Never before has technology played such a central role in education. In 2020, seemingly over night, technology took centre stage in the delivery of not just some education, but all education and the metaphors to describe this time leaned heavily on catastrophic terms of revolution, tsunami, and disruption. But why do apocalyptic metaphors abound…

This paper analyses how 'polarisations' in which social tensions between the religious, ethnic and socio-economic groups are believed to increase are experienced and understood by secondary school teachers in the Netherlands. Based on the idea that polarisation is present in everyday interactions, this study contributes to an everyday perspective…

Through discourse analysis, this article explores strategies used in the speeches and public statements of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos (2017-2020), as she employed marketing tactics in service of a neoliberal educational agenda. I identify DeVos's framing and lexical choices deployed to increase memory and attention salience, thereby…

This article compares the use of discourse markers (DMs) in Italian as a second language (L2) produced by Belgian-Dutch learners, with the DMs produced by Italian native (L1) speakers. The quantitative analysis of the data shows that L1 speakers produce more DMs than L2 speakers, whereas the comparison between the levels of proficiency in L2…

Discourses of social justice are becoming increasingly prevalent in educational spaces, with rising numbers of teachers and teacher education programs expressing their aims to teach towards social justice. Yet, recent scholarship has documented the contested meanings of social justice in contemporary educational contexts. This qualitative case…

In this article, the central argument is that research on the semiotic repertoire should also focus on how repertoires are racialized, and race is evoked through the semiotic repertoire. The article uses data from the South African educational context to advance a position in which semiotic repertoires simultaneously give and restrict access,…

In this study we present results of a discourse analysis of the interactions between two partners, Uma and Sean, through a feminist lens. During roughly five hours of small group work in a teaching experiment, how each partner used language to position each other's thinking as mathematically significant and establish a collaborative environment…

Even though a substantial body of research suggests that adults' math talk fosters children's mathematics development and willingness to learn mathematics, little is known about how teachers make pedagogical decisions to communicate mathematics to young students. Supported by socio-constructivist and semiotic lenses, the study focuses on the close…

Can "on-line" 'place-based learning' be more than a facsimile or ritual? Using a phenomenology of my pandemic practice, I investigate the meaning of 'place-based learning:' entertaining Aristotle's seminal thought on place as a container to venture into contemporary phenomenological inquiries where places and things are not only…

COVID-19 has occasioned ongoing shifts in discourse as language changes to reflect and shape new stages of the global pandemic and different voices weigh in on topics, such as infectious diseases and vaccine efficacy. This study looks at an instance of this that relates to the 'global education industry', where cancellation of the International…

A number of scholars have shown the prevalence of multiple metaphors in biological conceptions of the living cell. However, there is little research into unpacking these metaphors to understand their ideological implications for scientific knowledge and science education. In this paper, I perform a critical discourse analysis of the representation…

Racialized descriptions are a constant practice in our societies and a fundamental aspect of racial discourses. This paper uses conversation analytic tools within a Foucauldian perspective on discourse to investigate how discourses of race are (re)produced, and consequently navigated, in talk-in-interaction among speakers of Chinese. Four…

Teacher strikes have taken place in the United States since the end of the 19th century, became much more common in the 1960s, and have enjoyed a resurgence over the past five years (2018-2023). In this paper, we analyze teacher strikes with two main objectives. First, we examine how sexism and misogyny impact discourse around teacher strikes, as…

This study provides two exemplars of how grammatical analysis of language use in elementary science classroom discourse enhances the explication of students' epistemic process in the language use in that discourse. Methodologically, both practical epistemology analysis (PEA) and discourse register analysis (DRA) from systemic functional…

Reflection on the meaning of the word 'tradition', and related terms such as 'traditional', is conceptually complex but has been subject to limited critical scrutiny within academic discourse. The evidence of this study, drawing on the theory of tradition and a database of all 6947 papers published in "Studies in Higher Education"…