Abstract
This article reviews critical discourse analysis scholarship in education research from 2004 to 2012. Our methodology was carried out in three stages. First, we searched educational databases. Second, we completed an analytic review template for each article and encoded these data into a digital spreadsheet to assess macro-trends in the field. Third, we developed schemata to interpret the complexity of research design. Our examination of 257 articles reveals trends in research questions, the theories researchers find useful, and the kinds of interactions that capture their attention. We explore areas in the field especially ripe for debate and critique: reflexivity, deconstructive–reconstructive stance toward inquiry, and social action. We compare the findings with an earlier review published in 2005, reflecting on three decades of critical discourse analysis in education research.
In 2005, Rogers, Malancharuvil-Berkes, Mosley, Hui, and O’Garro published a review of critical discourse analysis (CDA) in education, examining the scholarship from 1983 to 2003. At the time, 46 studies of educational scholarship used CDA. Nearly a decade has passed and we wondered about developments since the publication of this earlier review. From 2004 to 2012, we see a spike in CDA research with 257 articles published, marking a sixfold increase in half the time. This proliferation in scholarship warrants a follow-up review. The following research questions guided our inquiry: What is the nature of CDA in education research from 2004 to 2012; what are the characteristics of studies that include CDA; what findings emerge from CDA scholarship in education; and how does CDA in education research contribute to the field of critical discourse studies?
Our findings reveal patterns in the field over time, including the topics, settings, questions, educational levels, and sociopolitical topics that capture researchers’ attention. Furthermore, our exploration of the procedures of research studies illustrates trends with regard to research design, detail of analytic procedure, and data sources. Given the continued interest in issues surrounding reflexivity, inquiry orientation, and social action, we also examined the literature with these features in mind and illustrate how education researchers are realizing them. We consider the findings in light of the results from 2005, reflecting on three decades of CDA in education.
CDA in Education Research: An Abbreviated History
CDA includes a set of theories and methods for the examination of discourse and social life. It grew out of critical linguistics in the 1970s. Two books, in particular, deeply influenced the development of the field: Language and Control by Fowler, Hodge, Kress, and Trew (1979) and Language and Ideology by Hodge and Kress (1979). The University of East Anglia was the original epicenter for CDA work, led by Fairclough, who coined the term CDA in his 1989 book, Language and Power. Merging systemic functional linguistics with critical social theory and historical analysis became the defining characteristic of European-style CDA. Central concepts, such as power, ideology, and discourse, predate the development of CDA and can be found in the work of language philosophers and social theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer, Bakhtin, Foucault, and Kristeva.
Since its inception, CDA has been practiced globally and developed into well-formed traditions including dialectical–relational, sociocognitive, discourse historical, critical metaphor, Foucauldian, ethnographic, narrative-based, and interventionist. It has also been applied worldwide in many disciplinary areas, each with a history and style unique to the practitioners in the field. Wodak and Meyer (2009) pointed to commonalities across approaches: an interest in the properties of real language by users in natural settings; a focus on texts discourses, conversations, or communicative events; a study of action and interaction; an interest in the nonverbal aspects of communication; a focus on the social and cognitive aspects of interaction; and an investigation of the context of language use. CDA found its way into education research through an interdisciplinary interest in language, power, and ideology. Indeed, in the 1970s, researchers in the fields of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies sought to understand life in schools, each with varying emphasis on textual and social analysis. CDA offered the theoretical and methodological tools to bring these efforts together, merging social theory and linguistic analysis. Foundational research by education scholars, such as Collins (1986), Gee (1990), Heath (1983), and Street (1985), recognized the ideological nature of educational practices and the social, historical, and political contexts in which they emerge and are transformed. The publication of Gee’s (1990) Social Linguistics and Literacies brought critically oriented discourse analysis into education research.
Another important development during this period was a meeting of the New London Group in New London, Connecticut, in 1994. This group comprised scholars from North America, Europe, and Australia, including Cazden, Cope, Fairclough, Gee, Kalantzis, Kress, C. Luke, A. Luke, and Nakata (New London Group, 1996). It was perhaps because of the New London Group that the work of Fairclough became more steadfastly seeded in the North American context. Indeed, Fairclough’s (1989) methodology provided a textually oriented form of discourse analysis alongside sociological theories of power, culture, and social life. One of the earliest comprehensive essays devoted to CDA in education was written by Luke (1995). He issued a strong call for the importance of CDA in the study of educational practice, writing, “A critical sociological approach to discourse is not a designer option for researchers but an absolute necessity for the study of education in postmodern conditions” (p. 41). By the late 1990s, a handful of empirical studies in education were published that used the version of CDA associated with Fairclough and followers (see Rogers et al., 2005).
Over the past 20 years, there have been many research networks, journals, and conferences devoted to CDA, attesting to its establishment as a tradition. In 2003, education researchers using CDA met for a working group meeting with Gee and Fairclough (Rogers, 2011b). In 2011, a North American CDA conference was held at the University of Utah. CDA groups met in Asconia, Switzerland, in 2011 and in Munich, Germany, in 2013. Every other year, an international conference called Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across the Disciplines is held. Here, research in education is presented alongside research in political science, sociology, and legal studies. These papers often find their way into journals such as Critical Discourse Studies, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, and Linguistics and Education. In addition, there are well-attended preconference institutes devoted to CDA at the American Educational Research Association (e.g., Kettle, Ryan, & Alford, 2015). All these activities demonstrate the growth of the field, which warrants this follow-up review.
Method
We carried out the literature review in three stages. First, we searched educational databases for scholarship (2004–2012). Second, we completed an analytic review template (ART), a system for describing the qualities of each research study. We entered these data into digital spreadsheets to quantify frequencies of variables such as publication year, educational level, study design, data source, number of participants, analytic procedures, and other features. Third, we inductively analyzed a number of qualitative features of the database including research questions, findings and orientation toward reconstructive/deconstructive stance, and reflexivity.
Review of the Databases
We conducted a search of five electronic databases from 2004 to 2012: ERIC (EBSCO), ArticleFirst (OCLC), PsycINFO (American Psychological Association), MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association), and Web of Science (Thompson Reuters). These were the same databases used in the 2005 literature review. We searched each database separately so we would have a clear record of search results. Our search terms were “critical discourse analysis” and “education.” We searched for peer-reviewed articles.
We chose these databases and search procedures to replicate the procedures used in the 2005 review. However, there were limitations with replication due to the geopolitics of database vendors and unstable university budgets. We did not have access to ProQuest, for example, which includes a non-U.S. database and might have included additional international scholarship. Even with this limitation, our search did include international journals such as Asia Pacific Journal of Education, Australian Educational Researcher, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Moviemento, and the South African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies. We cross-checked the databases to exclude overlapping and nongermane articles. Articles were considered not relevant to our search if they did not explicitly use the term critical discourse analysis or did not pertain to education. We located all articles as PDFs, filed them by author’s last name and publication year, and stored them in a cloud-based folder for ease of access by the research team. We identified 257 articles.
Analytic Procedures
The research team included seven people trained in CDA theory and methods. Rogers and Schaenen are university researchers. Schott, O’Brien, Trigos-Carrillo, Starkey, and Chasteen are doctoral students chosen to work on the research team because of the range of their experiences with social theory and linguistics. The team designed an ART to capture the aspects of each study that was relevant to our research questions, using the example of Rogers et al. (2005) as a guide. We divided up the articles, read each article, and completed a corresponding ART. A coding chart can be found in Supplementary Table S1 (available in the online version of the journal). This table illustrates each of the categories in the ART and the codes we used to enter our analysis into an electronic spreadsheet. Data entered into spreadsheets became the basis for our quantitative and qualitative analysis.
