On Fairclough's Language & Power (2015 ed)

Norman Fairclough, and his work with others such as Lili Chouliaraki, is regularly cited in critical discourse analysis studies in literacy scholarship. As I have been thinking about my data for the paper required for this discourse analysis course, I realized that it would benefit my analysis and my chances for publication in the future if I spent some time with his seminal work, Language and Power, originally published in 1989. The new edition quite helpfully includes an introduction in which he lays out an argument for how the CDA approaches he describes in Language and Power fit in the current landscape of discourse analysis scholarship. He also takes the time to respond to critiques leveled at the book, making a case for it as fitting with other thinking on CDA. As a new scholar in the field, what this introduction has provided is a means by which to historicize and think about the field of CDA as an active and evolving space that requires me to synthesize across approaches, maintaining an awareness of the potential for conflicting ways of representing discourse and the work of CDA across the field.

Fairclough claims that his approach to CDA in Language and Power offers a radical view, in which he constructs "discourse as a stake in social struggle as well as a site of social struggle, and views struggle as including class struggle" (p. 3). The dialectical nature of discourse, its ability to produce social struggle and to be produced by social struggle, fits with my own understanding of the work of discourse in the world. And, in speaking to the specific issues of class struggle, something that the field of education is currently calling for immediate and robust attention to (Comber, 2015), his arguments resonate with my own experiences of discourse in a high poverty setting. This perspective inserts issues of power and change into dialectical relationships with social objects - an important piece of not only literacy theory around new literacies and objects, such as digital tools, mediating experiences with texts (Comber, 1997; Prinsloo, 2005), but also of what I have, through research, begun to understand of the nature of digital tools to work in dialectical ways with the talk of teachers working in the high poverty setting in which they teach. His definition of CDA offers not only a means by which to conduct analysis, but a way forward with what has been interpreted and explained via the research process:

"CDA combines critique of discourse and explanation of how it figures within and contributes to the existing social reality, as a basis for action to change that existing reality in particular aspects" (p. 6).

Perhaps it is because I was teacher, perhaps it is because I was trained in sociocultural and critical approaches to teaching and learning, perhaps it is because I spent so much time learning and practicing reflection as a form of praxis, but what else is there for us to do when we have engaged in critique and explanation but work toward dialectically constructed potential actions for social change?

As part of my work for another course in which I am using data from this current study I have been struggling with how to share findings with participants. I have settled on offering some discussion points based on intentions and tensions I have seen in the data around the nature of top-down technology integration and its impact on what teachers talk about as possible from their own identity claims and based on the larger realities of working in a high poverty area. Intentions might be talk around the importance of time for planning while a tension point would be teacher talk about a lack of student background knowledge. What I hope to do is point to moments in teacher's talk where they offer ways forward, for example, one teacher suggested a community walk with iPads to take pictures. Teachers' talk so far has constructed digital tools as holding possibility measured by tensions in their construction of themselves as incapable or their students as lacking experience. These constructions are nestled within or bubbling from the top down requirement to use the tools, the high stakes accountability of testing and teaching today, and an incredibly overwhelming sense of what could be lost or what might be wasted in not using these tools. This shows talk constructing these digital tools dialectically with the social processes surrounding the actors and their talk while maintaining the object as a bringing with it certain material realities. Offering potential moves forward, based on the constructed talk of participants which I am privy to because of my privileged position in spending time looking so closely at this talk, leaves me with the responsibility of acting to support change.

At least that's what I think right now...

Comber, B. (2015). Critical literacy and social justice. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy,

58(5), 362-367.

Fairclough, N. (2015). Language and power. Routlege.

Prinsloo, M. (2005). The new literacies as placed resources. Perspectives in Education,

4(23), 87-98.

