This article compares a White teacher's approach to authority with that of an African American warm demander. Ethnographic methods and discourse analysis illuminated how an African American teacher grounded her authority with African American students in shared culture, history, and frame of reference. A comparative analysis makes visible…

Over the past two decades, critical discourse analysis has emerged as a major new multidisciplinary approach to the study of texts and contexts in the public sphere. Developed in Europe, CDA has lately become increasingly popular in North America, where it is proving especially congenial to new directions in rhetoric and composition. This essay…

This paper is motivated by the premise that little is known about the use of requestive strategies in request emails in Chinese English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) context. Specifically, the paper examines and compares requestive strategies in request emails between two groups of university students, namely English majors (EM) and non-English…

Informed by Foucault's analytics of power, this critical discourse analysis focuses upon the discursive construction of minority and low-income family identities, primarily using text from interviews of Texas school leaders within the neoliberal context of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Qualitative content analysis was used to discover whether the…

Korean higher education has experienced significant changes since the 1990s. Terms like quality, excellence, competition, efficiency, restructuring, and accountability have become dominant in higher education discourse. These changes are integral parts of higher education reforms implemented by the South Korean government and higher educational…

This article presents a discussion of how postmodernist, poststructuralist and critical educational thinking relate to different theories of power. I argue that both Critical Theory and some poststructuralist ideas base themselves on a concept of power borrowed from a modernist tradition. I argue as well that we are better off combining a…

This article explores the methodological turning points in conducting a critical ethnography on the discursive practices of Italian Canadian youth identities across their multiple worlds in Toronto (cf. Giampapa, 2004a). Specifically, I aim to problematize the construction of the "researcher," researcher identities, and the…

A rapidly changing postmodern working world demands revised conceptualisations of the self. Recent scholarship in discourse analysis invites an investigation into how selves are constructed and fabricated within a complex matrix of social discourses, and how this may impact on the field of career counselling and development. This paper examines…

From an ethnographic case study of a state-funded residential school for the Deaf, the authors employed Critical Discourse Analysis to identify competing discourses in the talk of educators. These discourses are embedded in the historical oppression and labeling of deaf people as disabled and the development of Deaf culture as a counter-discourse.…

This paper examines the ideological construction of educational discourses embedded within the South Korean print media. Significantly, these discourses have recently promoted the resurrection of a sweeping national testing and test results release policy. Through careful examination of the "test plus release" policy, the authors show…

While research literature affirms the potential for social networking sites (SNSs) to democratise communication, their impact on micro-level, academic relations at university level has not been explored sufficiently in developing countries. The literature on SNSs (especially "Facebook") has emphasised its appropriation for the marketing…

This article focuses on how issues of power and identity were negotiated when doing a critical sociolinguistic ethnography as a Spanish researcher in the Chinese educational context. Data come from fieldwork conducted in 3 different primary and secondary schools together in Zhejiang province, where inside- and outside-classroom…

In this article we offer analysis of the intersection between what is theorized as the "knowledge economy," US schools, and identity politics through our examination of a sample of print media advertisements. The thematic thread we use to tie these pieces together is the concept of smartness, which we frame as a metanarrative of truth reflected in…

The increasing use of zero tolerance discipline policies in the USA has led to a "discipline gap," in which minoritized students receive harsher and more frequent suspensions and expulsions than their peers from dominant cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Though disciplinary decisions are made by educators at the school level,…

Because policymakers have a direct impact on schools, teachers, and therefore students, this study examined the discourse of policymakers in relation to their views on "quality" teaching. Findings from the study conclude the cultural models and discourses widely varied among policymakers. Their views were based on an idiosyncratic…