We created a digital spreadsheet to collaboratively track the qualities we wanted to interpret quantitatively across the entire database (N = 257). Multiple researchers entered data in real time in the online document. We used the spreadsheet to quantify qualities of the database, sorting the columns individually (e.g., disciplinary area), aggregating by code to calculate the frequencies of codes within each quality. We sorted across columns (e.g., disciplinary area and sociopolitical focus) to identify correlations and trends.
We identified the range and frequency of sociopolitical topics in the field. We generated eight, distinct sociopolitical areas of emphasis. These included cultural and linguistic diversity—students’ identities; cultural and linguistic diversity—teachers’ identities, standards/evaluation/neoliberalism, racism/antiracism, sexualities/gender, disability, democracy; and cultural and linguistic diversity—global or local ideologies. We also sorted the scholarship into the following disciplinary areas: Literacy Education, Educational Policy, Teacher Education and Professional Development, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), Higher Education, Curriculum, Art and Music, Vocational and Workforce, CDA, Research Methodology, and Character and Citizenship Education. We identified 11 educational settings represented in the data set including early childhood through secondary, community based education, and higher education.
Analysis of the Findings
Our analysis of the findings focused on the content and representation of the CDA. We synthesized the essence of the findings from each of the empirical studies. As an example, for Kettle (2005), we developed a statement about how the findings of the study show the complexity of identity work associated with balancing dominant discourses and cultural identities. We categorized this study with those focused on the representation of identities. After we synthesized the finding of each study, we looked for themes across the studies. Within each area of finding, we identified the range of ways in which authors represented their CDA.
In light of deliberations in the field over issues of reflexivity and deconstructive/reconstructive aspects of CDA, we utilized schemata to analyze these aspects of each study (Rogers & Schaenen, 2014). The schemata categorized how researchers attended to reflexivity (low, medium, high), deconstructive–reconstructive orientation (highly reconstructive, a combination of both orientations, deconstructive), and social action (minimal, moderate, or high calls). These schemata were developed based on the range of qualities we noticed in the data after reading a subset of the articles. We grouped each study into one of three categories (with a numerical value of 1, 2, or 3 assigned to each study) for each of the three qualities.
We examined markers of reflexivity including the researcher’s background and the inclusion of the researcher in the findings. We determined a study to evidence low reflexivity if the author positioned herself or himself as an outsider or unexamined insider. Studies that illustrated high levels were explicit about the author’s positionality in every aspect of the study. We sought to understand each author’s critical orientation to the inquiry. Deconstructive studies concentrated on how dominance and inequality are enacted through texts and talk. Reconstructive studies focused on instances of agency, transformation, and justice and how discourses produce these practices. Other studies focused on the push–pull nature of power and scholars focused on the dialectic between structure and agency.
In studies with high calls for social action, researchers take an interventionist approach in the design of their study and share an intention to change educational conditions as a result of their research. We judged an article to have minimal calls for social action if the study extends a line of inquiry or suggests ideas for educational change in the discussion but does not refer to action in the study. Studies with moderate levels of social action included some sort of action (e.g., curricular change, forming a study group, reanalysis of texts) and reported on the action in the article. Like the other schemata, we assigned a numerical score to each of these areas.
Finally, we identified CDA scholars from each of the 257 articles in the section of the article where CDA was described. We calculated the number of times CDA scholars were referenced and the frequency of particular publications.
Interrater Reliability
We developed a multiphase approach to building a rigorous and dependable analysis. First, we piloted our ART with eight studies to develop a shared understanding of the categories and arrived at agreement in assessing levels of reflexivity, stance toward power, and social action. We met regularly to discuss questions regarding the ART and developing trends across the database. The first author checked all the ARTs for consistency in reporting and scoring. Our analytic process is contextually bound and meant to develop a nuanced language for describing salient themes in the field.
Results
Research Question 1
What is the nature of CDA in education research from 2004 to 2012? Table 1 summarizes basic findings regarding pace of publication per year, type of study, rate of collaboration, geographical area, and disciplinary area. Between 2007 and 2008, the number of published CDA studies in education more than doubled (from 16 to 34) and never dropped back down. Roughly 72% of our data set was published between 2008 and 2012. The largest concentration of studies was found in the discipline of Literacy Education, representing nearly 30% of all studies. Educational Policy represented 21% of the database, followed by Higher Education at 10%. The number of studies in STEM, Teacher Education, and Curriculum were equal at 9%. Vocational Education, studies of CDA itself, Character and Citizenship Education, and Art and Music each constituted less than 8% of the database.
Summary table of quantitative findings (N = 257).
Note. STEM = science, technology, engineering, and math; CDA = critical discourse analysis.
The preponderance of CDA studies in education included in our data set are published in Anglophonic contexts (74%), with 40% in our total sample emerging from the United States. Other geographic regions—including studies in Africa, Europe, and Asia—are represented. We found CDA published in nearly 140 different journals around the world. This range included general publications such as International Review of Education and International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education as well as journals specific to content areas (e.g., Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education). The three journals that published the most education research using CDA between 2004 and 2012 were Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (n = 12), Critical Inquiry in Language Studies (n = 9), and Journal of Language, Identity, and Education (n = 8).
Research Question 2
What are the characteristics of studies that include CDA? Table 2 summarizes basic findings regarding study design, data source, definition of CDA, multimodal analysis, use of technologies, depth of analytic procedures, and number of participants.
Summary of empirical studies quantitative findings (N = 242).
Educational Setting
Forty percent of all the studies took place in higher education (n = 98), including studies in teacher education and professional development. Thirteen percent of the studies were set within the elementary context (n = 32) and only 5% (n = 13) were in early childhood settings. Middle school and high school settings made up 10% of the studies. Eight percent of the studies were set within the community (n = 20) and 6% (n = 15) in adult education.
Sociopolitical Focus
Forty-six percent of the studies included a focus on cultural and linguistic diversity of students or teachers, or an emphasis on local, state, or national ideologies. The next highest area was standards, evaluation, commercialization of education, and neoliberalism. Articles that focused on racism comprised 11% of the database. The categories of democracy and citizenship, disability, and sexualities and gender all had fewer than 10% of articles. Most of the categories showed persistent lines of inquiry across the 8 years of the review. The majority of articles in the area of democracy were published in 2010 or later, reflecting a more recent area of concern. Researchers’ interest in neoliberalism spiked in 2008, more than tripling in articles published the year prior. This area has remained strong with 21% of all articles in this area published in 2012.
Study Characteristics
Over 80% of the articles (n = 196) were case studies. Roughly 10% of the studies were teacher action research (n = 21), and these studies fell primarily within the areas of teacher education and literacy with just a few in curriculum. Of the studies with research participants (n = 127), 50% included fewer than 10 participants. Twenty-eight percent (n = 36) included between 10 and 20 participants, and 13% of the studies (n = 16) included between 21 and 40 participants. Of these, four articles were in the disciplinary area of curriculum. Only 9% (n = 11) of the studies included more than 40 participants.