On discursive psychology and the field of critical literacy

So, I am currently working on two research projects in addition to the one I have been writing about for this class. What has become quite interesting, and connected, about these two topics are the ways in which the faculty members I work with are drawing from established critical literacy frameworks in order to inform and concentrate our analysis and findings. The work we are doing for these projects is not a-typical of the types of research I might read in a literacy journal. The one project involves analyzing teacher narratives about their critical literacy approaches to teaching and their classrooms. The other project deals with how pre-service teachers evaluate online sources about climate change. Both are coming from a position that privileges critical literacy frameworks for thinking about what literacy means and by doing so structure our analysis and talk around these frameworks. This, in my pedagogical view, is good. Knowing more about how teachers talk about themselves in terms of critical literacy as critical practitioners can help in supporting new ways of thinking about critical literacy and ways to help students and teachers think about the work of the critical classroom. Considering how people read online sources, and in specific about climate change, from a critical literacy standpoint considers issues of power, access and justice in terms of climate change and how we can read and reconstruct ideas toward that end. These are all good things.

But, and here is where I am really realizing that discourse analysis has become my way of thinking about research, neither of these projects are considering how the discourse of either the data or the discourse within the data continue to re-constitute discourses of critical literacy - in either positive or negative ways. I think this would be hard to do on a few levels, one because so many critical literacy people argue for and practice close language study. This means that in the well-written pieces and the frameworks that are looked at consistently, the tension of the language around critical literacy and what that means is always being revised and reconsidered given social, historical and political contexts. One author in particular, Hilary Janks, is adept at adapting her language and framework to the times. And critical literacy practitioners place their own language, pedagogy and work under the microscope to examine it closely and refine. What I have been thinking about, though, is that this eye to refinement, of course a hallmark of academia (how else would we keep our jobs!?), along with some of the significant tenets of the field (such as drawing from multiple perspectives, focusing on the sociopolitical, redesigning, etc) of course are creating their own discourses of what doing critically literacy means.

What really brought this to the fore for me was the article by you, Jessica, (Lester & Paulus, 2011) this week. I was thinking about my study on climate change and how students wrote responses (not intended to be read by other students) using an online tool designed around a critical literacy framework with the intent of scaffolding specific ways of thinking about a text. What lead me to thinking about the idea of discursive psychology and critical literacy was the fact that the critical literacy framework was taken for granted and not considered as part of the student response. Rather, because of the privileging of this framework, we understand those questions as scaffolds, leading students to specific options and ways for considering evaluation. What I want to know is, apart from a content or knowledge level, is how are the students constructing responses to these questions designed from a critical literacy stance, and what might that mean for what it means to do critical literacy. I wonder this because our initial reading of some of the data included codes such as superficial understanding, does not understand claim, etc. There were more positive analyses too, such as identifies implicit bias or intertextual references, etc. Either way, these are focused on content rather than how students are constructing the work of evaluation in the face of critical literacy frameworks. Further, in follow up interviews as I was listening I immediately noticed moments from critical literacy training where I identified student talk as doing critical literacy (moments of redesign of ideas or reflexivity, for example). But again I wondered what about their talk made these moments of content analysis possible, and what would a DP look at critical literacy need to be. I'm not sure I'm quite able to think my way through that entirely at this point, but I think it is something to consider. And as I move forward in these projects I am hoping to use some of these perspectives to broaden the scope of our work.

On reflection and becoming comfortable with critical work

I have to admit that I felt my presentation last week went poorly. I am actually quite secure in my theoretical frames and approaches, and know that modifications to these must be met with new readings and new ways of thinking by me. In fact, I enjoy that type of work and thinking. Rather, my insecurities stem from my work with the teachers in Connersville. In stark contrast to the democratic and egalitarian relationship I have developed with the former teacher and now principal I first worked with last year, these teachers had me thrust upon them along with a new principal and a bunch of demands to integrate technology into their classrooms. I'm not sure I was fully aware of that as I worked with them this year. Now, I want to give myself as much credit as possible here, so I need to acknowledge that I went in to the first semester concerned they would feel I was pushed on them, so I quietly observed a few classes and I set myself up in a neutral location for them to come and chat with me if they wanted. This semester we shifted to discussion groups because so many of them had talked about feeling isolated and perturbed by technology. I offered discussion groups as an option, with a survey sent out to see if a) they wanted to participate and b) what they might want to get out of such groups. So, this is all to say, that I did take into account that they did not ask for me to be in their school and classrooms and lives.

