).

c. Theoretical Framework: This study has been framed from post-structural perspectives of power as a tool for the social construction of reality (Dreher, 2015) and of discourse as “a practice that systematically forms the objects of which it speaks” (Foucault, 1981). The concepts of “intertextuality” (Allen, 2000), “ideological becoming” (Bakhtin, 1981; Freedman & Ball, 2004) and “framing/re-framing” language (Lakoff 2014; 2014; Kumashiro, 2008) were also central to the analysis and, along with the idea of “regimes of posttruth” (Harkins, 2015), led to an understanding of how discourses deployed as strategies for critical advocacy are, at times, ironically embedded within conflicting cultural and political logics, serving diametrically opposed ends.

d. Mode of Inquiry: The study employed multiple critical discourse analytic strategies (Fairclough, 2003; Foucault, 1981; Gee 1996) to identify-examine text signaling social, economic, political, and educational ideologies in light of author(s)’ explicit goals. The analysis of “intertextuality” (Allen, 2000) helped to identify conflicting perspectives within and across texts.


e. Data Sources: Data comprised a final corpus of 14 of the most cited peer-reviewed journal articles relevant to bilingual (teacher) education advocacy in the U.S. (1998 – 2018), as well as state legislative proposals (i.e. California-Non-English-Languages-Allowed-in-Public-Education-Act-Senate-Bill-1174).

f. Conclusion: Findings suggest that bilingual (teacher) education scholars fall into two basic categories of advocacy relevant to the discourse/ideologies these promote to meet “critical” ends: (a) ideologically consonant and (b) ideologically dissonant. In their quest to advocate for bilingual (teacher) education, scholars tend to employ multiple, at times contending, discourses/ideologies that, unintentionally, signal alignment with dominant/post-truth logics that re-produce social inequalities. On the contrary, political advocacy proposals are characterized by being ideologically consonant and aligned with neoliberal/post-truth master narratives.

g. Scholarly Significance: This study opens critical avenues for understanding how social relations of power in bilingual (teacher) education advocacy produce/reproduce and legitimate particular knowledges as truth (Foucault, 1972). These understandings can help us forge new approaches to “knowledge advocacy” in light of master narratives that seem to have hijacked our critical imagination. The study maintains that “[w]e must make allowance for the complex and unstable powers whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy” (1978). This latter function of discourse could well serve us in restoring “critical hope” (Bozalek et al., 2014).

Author

• Cristian R. Aquino-Sterling, San Diego State University