Sixty-four percent of the studies relied on written data sources such as textbooks, curriculum documents, professional development books, policy documents, or syllabi. Studies where interactions, including interviews, were the focus comprised 36% of the database. Studies of interactions focused on teacher–teacher, teacher–student, student–student talk set in classroom settings, social networking sites, or in informal learning spaces. Not surprisingly, scholars in the educational disciplines of curriculum and educational policy focused mainly on written texts. Studies in literacy education focused heavily on interactions. Interview studies were distributed across areas.
Digital Technologies
Digital technologies were included in 20% of the studies (49 of 242). The majority of these technologies (n = 28) were websites (e.g., Askehave, 2007; Chiper, 2006; Irving & English, 2008). Website studies allowed researchers to access first-person experiences that may have been too rare to find if they were searching just in their geographic area (Benesch, 2008; Morgan, 2009). Discussion boards and blogs constituted 7 of the 49 studies, followed by emails or listservs in 6 of the 49 studies (e.g., Chen, 2006). Six studies included film, television, or phone. Richardson (2007) analyzed the roles of African American women in rap videos. Only two of the studies investigated social networking sites (Rambe, 2012; Ryan & Johnson, 2009). None of the studies investigated synchronous communications, and the highest concentration of digital technologies was found in STEM and Educational Policy, both with 11 studies.
Multimodal Analysis
Seventeen percent (n = 41) of the articles included multimodal analysis, with almost half being in literacy education. Of these, only eight included a multimodal transcript. The next highest grouping was in STEM and included five studies (12%) followed by higher education with three studies (7%). Other studies that included multimodal analysis were dispersed across the disciplinary areas.
Level of Detail in Analytic Procedures
Fifty percent of the articles included minimal or no description of their analytic procedures. However, 30% of the articles included a detailed description of 5 to 10 paragraphs. We noted that articles published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, and Linguistics and Education consistently had detailed analytic procedures section. Almost three quarters of the articles in educational policy had either minimal or no description of their procedures. Likewise, over 50% of the articles in higher education had minimal description. The disciplinary areas that trended toward thick description of analytic procedures (30% or more scored as 3) included Vocational Education (6 of 13), Teacher Education (10 of 22), Citizenship and Character Education (4 of 10), STEM (8 of 22), and Literacy Education (24 of 75).
Research Question 3
What findings emerge from CDA scholarship in education? Findings clustered around five major themes, with studies generating overlapping themes. Additionally, there were three predominant ways that the authors represented their findings: (a) analyses limited to micro-textual analysis, (b) those that attended to macro-ideological discourses without much granular analysis, and (c) analyses that explicitly linked the micro-textual analysis to institutional and societal contexts. We share representative studies for each of the themes and various ways scholars represented their CDA.
Learning Across Social Difference
Educational spaces are sites where social differences are negotiated. Findings that emerged from this category demonstrated how discourses around gender, class, race, or sexuality were transformed and enacted. Blaise (2005) demonstrated how gender was constructed relationally in a kindergarten classroom. The findings are represented through five, macro-level discourses of gender that the author identified in the classroom: wearing femininity, body movements, makeup, beauty, and fashion-talk. The following excerpt is representative of how the findings in this article stay mainly focused on gendered ideologies but without a fine-grained linguistic analysis:
Alan has little interest in the feminine world. Talking about dolls, the color pink, or Barbie evokes a cringe, roll of the eyes, and groans. . . . As Theresa begins explaining her drawing, Alan groans loudly, interrupting her as he complains, “She’s talking about the little mermaid again.” While saying this, Alan rolls his eyes and turns his body away from Theresa, indicating that he is neither interested nor values the work that Theresa has done during center time. (Blaise, 2005, p. 98)
Blaise described how dominant meanings surrounding gender were embodied and communicated through multiple modalities. L. W. Clarke (2007) and Moita-Lopes (2006) also focused on gender and sexuality, in a book club and classroom interactions, respectively. Both studies demonstrated how turn-taking structures and turn-by-turn positioning produced relations of gender and sexuality.
Stamou and Padeliadu (2009) drew on systemic functional linguistics and attended to the discourse processes (specifically transitivity) of teacher candidates who participated in a disability simulation. The authors identified discourses associated with disability and what discourse processes—kind of action (acts, states, feelings) and participants (humans, animals, or objects)—were associated with each discourse. Quantitative results were displayed through tables that displayed the percentage distribution of the nature of discourse processes by discourse type. Their findings showed that teachers represented disability through both traditional and progressive discourses. However, when they moved beyond a counting of discourse processes, they learned that the progressive discourses were subsumed within subjugated discourses.
A consistent conclusion drawn across the studies in this category is that people construct differences based on available meanings. Thus, pedagogical interventions ought to include a diversity of discourse practices. Other studies whose findings focused on learning across social difference include Allard and Santoro (2008), Graff (2010), Pimentel (2010), and Wade, Fauske, and Thompson (2008).
Representation of Identities (Teacher/Learner/Institutional)
Findings in this theme coalesced around the idea that representation of self and others is always partial and transformations in identity are incremental. Scholars showed how CDA offers the tools for tracing discourse patterns that constitute identity work across time and contexts.
Tamatea, Hardy, and Ninnes (2008) conducted a macro-ideological analysis on international schools’ websites to examine the construction of student subjectivities. They used three frames—individual selves, members of communities, and individuals in the world—to interrogate tensions and contradictions within and across the websites. They found the websites emphasized community as an intellectual activity rather than through lived interactions. Relatedly, students were represented as global subjects unfettered by economic structures. The following excerpts are representative of the findings:
While the web page asserts that the “school endeavours to develop global citizens,” it also states: “your children deserve the best quality education you can give them. Don’t settle for less!” Here one school displays two photographs of deluxe housing areas established by the school. . . . While web page statements speak of a universal world/humanity, and global citizenship, their graphic texts often construct a particular (student) world framed by privilege and a citizenship isolated and “secure” from surrounding local nation-state citizens. Such texts undoubtedly comprise signage displaying to the consumer the cultural, economic, symbolic and economic capital of the world of the globally mobile professional class. (Tamatea et al., 2008, p. 165)
The findings focused mainly on a macro-ideological analysis of the commodification of international education. Other studies focused on how teachers or learners are represented through policy documents, the curriculum, and the news (see, e.g., Cohen, 2010; D. C. Johnson, 2010; Oughton, 2007).
Another grouping of studies in this category focused on teachers’ identification processes (see, e.g., Cahnmann, Rymes, & Souto-Manning, 2005; Mosley, 2010; Rymes, Cahnmann-Taylor, & Souto-Manning, 2008; Schieble, 2012). Haddix (2010), for instance, examined how Black and Latina preservice teachers reconciled tensions between their racial and linguistic identities and the identities expected of them as novice teachers. Using Fairclough’s (1989) approach to CDA, Haddix (2010) integrated an analysis of African American Language into her analysis of the style of the teachers’ talk. The following is an excerpt from her findings:
Natasha also used AAL as she developed her own classroom management style. She would often remind students: I shouldn’t BE hearing any talking Authority (D)/ Reprimand (G)/ AAL (S). (videotaped observation, transcript, 11/27/06). Here, her use of habitual BE served to remind the students that they should not “be talking”—not only in that moment but at all times that required students to actively listen. In both of these instances in the second-grade classroom, Natasha forged a hybrid discourse that coalesced her use of AAL, her emergent knowledge around teaching and classroom management, and her acknowledgement of the shared cultural and linguistic norms between her and her students. (Haddix, 2010, p. 107)
Haddix’s (2010) findings are illustrated through her micro-analysis of genre, discourse, and style of culturally sensitive classroom practices.