But, when I read the data I presented on last week I see flowing out behind my words, standing behind me, the thrust of unwanted demands on their time, bodies and knowledge. In particular, I am struck by how my words (Yeah, I know. (laughs) So what they're doing is not anything you guys couldn't do. Whatever tools they have, you guys have the same ones. And it sounds like similar. Isn't somebody studying butterflies, or frogs?) not only draw from those discourses of requirement but also don't even draw from my own theoretical conceptions of digital tools! How did this happen? And what reflective process can I engage in to resituate myself and do better? I also want to be sure I am not reading too much power into my own talk. I worry that I am too obsessed with reflection and my own practice as a researcher to be a particularly good one when it comes to my integration within data. And then I worry that without acknowledgement of this integration research isn't real or rigorous enough. I just can't figure out how to account for impacts on the discourse by my talk and presence without feeling constantly as if I am harming others. 

The reading for this week on identity in discourse felt particularly interesting. I wonder if spending time on identity construction in analysis could further reconnect me to how the teachers orient to one another and to me, without focusing solely on my own role. I think this will also tie into my questions about ways that teachers are resisting and reconstructing their own futures in discourse. That's where I am now, and I hope to have a much more solid grasp on these pieces in the next few days. 

On thinking through the iterative process of deconstruction and reconstruction

I am feeling a bit of paralysis as I think through my data. What I have found is that as I sit with it, I cannot help but agonize over the ways in which my own talk, and that of the participants, serves to constantly reify discourses about technology and teaching that are problematic for today. What I have come to understand this paralysis might indicate is that I am working through a Foucauldian sense of my data, an examination of what has become true in this space, and as such what has become possible for us as subjects within this discourse community to construct objects around us. I am leaving some quotes from the Jorgensen & Phillips text on Foucault and also from some course notes I have from Y613. As I think through these, they make sense. I am beginning to outline what is possible for the teachers I work with as they think through issues of technology and teaching. I am understanding the edges of these spaces in a very initial way, and I am so concerned about what I see. What I am beginning to see are teachers who understand themselves as subject to discourses of their own identities as outside or other to technology use. I am beginning to see that their lives are mediated by texts as technologies that determine a very specific future for their classroom environments - their talk about their classroom environments and lives as teachers. That in some ways, their own abilities to act within these structures is to respond in foot stomping. I am early in my analysis, and this is also based very much on my ethnographic work - the larger sense I have from spending time with the teachers in my study. They have been told to integrate technology by a new principal, a man, and all of the professional development, tools, district policies, and new best practices that stand behind him. What becomes possible for them in such spaces but to consider not just what their present-day classrooms might be like, but also what they know of past professional development and classroom initiatives? What else can they do but become stymied by their conceptions of a future in which they have trouble seeing themselves?

This is a deconstructive cycle that feels at once very comfortable for me - these discussion groups become a text as if I were sitting with a book. I can look for their limits and shape out patterns, even identifying outlying ideas or instances, such as the teacher who does unit/project-based learning or the teacher who steps out of her comfort zone and tearfully asks for my help. But I am trying very hard to remind myself that what is not there is not all that is there; these omnipresent discourses that only show flashes of themselves in teacher talk, laughs, or subject changing. What is there is also important, and I believe I am now in the beginning stages of also thinking through what is being constructed, or perhaps I am reconstructing?, what might be happening in terms of what is possible and where discourses can change or create action. Specifically, what I am noticing when teachers nudge toward what seems to terrify them - these very shaky futures that they can't quite see, or what they do see scares them - may also offer a way forward. Talking in this way, a way that accounts for the past, situates themselves in the present, and nods toward a potentially terrifying future, can also be understood as a sense of futurism. This is what science fiction writers have done for quite a long time now. To re-situate themselves, to reconstruct themselves as actors in a brave new world of technology, do teachers first have to work through their own conceptions of scary dystopias in their futures? They aren't voicing fears that their students will become automatons or that they won't have jobs necessarily, but they do voice these concerns that speak to what they know - a concern about time (where does it come from?), a concern about their bodies (how can I be in so many places?), a concern about knowledge and identity (am I capable of mastering such skills?). Upon initial analysis perhaps these delimit what teachers can talk about, but could it also be possible that working through these potential futures allows them the space to create discourses about pitfalls of their own personal classroom dystopias? These potential futures are not set in stone, and given what I already know from interviews and later discussion groups, they can be changed. Fears shift after we avert disaster. Averting disaster gives us strength to work again through iterative processes. What I want to know as the researcher, is are these teachers actually futurists? In what ways might their discourse construct such identities? And do futurists need to be aware of their own identities as such? Does it still count if they would just identify their discourse as venting?

