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.