Similar findings emerged from studies focused on how multilingual students negotiated their identities in academic contexts. Fernsten (2008) also used Fairclough’s (1989) approach to CDA and developed a case study of a student named Mandy enrolled in a university writing course. Her findings highlighted the struggle of this multilingual writer to find personal voice and establish academic credibility. She displayed her findings through three contexts—a writing assignment reflecting on her identity as a writer a reflection to a journal article and a writing conference. Fernsten’s (2008) focus was on the representation of identities at the thematic level, not the grammatical level. Looking across this category of findings, we see the different ways in which CDA reveals the complexity of identity work at the level of grammar, through themes and in concert with societal-level ideologies.
Stability of Discourses
Widely circulated texts, whether policies, textbooks, or professional development books, are often the subject of CDA. Analysts are interested in the legitimization of ideas within these texts. de los Heros (2009), for example, studied the representation of language ideologies in a Peruvian textbook for first-year high school students. The findings were represented through four examples, each of which displays a different linguistic concept (e.g., conjunctions, variation in oral speech and the use of stigmatized verb forms, language change and the use of neologisms, and the inclusion of indigenous languages). The author presented excerpts from the textbook as an example of how the textbook addresses language change. She then presented her CDA of the passage, shuttling between the grammatical construction of the passage and the language ideology of “standard” that it evoked.
Similarly, Peled-Elhanan (2010) argued that mainstream Israeli textbooks implicitly legitimated the killing of Palestinians as an effective tool to preserve a secure Jewish state and suggests that this legitimation prepared Israeli youth to be good soldiers and to carry on the practices of occupation in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. The author identified four commonly reported events and used van Leeuwen’s (2008) and Kress’s (2010) approaches to CDA, closely analyzing the rhetoric of legitimation. A number of authors’ findings pointed to the conclusion that regulative discourses reinforce standard uses of language that privilege dominant groups (see, e.g., Hashimoto, 2011; Li, 2011; Taylor, 2008).
Other studies focused on the discourses of disciplinary learning. Llewellyn (2009) used a Foucauldian-style CDA to investigate power/knowledge relationships embedded in teacher candidates’ talk about mathematics. Findings are represented through narratives of two candidates (Sam and Alex). Her CDA illustrated notions of gender, individuality, and ways of being in the mathematics classroom. The author drew on topically related statements from the interviewees to demonstrate how these societal-level discourses are embodied or resisted by individuals and what this means for becoming a mathematician.
Dworin and Bomer (2008) examined how Payne’s (2005) widely used book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, demonized people living in poverty, yet has had wide appeal with educators. They asked, “If the persuasion is not working through evidence and reasoning, how is it working?” (p. 102) They evoked CDA and studied how the lexicogrammatical and rhetorical choices activate deficit perspectives of people living in poverty. The following excerpt is representative of Dworin and Bomer’s (2008) findings:
Throughout the text, Payne employs categorical modality—that is, writing with few or no modal verbs such as “may” or “might,” or adverbials such as “often” or “sometimes.” . . . In other words, categorical modality turns casual possibilities into certainties, and indeed, that is what Payne often does throughout her text. She repeatedly uses phrases like “in fact” and “as a matter of fact,” though facts seem never to be included. Claims in the book are only stated as universals, never as opinions, perspectives, interpretations, guesses, or located and partial understandings. (p. 111)
Their CDA attended to the micro-context of the text and its ideological persuasion.
We learn that social constructs are negotiated but some are more durable than others. With regard to disability, Mazher (2011) found that in both academic and personal narratives, people used deficit language to describe disabilities. Price (2009), when looking at language used within conference documents, found that the use of pronouns provide insight into how disability is contextualized. Despite an abundance of evidence about gender discrimination in education, women teachers demonstrated a lack of awareness about gender issues (Moreau, Osgood, & Halsall, 2007). Ngo and Leet-Otley (2011) found that not all powers deemed oppressive are always so. Hmong culture is not singularly oppressive for women because it also supports educated women.
As a whole, the studies in this category of findings demonstrated how discourses maintain their ideological stronghold. Although some studies focused on the grammatical composition at a fairly micro-social level, others honed in on the hegemonic aspects of institutional and societal discourses.
Emergence and Trajectory of Social Constructs
Social constructs are negotiated and have a trajectory and life-course. A persistent concern in the database after year 2008 is the enactment of neoliberalism. Across the studies, we see the life cycle of neoliberalism from the emergence of the concept, to the perpetuation of narratives that emphasize individualism, competitiveness, and the primacy of economic markets, to the integration of the logic/practice into policies and practices. This collection of studies makes these social processes more visible to educators. Findings coalesced around the idea that cultural politics lay the groundwork for neoliberal changes in education. Neoliberalism is carried out in a range of geographic settings, each with their own history and power asymmetries (Ryan, 2011; Takayama, 2009). Parker (2011) illustrated the crisis-and-salvation narrative related to public education that has been constructed by media workers and policymakers. The crisis is that schools are failing to prepare students for the world of work in a global economy. The salvation narrative is that only schools can save the nation. These narratives, Parker (2011) reminded us, are what Foucault (1980) referred to as discourse formations, widely circulated messages about social institutions.
With teachers ill-equipped to solve the problems of schools, neoliberal policies reinforce a managerial style of governance of education that is monitored through performance indicators, outcome related targets, and mandated staff developments, which make it difficult for educators to resist (Hamilton & Pitt, 2011). Indeed, accountability measures are effective, in part, because educational leaders become the arm of the state, enforcing accountability-driven policy measures. A collection of studies exposed the discursive shift away from teaching to testing, an international trend. In South Korea, there is a “test plus release” policy that has gained dominance by manipulating public opinion about the benefits of competition within public education (Sung & Kang, 2012).
In Australia, Comber and Cormack’s (2011) ethnographic study examined how national policies were mediated through the work of principals. Drawing on Luke’s (1995) approach to CDA, the authors tracked the “coordinating language of mandated literacy assessments” (Comber & Cormack, 2011, p. 78) and showed how principals are positioned vis-à-vis testing and accountability. Comber and Cormack (2011) wrote,
The last section selected for analysis follows immediately after the “Responsibilities of the principal” section. It is entitled, “Communicating NAPLAN information with the school community.” This brief (half page) section begins with the statement that “It is important that the school community is informed of the NAPLAN test dates and procedures” (p. 9). It continues with a sentence stem, “Communications with the school community may include the following details” (emphasis added) which is followed by nine dot-points of information. The grammar of the stem constitutes an instruction using the modal verb auxiliary “may” which implies that permission is provided. The use of an alternative auxiliary “can,” for example, would produce the list that follows as a list of possibilities—the use of “may” produces it as a restricted list of things it are allowable rather than possible. The unsaid of “may,” of course, is that what is not on the list may not be said. (p. 82)
Their CDA showed how the principal negotiates the demands of accountability by accessing information from the state and managing participants in the process.
Schools are under pressure to perform well on tests or be subject to reconstitution or closure. Faced with these threats, school leaders seek to construct a positive identity for themselves by attempting to meet the requirements (Briscoe & De Oliver, 2012). Reid (2009) demonstrated how universities implemented the discourses of managerialism through their audit processes, which, in turn, actors within the universities internalized. Public school teachers are also often complicit with policies because of the public pressure (Comber & Nixon, 2009; Reid, 2009; Thomas, 2011). CDA makes these tensions visible by exposing the discursive contours of neoliberalism at local, institutional, and societal levels.