I think this type of work would need to be longitudinal. I would need to understand what changes for teachers and their talk over time, but I wonder, could this be a way of thinking about what is possible, and perhaps how teachers are not just within power structures but constructing their own discourses?

Some quotes from Foucault to keep thinking about...

Archaeology: different regimes of knowledge determine what is true and false (Jorgensen & Phillips, p. 12), what is true, is discourse.

Genealogy: From Jorgensen & Phillips (p. 13), "What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it does not only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. (Foucault 1980: 119)".  Power lets us consider what is possible, as in what is delimited by power and what is produced by power: what are the effects of the truths, of the discourse.

From Y613 class notes:

"If what is meant by thought is the act that posits a subject and an object, along with their possible relations, a critical history of thought would be an analysis of the conditions under which certain relations of subject to object are formed or modified, insofar as those relations constitute a possible knowledge (savor)…The problem is to determine what the subject must be, to what condition he is subject, what status he must have, what position he must occupy in reality or in the imaginary, in order to become a legitimate subject of this or that type of knowledge (connaissance)".

"But it is also and at the same time a question of determining under what conditions something can become an object for a possible knowledge (connaissance), how it may have been problematized as an object to be known, to what selective procedure it may have been subjected, the part of it that is regarded as pertinent" - in other words, the mode of its objectivation.

On the construction of research "results"

I want to just briefly use this blog post to think about something that came up in chapter 6 of the Jorgensen & Phillips book. Specifically, in their discussion of critical discourse analysis's approach to a modified ideology critique. I have yet to finish the chapter, but I am thinking about this in the context of having read Rogers & Schaenen's (2013) review of CDA scholarship in literacy. Their review focused on assessing debates and critiques of CDA in literacy as it approaches context, reflexivity, social action and a deconstructive/reconstructive stance toward inquiry. Jorgensen and Phillips claim that CDA situates itself as offering one form of knowledge (discourse?) that "is treated as a contribution to the public debate rather than the final arbiter of truth". Rogers & Schaenen explore this same idea by identifying studies that take a minimal, moderate or high call to social action. They found that the majority of studies (78%) took a minimal or moderate call to social action. These minimal and moderate calls, or perhaps according to Jorgensen and Phillips contributions to the public debate, were identified as either calling for a general change to pedagogy or society or a more specific call to social action or engaging/reporting on social action as part of a study. The high level calls embedded social action within their research design and had authors go into detail about what changes need to be made and how to enact such changes.

I guess what I am considering is, given the locations of publication of the articles reviewed, and in general the ways that research is presented, I wonder how authors go about situating themselves as offering one form of knowledge rather than a more concrete truth constructed by a researcher. I am really looking forward to reading and jumping in a more detailed fashion to the nuances of how researchers understand the ways their own work is constructed around ideologies and issues of power. In education broadly, and sociocultural and critical methodologies within literacy more specifically, I have always recognized, and felt an affinity toward, the pragmatic consequences of research. Discourse analysis feels quite comfortable for me, but I have also felt a concern about the ways such research is presented - it is very 'high minded' stuff. I remember in our first class you (Jessica) asked us to think about what our elevator speech would be about this course. I think elevator speeches are always hard, but those around discourse seem especially hard given the ways you first must construct a shared understanding of discursive practice and a shared understanding of the role that discursive practice plays in the world. I think as a budding researcher, my first task (and the one I hope to take up in the literature review) centers heavily on the means literacy researchers have of unpacking this type of work for both critical and pragmatic purposes - as I believe those calls to action and that contribution to knowledge production should be. That said, it seems that solid methodological approaches to discourse analysis require us to think so rigorously about every single step. I am not complaining about this, rather I find it a unique challenge. The methodologies I have been exposed to thus far seem not to take these epistemological unpackings quite so seriously, and when they do they haven't rung true. This is to say that the more I explore the underpinnings of discourse analysis the more I find that it fits with what I see in the world and how I feel most comfortable sharing what meanings I am able to take away from my data.


