Negotiating Students’ Identities and Promoting Agency Through Critical Discourse Analysis (Poster 3)

• In Event: Critical Participatory Inquiry in Transnational Research Contexts

Abstract

Critical Youth Participatory Action Research aims to empower young people to name, identify, and develop solutions to their problems (Richter, 2016). Nevertheless, especially when the action research takes place in official settings like schools or NGOs, those in institutionalized roles of power such as teachers affect CYPAR’s main purpose, to honor and promote the young peoples’ voice, due to binarities such as adult/child, teacher/students, and knower/non-knower (Oswell, 2011). The identification of power issues it is not easy because in many cases they have been naturalized in everyday practices (Gee, 2014) and, subsequently, more elaborate tools are needed to identify them. One such tool is Critical Discourse Analysis, which can identify these subtle issues by focusing on the language the participants use. In school settings, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can be a useful tool to identify power issues, negotiate students’ identities, and promote agency.

The Greek educational system and the accompanying pedagogy are characterized by strict hierarchies, homogeneity, and exclusion of students’ local contexts, language varieties, experiences, and voices. In addition, the exam system determines all the educational practices and focuses on students from wealthier families who live in urban areas. In this paper, I present the design and implementation of a two-year and two-cycle CYPAR project that took place in a junior high school Modern Greek language course in a rural area of Crete, Greece. Having taught in this area since 2012, I employed critical literacy pedagogy in language courses (Cope & Kalantzis, 2016) to connect the context with the everyday practices in the school, but student participant remained low. I decided to engage in CPI to increase students’ participation and discuss power issues, and I saw CDA as a tool that could help students to identify asymmetrical power dynamics and empower them to understand the economic and sociocultural factors that constrained their lives.

Each cycle lasted approximately 32 weeks during the school year, and 23 students, 16 girls and 7 boys between the ages of 12 and 13, participated. We co-collected, co-analysed, and co-interpreted data, including students’ journals, drawings, and written accounts, throughout each cycle. In this project, my students had the opportunity to identify how power shapes their identities and to understand that learning is not necessarily connected with exams and textbooks. Additionally, our findings showed that the utilization of such a sophisticated method as CDA in CPI provokes continuous reflexivity, particularly for teacher-researchers who hold more power in the institutional context. Through CDA, the participants had the opportunity to identify how power forms relations, including adult/child and knower/learner binaries (Oswell, 2011). CPI aims to enhance democratic potential and to democratize and open research to ordinary individuals (Appadurai, 2006). In this study, the cyclical process of action research provided the opportunity to identify the potential, the challenges, and the problems that arise in CPI, especially when new methods are applied (Stern et al., 2013). Consequently, I argue that CDA has a lot to offer in action research as well in the democratization of our societies.

Author

• Konstantinos Sipitanos, University of Crete