Neoliberal education practices are infused with competing discourses. On the one hand is global competitiveness and entrepreneurial, client-based practices and, on the other, civic engagement, professionalism, and inclusiveness (Arnott & Ozga, 2010; Chiper, 2006; Ryan, 2011). Universities use the discourse of community engagement to further their social and economic goals. Peacock (2012) conducted a CDA of university–community engagement in the context of Australian higher education, specifically focused on a key position statement released by the Australian Universities Community Engagement Alliances. Through an analysis of interdiscursivity and modality, the author found that the position statement rhetorically privileged a neoliberal interpretation of community engagement, one that focused on competition, individualism, and commercial outcomes. This study embedded the CDA of the position statement within the larger social and political context of higher education in Australia.
McNeill (2012) investigated the social media policies of 14 universities in the United Kingdom using CDA. McNeill (2012; pp. 160–161) concluded that many social media policies focused on impression management “imposing from the top-down as it were a repertoire of preferred presentational strategies (use of corporate branding, tone, disclaimers, etc.).” Although the author’s CDA stayed focused on the texts of the social media policies (without much attention to the historical context or what people say about the policies), it did so across 14 institutions and, in this way, extended the reach of the conclusions about the potential and threats of social media in higher education. Indeed, the marketing of neoliberal universities is tightly orchestrated to create the ideal image of the student experience (Askehave, 2007). Despite this rhetorical emphasis, Sabri (2011) found that neoliberal practices homogenize students and their experiences.
More generally, CDA illuminates the complexity of the policy process. A number of researchers found contradictions between the intention and implementation of a policy, what Nudzor (2012) referred to as the “policy implementation paradox” (p. 358). Liasidou (2008) showed how a policy intended to create inclusive education reinforced binaries with regard to children with special needs. In Cyprus, for inclusive education policies meant to advocate for the educational rights of children with special needs, the documents were peppered with “clauses of conditionality” whereby children with special needs are deemed as atypical.
We learn of an ideological chasm between language policy and racial equity within the United States (Blum & Johnson, 2012). The No Child Left Behind Act claims color blindness while maintaining hierarchies of race and class (Brown, Souto-Manning, & Laman, 2010). Language policies around the world legitimate unequal access to different groups of students (Krieg, 2010). As with the other categories of findings, we see numerous ways of enacting CDA—through a close granular analysis to a focus on discourse formations. Taken together, this collection of studies illustrates the framing, enactment, and transformation of social constructs such as neoliberalism.
Instructional Design, Practice, and Evaluation
Within the written documents that drive learning (e.g., syllabi), the instructional design that shapes pedagogy, and the ways in which learners are evaluated, there are numerous macro-level and micro-level findings that researchers discovered in their studies. These findings revealed many interactional patterns that can both construct boundaries and facilitate access for learners.
Using Fairclough’s (1989) approach to CDA, Rossi, Tinning, McCuaig, Sirna, and Hunter (2009) analyzed a syllabus “to explore the relationships between the emancipatory/social justice expectations . . . and the language details of learning outcomes that indicate how the expectations might be satisfied” (p. 75). They illustrated what verbs were being employed in the document and the significance of these word choices. As Rossi et al. claimed, “The declarative nature of the language of the syllabus and the nature of the process words in the outcome statements, we can take the ideology within the syllabus as being invested with significant power” (p. 86). When attention is given to the individual word choices of documents, a more nuanced understanding of the language’s impact can be achieved.
We also learn about the effectiveness of instructional designs in other studies. Goulah (2011) found that a transformative world language learning approach might be effective for bridging traditional written literacies with “ecospiritual literacies” in the foreign language classroom. Paugh and Dudley-Marling (2011) found that inquiry groups as a form of professional development allowed teachers to challenge preconceived notions about ability. Hanrahan’s (2006) study of science classrooms framed two teachers’ discourse practices by breaking them down into three themes: “Ways of Representing School Science,” “Ways of Acting and Relating in the Science Classroom,” and “Ways of Identifying Teacher and Student Roles.” Through an analysis of pronouns and article usage, Hanrahan (2006) showed how teachers’ communication with students in science classrooms can reveal teacher attitudes that, in turn, affect learning. Findings that focus on the grammar of interaction can highlight inequitable participation patterns in learning environments.
In addition to teacher talk, we also learn what kind of pedagogy captures children’s attention. Wohlwend’s (2012) findings indicated that doll play is a productive pedagogy for mediating gendered texts circulating through global media. Similarly, Schaenen (2010a) found that when discussions in her fourth-grade classroom took a turn toward the moral—that is, discussions about power, goods, prestige—students’ participation increased.
Other studies focused on assessment and evaluation. Stack (2006) found that newspapers frame test scores in ways that shift the problem from poverty to pathologies. Prins and Toso (2008) found that the Parent Education Profile constructed parents in ways that upheld inequities. Tuten (2007) uncovered the interconnected nature of discourses when mothers talked about report cards. Dutro and Selland (2012) demonstrated how children internalized the discourses of testing. Rambe’s (2012) study, informed by Fairclough’s approach to CDA, examined the potential of social networking sites to democratize classroom interactions in an institute of higher education in South Africa. Through a series of tables that help contextualize and compartmentalize particular issues through Facebook interactions, Rambe breaks down a description, interpretation, and explanation of salient interactions. Table 3 illustrates Rambe’s (2012) CDA of an educator–learner interaction via Facebook. The author concluded that although social networking sites hold the potential to enable students to independently gain access to learning materials, critique their instructors, and learn alongside other students, the design of online learning activities mattered a great deal. Similarly, Weir (2005) used her CDA to caution educators that online communities of practices do not automatically lead to more democratic interactions.
Example of representing critical discourse analysis in the findings.
Note. Recreated from Rambe (2012, p. 303).
Research Question 4
How does CDA in education research engage with and contribute to the larger conversation about the theory and method of CDA? Table 4 summarizes our assessment of three CDA design characteristics: reflexivity, orientation toward inquiry, and social action. We discuss the findings across the empirical articles as a whole and describe patterns across categories of disciplinary area, data source, and time. For purposes of space, we present only a few illustrative exemplars within each category.
Qualitative assessment of CDA design characteristics (N = 242).
Reflexivity
Sixty percent of the studies fell on the low reflexivity end of the schemata (n = 144). In these studies, the authors positioned themselves as unexamined insiders or outsiders to the study. Thirty-five percent (n = 85) included disclosure of demographic information about themselves as scholars and embedded a reflexive stance in several places throughout the article. Only 5% (n = 13) of the studies exhibit high reflexivity, where the author’s position and intentionality were embedded in every aspect of the article. Six of the most reflexive studies were from literacy education. Other highly reflexive studies were distributed across disciplines including vocational education (Mitchell, 2004; Morgan & Ramanathan, 2009), teacher education (Mosley, 2010; Oikonomidoy, 2008; Wade et al., 2008), and STEM (Carlone & Webb, 2006).