Jørgenson, M. & Phillips, L.. (2002). Discourse analysis as theory and method. London, UK: Sage Publications.

Rogers, R. & Schaenen, I. (2013). Critical discourse analysis in literacy education : A review of the literature. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(1), 121-143.

Considering my data

The data I am currently in the process of collecting is in the form of audio recordings of my interactions with teachers in brainstorming sessions and as a researcher-member of an after school discussion group devoted to speaking to the successes and challenges of technology integration at an elementary school in a rural-rustbelt town in the midwest. This is to say, that as I consider this data I have been thinking about where I feel most comfortable as a discourse analyst. After last week's work with CDA and this week's in discursive psychology, and more so in the chapter we read in Jorgensen and Phillips thinking across perspectives, I think I most solidly fit in with the CDA folks.

This is due in large part to my perspectives on social justice, change and power. It is my distinct hope that engaging with this specific group of teachers will benefit conversations around poverty and technology in the US. I thought a lot about what Francesca had to say last week about my epistemological approaches to issues of inequality, and I understood her as voicing concern about a priori (and perhaps savior-y) approaches to inequity. For me, this might leave out the voiced experiences of habitual and accumulated practices that reveal inequity, such as those of the teachers I work with. They continually give voice to and re-produce discourses of poverty connected to their students lives. But I knew this before I met these specific teachers because I had spoken with their principal. And while perhaps the ways the interactions the children in this school have with their teachers and technologies might not initially reveal inequity it does when put in conversation with other interactions, such as those wealthy children have at schools or those that multilingual children have at schools or those that children from different countries but with similar experiences with parents on drugs. So I wonder how focusing on the interaction can fully reveal discourse if we don't put it in conversation with other discourses (the idea of ordering discourses). And I wonder what it means to understand intertextuality if we don't consider other accumulated interactions that built other discourses. It was this thinking that led me to understand my specific 'place' in discourse more concretely.

It is also this point that speaks to my considerations of my data. When I think about the ways this data fits with CDA I at once wonder how critical I must be of my own role in the ways orders of discourse are understood within the analysis. I wonder how to delimit discourses and orders of discourses when I am present. I also wonder how to handle the integration of readings, video and activities I might bring in to the discussion group. Ultimately, the discourse analytic work will have to contend with these pieces - the main purpose for my presence is to support these teachers in what they need, not what my data needs. I think CDA allows for this, but how does it fit and what flak do you get for this?

On critical discourse analysis (Fairclough)

There were so many terms this week - an overwhelming number of terms. Or, perhaps I am just becoming more aware of what to pay attention to - the terms and concepts which make discourse analysis what it is. I'm going to try to reflect, analyze and make connections, but in this post I also want to lay out the terms Jorgensen and Phillips take the time to explicate in their chapter on CDA, and more specifically on CDA through Fairclough (and his co-researchers over time such as Wodak and Chouliaraki).

What is discourse? On p. 62, Jorgensen and Phillips write that "in critical discourse analysis, language-as-discourse is both a form of action (cf. Austin 1962) through which people can change the world and a form of action which is socially and historically situated in a dialectical relationship with the social".

For Fairclough, discourse is made of...

• text
• texts are linguistic and multimodal productions that are discursively created
• discursive practices
• how people produce and consume texts, within larger social practices
• social practices
• non-discursive practices which have a dialectical relationship with discursive practices

In Fairclough's version of CDA, understanding the 'ordering' of discourses is also important to theorize this, he draws from Bourdieu theory of field - no mention of habitus, however. Thus the ways various fields interact are ordered. I was a bit confused about how we can speak to what this order is, but know from Bourdieu that much as Laclau and Mouffe speak to individuals being over-determined by given 'identities' or 'discourses', so to can fields interact and contend with negotiations of discourse.

This brings me to a range of terms that must be particularly of interest to literacy scholars, especially given these concepts make their way so fluidly into literacy scholarship. The sections on intertextuality and interdiscursivity