Although most of the reflexive studies included interactional data, there were a few highly reflexive studies that analyzed written documents (Morgan & Ramanathan, 2009) and digital texts (Oikonomidoy, 2008). The disciplines with the highest concentration of minimal reflexivity included Curriculum (18 of 20 studies), Educational Policy (39 of 55), and Higher Education (16 of 25). Another common feature of the highly reflexive studies was that 10 of the 13 were conducted among adult participants. Thirteen of the most reflexive studies were spread evenly over time, with no sign of increasing toward 2012.
Low reflexivity
Ates and Eslami (2012), in a study of nonnative English-speaking graduate teaching assistants’ journals, used first person consistently but offered no other information about themselves. M. Clarke (2009) reported on a study of communication strategies of preservice teachers in an online forum over the course of a year. However, we do not learn of M. Clarke’s position vis-à-vis the data generated (e.g., teacher educator). The lack of reflexivity was particularly surprising in some cases. For instance, the first line of Moita-Lopes’s (2006) article discusses reflexivity in her study of “queering school literacy practices” (p. 33). She even disclosed the sexual orientation of her research assistants but, surprisingly, engaged in minimal reflexivity herself. Kuntz, Gildersleeve, and Pasque (2011) analyzed Obama’s American Graduation Initiative. They reported their findings in the third person and do not identify how their positionalities influenced their interpretive lens. This kind of distanced, outside perspective was relatively common in studies of documents such as policy and curriculum documents, or in analyses of publicly available texts where the author was not intricately involved in data generation (e.g., Krieg, 2010; Manteaw, 2008; Nordin, 2011; Nudzor, 2012; Sutherland-Smith, 2010).
Medium reflexivity
Researchers who exhibited a medium amount of reflexivity disclosed basic information about themselves, wrote in the first person, and positioned themselves in relation to data generation. Kettle (2005) included a description of how she generated the texts and how her primary language affected the interpretive process. Rogers and Christian (2007) included a detailed description of their interracial research team and consistently shared their interpretive positions throughout the findings. Other studies with a medium amount of reflexivity included Comber and Nixon (2009), Davison (2006), du Preez and Simmonds (2011), Talbot (2010), and Yoon (2012).
High reflexivity
Authors of highly reflexive studies built reflexivity into their questions. These studies weaved an analysis of positioning throughout the study. Wade et al. (2008) wrote, “Just as we want our students to become critically reflective through dialogue, we too, as teacher educators, wanted to become more critically reflective by engaging in dialogue about our pedagogy” (p. 414). Crumpler, Handsfield, and Dean (2011) subjected their interactions in an inquiry group to the same level of scrutiny as their participants. Other studies in which reflexivity was central included Rocha-Schmid (2010), Rogers (2011a), Schaenen (2010b), and Souto-Manning (2006).
Deconstructive–Reconstructive Orientations
Sixty-six percent of the studies included some element of reconstruction or attention to learning and transformation. Only six studies, however, referred to themselves as reconstructive analyses. Approximately 34% of the studies (n = 83) focused their analysis on discourses that sustained inequalities or took a deconstructive approach. These authors pulled apart texts to show how inequity is reproduced. Literacy education had the highest level of reconstructive analysis (Rogers & Schaenen, 2014). Authors of highly deconstructive studies primarily analyzed written texts, while those with a reconstructive orientation tended to work with interactions.
Highly reconstructive
Studies with a reconstructive approach focused on learning and transformation. Almost all of these studies are in the second half of our time frame, published in 2009 or later (the exception is Hanrahan, 2006). Barrett (2010) used CDA to study effective problem-based learning in higher education. He focused on examples where individuals were in a flow state, the zone where a high level of challenge is matched by one’s sense of proficiency and there is a “feeling of using one’s skills to the maximum” (p. 171). Young (2009) studied the design of an intentionally liberational text (The Brownie Books by W. E. B. Dubois). Other examples of highly reconstructive studies included Goulah (2011), Haddix (2010), and Hanrahan (2006).
Studies finding both structure and agency
Authors in this group attended to the top-down forces but also to how individuals created room for social change. There were two clusters of studies within this category. The first represented those that lean more toward reconstruction. Key words associated with these studies included change, learning, becoming, emerging, and reconstructing. Ryan and Johnson (2009) illustrated how Australian adolescents negotiated their identities between school and the outside world. They found that the social justice curriculum did not translate into the youths’ out-of-school lives. Allard and Santoro (2008) investigated the pedagogies of high school teachers who worked with non-English-speaking and economically disadvantaged immigrants or refugees in Australia. The authors used CDA to show how the teachers were becoming more culturally aware. Other studies that attended to both structure and agency but were weighted toward agency included Green and Tucker (2011), Mossman (2012), Paugh and Robinson (2011), Price (2009), and Rambe (2012).
Another cluster of studies oriented more toward deconstruction, but the authors discovered that traditional power relations were not being entirely reproduced. Cary (2004), in response to calls for reforming teacher education, studied the discourses of Professional Development Schools. Typical of studies of this kind, she deconstructed larger narratives about the crisis in teacher education and created a counternarrative that deliberately historicized and politicized reform. Richardson (2007), in a focus group study with African American adolescents, asked, “How do young African American females negotiate stereotypical representations of African American culture, gender, labor, and sexual values in rap music videos?” (p. 791) She showed how the women sometimes internalized stereotypes and other times resisted them. Other studies that attended to both structure and agency but were weighted toward showing how oppression is reproduced included Berkowitz (2012), Blum and Johnson (2012), Cranston (2010), and Haas and Fischman (2010). Studies that focused on structure and agency made up the majority of the database.
Highly deconstructive
The tendency to deconstruct practices to show the stronghold of oppression remains persistent over time. We found studies with a deconstructive orientation spread across the review and across disciplines. The majority of highly deconstructive studies examined written documents. There were some exceptions in studies with this orientation that analyzed interactions (e.g., Crumpler et al., 2011; Mitchell, 2004; Yoon, 2012) or interviews (e.g., Brown et al., 2010; Krieg, 2010). Hashimoto (2011) investigated how ideologies about Japanese language and identity are reproduced in language policies. Typical of studies with a deconstructive stance, Ayer’s (2005) CDA demonstrated how “the community college itself is instrumental in reproducing the class inequalities associated with advanced capitalism” (p. 528). Osgood (2009) examined how gender inequalities were perpetuated through policies associated with nursery workers in the United Kingdom. Other studies that focused on exposing how inequalities were sustained included Hamilton and Pitt (2011), Manteaw (2008), Pimentel and Velaquez (2009), and Smith (2008).
Social Action
Half of the studies (n = 123) took a moderate stance toward social action, calling for societal change as a result of their study (e.g., curricular changes, policy reforms, institutional interventions) or engaged in some sort of social action and reported on this action in the article (e.g., reanalysis, policy intervention, curricular change). Forty-four percent of the studies (n = 106) limited their discussion to general calls for future research or ideas for educational change, indicative of studies with minimal calls for social action. Studies in educational policy and literacy comprised about half of all studies deemed low in social action. Six percent of the studies (n = 14) embedded social action within the research design.
Strong calls for social action were, predictably, generally associated with higher degrees of reflexivity as well as with the studies we deemed most reconstructive in stance (cf. Carlone & Webb, 2006; Gebhard, Demers, & Castillo-Rosenthal, 2008; Haddix, 2010; Hanrahan, 2004; Rymes et al., 2008; Schaenen, 2010b; van Rensburg, 2007). Only two studies with the highest commitments to social action were also scored as most deconstructive in orientation (i.e., Mitchell, 2004; Rocha-Schmid, 2010).
Minimal call for action
Some studies recommend future research or offered new research questions but do not call for any sort of social action. Agiro (2012) extended a line of inquiry about comparative analysis of American literature textbooks and suggested ideas for change in the textbook companies but did not make a call for social action. Other studies provided a thoughtful discussion of central issues but offered neither ideas for future research nor calls for any sort of action (e.g., Brooks, 2009; Cary, 2004; Domine, 2012; Raptis, 2012).
Moderate call for action
Studies with moderate calls for action recommended a specific set of actions or took some sort of action and reported on it (e.g., curricular change, policy intervention, institutional change). Yoon (2012) studied a teacher study group comprising White women who inquired into issues of equity in their schools. She focused on the paradoxes among teachers’ beliefs and actions. Her discussion requested that educators recognize and name “Whiteness-at-work,” which “can become a tool for educators to interrupt taken-for-granted ideologies and actions and redirect discourse toward socially just aims to support educational opportunities for their students” (p. 609). Indeed, it was typical for authors to call for pedagogic, curricular, or institutional change in their conclusions. Other studies reported on their actions within the article. As part of Graff’s (2010) study, teachers enrolled in her multicultural literacy course designed units of study focused on the immigrant experience and used this to build professional development experiences. Other studies with moderate stances toward social action included Barton and Sakwa (2012), Dutro (2010), and Liasidou (2008).
Action embedded in research design
Authors who took an interventionist approach embedded social action within their research design. Cahnmann et al. (2005) focused on bilingual adults studying to be teachers of English learners. They called their inquiry a form of “engaged praxis” that sought to “foster local identification processes among our participants so that their bilingualism is fruitfully used as a resource within local schools” (Cahnmann et al., 2005, p. 197). The authors used CDA to examine the complexities of becoming a bilingual teacher within monolingual school systems, framing the purpose of their study in action-oriented terms: “It is our goal that participants can use local understandings of being bilingual to define themselves as both bilingual adults and bilingual teachers” (Cahnmann et al., 2005, p. 197). Graphics, texts, and actions (talking pie charts, theater of the oppressed actions) encourage readers to think in action-oriented terms. Authors who embedded social action in the research design were intentional in their attempts to use CDA to dismantle inequities and report on the results. Authors who took this approach included Marshall and Toohey (2010), Rocha-Schmid (2010), Schieble (2012), and van Rensburg (2007).
Citation Frequency
Supplementary Table S2 (available in the online version of the journal) provides a list of the publications that were cited 10 or more times across the database. Nine publications were cited over 20 times, signaling their impact on the field. All but two of these publications included Norman Fairclough. James Gee’s two books are also included in this list. Allan Luke followed close behind with 18 references to his 2002 chapter in the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. Lili Chouliaraki, Hilary Janks, and Rebecca Rogers are the only women cited. Many of the publications in this list were published before 2000 (12 of 20). The majority of publications on this list are books. Interestingly, just one of the articles was a report of an empirical study (Fairclough, 1993). The rest of the articles reported on theoretical developments (e.g., Luke, 1995; van Dijk, 1993) and one was a review of the literature (Rogers et al., 2005). Although van Dijk only appeared once on this list, his article (and subsequent reprinted chapter) with the title “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis” was cited 13 times.
Discussion
CDA in education research has expanded across disciplines and geographical areas. We describe how the field has evolved in the past 8 years and compare the findings of this literature review with the one published in 2005. We discuss findings in light of criticisms of CDA and point to directions for research and theory building.
Supplementary Table S3 (available in the online version of the journal) presents a comparative snapshot of the review published in 2005 against the current review. Most remarkable is the accelerated publication rate of CDA-inspired education research. Indeed, 46 articles between 1983 and 2003 versus 257 in the past 8 years alone. A sixfold increase is a significant proliferation of research in education alone. Researchers in educational policy and literacy have steadily drawn on CDA. Literacy education has remained the largest discipline represented for nearly 30 years. This is not surprising given the theoretical commitments of literacy studies and CDA are commensurable (Rogers & Schaenen, 2014). There is plenty of room for CDA studies in all disciplinary areas, especially as CDA is increasingly theorized as a pedagogical tool (Cots, 2006; Janks, 2009; Rogers & Mosley Wetzel, 2014).
Education researchers around the world are using CDA. However, most of the studies across 30 years took place in countries where English is the primary language: the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, or Canada. This finding is, in part, reflective of the geopolitics of publishing and database vendors. It may also be that scholars in the global south are referring to their work as critically oriented discourse analysis rather than CDA. Nonetheless, this is a trend that should be taken seriously and efforts made for more inclusive publishing practices.
There are other interesting findings across the two reviews. Forty percent of the studies published in the past 8 years took place in higher education (including teacher education and professional development). This finding represents a radical shift in focus from the earlier review when only 18% of the studies were set within higher education. Researchers are finding the university setting as one that supports the use of CDA. There was a significant decrease in the percentage of articles set within middle and high school contexts in the current review. In the 2005 review, 31% of studies were in middle or high school settings. Currently, only 10% of the studies reflect this emphasis area. The number of studies set in the community has risen substantially (from 11 to 35 studies), reflecting the importance of nonschool places of learning.
Across time, there has been a consistent focus on cultural and linguistic diversity. Indeed, 38% of the studies in the first review and 46% in the current review had this focus. There has been a decrease in interest in gender and sexualities. Only 5% of the articles carry this focus currently, compared with 18% in 2005. We see an uptick of interest in the areas of neoliberalism and in democracy, citizenship, civil, and human rights in current years.
An enduring criticism of CDA has been that discourse practices are taken out of context (Blommaert, 2005). CDA practitioners in education have countered this criticism with research designs that are part of larger ethnographic studies, teacher action research projects, and case studies. From 1983 to 2004, there were only three examples of teacher action research across the entire education database (Egan-Robertson, 1998; Rogers, 2002; Young, 2000). These studies took place in the community and in a homeschooling context, not in traditional school settings. Marking a big swing, there were 21 instances of teacher action research between 2004 and 2012. Educators are realizing the potential of using CDA to inform their practices. We did not find any examples of teachers researching their own practices in STEM, Curriculum, or Higher Education.
In reflecting on the rate of collaboration across the reviews, we noted a privatizing tendency of CDA scholarship. Seventy-one percent of the research conducted over the past 30 years has been by lone researchers. There is a slight trend upward in articles written by two authors, from 15% in the earlier review to 22% in the present review. Although we are amplifying relationships between texts and social structures, at a meta level, we continue to do so individually.
CDA has been critiqued for its written language bias (Blommaert, 2005) and, more recently, for its language bias in general (Maybin, 2013). In 2005, Rogers et al. reported that education researchers were overturning this bias, because 66% of the studies analyzed interactional data sources and just 33% of the studies focused on written texts. In this review of current research, we were surprised that 64% of the studies focused primarily on written texts. Future research might look more closely at the treatment of written texts in CDA studies of educational practices. That is, to what extent are written texts treated as a passive object of study or part of a trajectory of practice—configured, recontextualized, and transformed across contexts? Likewise, researchers might highlight the ways in which spoken texts are themselves multimodal. Just 42 studies attended to modes beyond language, and of those, just eight studies included a multimodal transcript. This is an increase from the single study in the earlier review. It was surprising that education policy or curriculum attended only to verbal or written modes, given that the design of curriculum or policies plays a role in their interpretation. We recommend education researchers using CDA attend to the dynamic intersections between meaning-making resources.
We see an increase in the integration of global technologies into these studies. In 2005, there were only two studies that included global technologies (Gebhard, 2002; Pitt, 2002). Eight years later, there are 49 studies, representing 20% of the total number of studies from 2004 to 2012. We were surprised that only 7 of the 75 articles in literacy studies included global technology, and by the paucity of studies investigating online learning, given the increased attention in these areas. There were no examples of synchronous interactions, an area ripe for study. We consider the increase in global technologies to be a substantial, but researchers are not examining the multimodality of these sources. Given the 20% of studies that integrated global technologies or relied on digital data sources, we would have expected researchers to examine not only what was said but how the layout, time, space, and proximity all contribute to meaning making. The majority of studies with multimodal procedures were influenced by the scholarship of Kress (2010) or van Leeuwen (2008).
The lack of attention to multimodality is not an inherent limitation of CDA frameworks. Indeed, CDA is amply prepared to inquire into how meanings are made in an increasingly digital world. The inventory of communication tools and activities is ever-growing: Wikis, Smartboards, iPads, multiplayer gaming systems, ultra-abbreviated forms of meaning making taken up by Twitter, memes that are made, shared, appreciated, and instantly left behind. Conceptual and methodological work that merges multimodal discourse analysis and CDA is needed to study such changes.
Across 30 years, CDA practitioners have primarily carried out analyses of small groups of people (20 or fewer participants). Optimistically, we consistently see around 30% of the authors providing a robust description of their procedures. This finding relates to a persistent criticism of CDA studies, that is, there is little method and too much social theory (Widdowson, 1998). There are factors that affect how thickly authors describe their analytic procedures such as space in journals and familiarity of the audience with CDA. Still, there are minimal requirements of adequacy within the field that include enough description of procedures so the account may be trustworthy.
The findings across studies have collectively persuaded, informed, and critiqued our understandings of the relationship between discourses and social structures. Some of the clusters of findings are thematically based and others are related to how discourse practices operate. Although CDA is known for its ability to connect micro- and macro-processes through description, interpretation, and explanation, the studies foreground some processes and background others. Indeed, looking across the studies, we saw the differences in how authors represented their CDA findings. Scholars are finding ways to contextualize fluid representational practices in a trajectory of discourse practices. Some studies deeply described grammatical structure of texts and others focused on macro-level ideologies. These differences reflect the diversity of not only approaches to CDA but also variation in representational choices available to scholars. We were reminded of the collective impact of studies as we looked across studies in thematic areas. For instance, we saw how CDA exposes the discursive contours of neoliberalism at local, institutional, and societal levels across time and geographical space. Read together, the studies in this area provide a more complete picture of how neoliberalism operates on and through educators and educational institutions. We call for further conceptual work on the collective impact of CDA studies in education.
We now discuss the findings of the three schemata. The earlier review discussed reflexivity and reconstructive/deconstructive orientation but did not include the schema that we used in this review. In the earlier review, Rogers et al. (2005) found a limited amount of reflexivity, noting “some of the articles did include a researcher role section—a rhetorical strategy that is commonplace in publishing qualitative research. However, many of the authors did not move from reflection to reflexivity” (p. 386). Although the majority of studies in the current review still were nonreflexive, 40% of the studies exhibited modest or high levels of reflexivity (2s and 3s combined). We think this represents good progress. Curious to us was the amount of scholarship judged as nonreflexive that included interactional data. We encourage authors to position themselves, minimally, in the methodology sections of their papers. Future conceptual work might focus on the consequences of reflexivity.
One of the most interesting findings is the reconstructive leaning of scholarship over the past 8 years. Indeed, the majority of scholars focus on how learning, change, and identity work are constructed through discourse practices. The 2005 review noted, “Most of the studies focused on what Luke (2004) calls ‘deconstructive rather than reconstructive aspects of power’” (Rogers et al., 2005, p. 384). The authors also wrote “more analyses of the intricacies of classroom talk, within a democratic framework, could offer descriptions, interpretations and explanations of how agency, productive literate identities and a sense of community are formed and sustained” (Rogers et al., 2005, p. 384). CDA practitioners have answered this call and now we need further theorizations of positive discourse analysis (e.g., Bartlett, 2012; Martin, 2004; Rogers & Mosley Wetzel, 2013). Whereas the majority of studies report on or call for social action in their study, there were few studies that embed social action in the research design. Scollon (2008) argued that CDA might be used to influence ongoing practices instead of studying artifacts of the past. We call for more reports of interventionist CDA and better theorizations of social action.
Three traditions of CDA scholarship are represented (European, North American, and Australian) in the work of Fairclough (1989), Gee (1990), and Luke (1995), respectively. These traditions have taken root and further scholarship should parse out similarities and distinctions among these approaches. Yet the concentrated nature of these people’s publications reflects the hegemony of a small group of people who have influenced CDA in education research, which could result in a narrowing of perspectives and approaches. We encourage education researchers to seek out the research of CDA scholars such as Jan Blommaert, Carmen Caldas-Coulhardt, James Collins, Michelle Lazar, Mónica Pini, and Luisa Martín Rojo. CDA has developed well-formed areas and education researchers might expand their theorization into these areas—sociocognitive studies, multimodality, discourse-historical approaches, positive discourse analysis. If education researchers are concerned with equality across gender, race, social class, and ability/disability lines, we need to get serious about calling on the work of scholars that reflect these categories. There are too few women, scholars of color, and differently abled scholars being referenced with regard to CDA’s tenets. Of the most cited publications, over half were published several decades ago.
Final Words
Despite the scope of this literature review, we do not claim to have produced a definitive account of the state of CDA in education research. Rather, we have provided an updated record of the kinds of activities occurring among education researchers using CDA. Given the sheer bulk of education researchers using CDA to study educational problems, the potential for influencing the broader field of critical discourse studies is immense. It would serve education researchers well to expand the theorization of CDA, standing on the shoulders of those CDA scholars who have come before them and reaching out to bridge and build new traditions.
Footnotes
Authors
REBECCA ROGERS is a professor of education in the College of Education, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 369 Marillac Hall, One University Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63121, USA; email:
INDA SCHAENEN teaches language arts at an urban middle school in the St. Louis area. She is a frequent contributor to media reports on the politics of race in public education, and author of “Speaking of Fourth Grade: What Listening to Kids Tells Us About School in America” (New Press, 2014). Her email is:
CHRISTOPHER SCHOTT is a doctoral student in the College of Education, lecturer in English, and writing center coordinator, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 428 Lucas Hall, One University Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63121, USA; email:
KATHRYN O’BRIEN is a doctoral candidate in the College of Education, Department of Educator Preparation, Innovation, and Research, at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, 369 Marillac Hall, One University Blvd., St. Louis, Missouri 63121, USA; email:
LINA TRIGOS-CARRILLO is a doctoral candidate of learning, teaching and curriculum in the College of Education, University of Missouri-Columbia, 303 Townsend Hall, Columbia, MO 65201, USA; email:
KIM STARKEY is a doctoral student in the College of Education, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 369 Marillac Hall, One University Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63121, USA; email:
CYNTHIA CARTER CHASTEEN is a post doctoral fellow with the Quality Teachers for English Learners (QTEL) project at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, 369 Marillac Hall, One University Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63121, USA; email:
References
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