麻豆淫院

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a qualitative analytical framework which scrutinises language in use (see Fairclough, 2010). My research, conducted in secondary schools in the north-west of England, used semi-structured interviews with eight English teachers, from retired to trainee, and found that English teachers often resist the ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum in their discourse while reproducing traditional structures in practice, resulting in fragmented professional identities.

This blog post focuses on how CDA allows for exploration of impacts on the ‘soul’ of the teacher (Ball, 2016) through analysis of language and factors shaping discourse. CDA foregrounds language as reflecting the discourses constituting experience, revealing how power is internalised or negotiated. Linguistic choices and their reflection of ideological or power structures enable us to consider the personal and emotional burden of curriculum and policy reform often abstracted by quantitative methods.

The context from which participants were drawn provided anchor points for a shared social reality: the ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum. Lacking formal policy definition, the ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum is primarily constructed through rhetoric, neoliberal policy and institutions, shifting the focus from professional autonomy to the achievement of quantifiable outcomes.

The tick-box and the washing machine

In CDA, metaphors are essential, revealing how individuals conceptualise and give form to abstract or inexplicable experiences, grounding them in shared cultural or physical realities. The most pervasive metaphor was that of the ‘tick-box’. Several participants recognised its use to represent completion rather than quality. It reinforces a reality where participants were complicit in the surface nature of their work. Experienced teachers referred to tasks shifting from substantive to ‘tick-boxes’: superficial, related to completion rather than quality, where finishing replaces standards, enquiry and judgment. Trainee teachers saw mandatory or required examination texts as removed from immediate professional responsibility. Choice of texts, particularly extracts, from ‘prestige’ texts in the knowledge-rich context, were seen as superficial, signifying substantive engagement without meaningful teaching.

‘Experienced teachers referred to tasks shifting from substantive to “tick-boxes”: superficial, related to completion rather than quality, where finishing replaces standards, enquiry and judgment.’

Use of visceral metaphors, of existing in a ‘washing machine’ to ‘teaching in a washing machine’, simultaneously portrayed the experience of moving from being a student to a teacher as tumultuous, revealing a disorientating reality. The same participant expressed anxiety borne of pace and stress, with teaching English portrayed as, ‘like running through a crowd and you try to find someone, it just doesn’t work’.

The resistance–reproduction paradox

Experienced and retired teachers used political discourse to distance themselves from a curriculum they found reductive or elitist, simultaneously falling back on the ‘powerful orthodoxy’ (Peim, 1993, p. 18) of the English literary canon as their primary way of representing knowledge. When asked what, for them, constituted knowledge within the discipline, following their critique of the ‘knowledge-rich’ regime, participants returned to Shakespeare, Dickens, Milton and the Romantic poets, citing the need for deep background knowledge of religious and historical contexts, suggesting that disciplinary culture is as powerful a regulatory force as government policy.

A blend of joy and bureaucracy

Fairclough’s (2010, p. 170) notion of interdiscursivity – ‘developing one theory in dialogue with another, being open to having one theory transformed through internalising the logic of another’ – is evident in the weaving together of passion, particularly about the classroom, and compliance. Participants anchored their identities in the classroom to deny themselves the fate of being bogged down by data and marking, using the joy of classroom teaching to rationalise the omnipresent performative demands of the job. One experienced teacher balanced a range of contradictions simultaneously from feeling ‘burnt out’, ‘done’, ‘shepherded’, to ‘I walk into a classroom, and I love it’ and ‘I’ve not lost any of my passion or any of my energy’.

Methodological contribution

CDA allows for Diamond and Bulfin’s (2023, p. 4) ‘care of the profession’, ‘attending to the social and relational’ capturing fundamental aspects of what motivates teachers and supports them in their jobs. If policy continues to reduce English to an itemised ‘knowledge- rich’ agenda, we risk a generation of teachers who feel like outliers in their own classrooms. CDA offers an opportunity to transform how we listen to teachers, noticing and supporting them in the way they represent their experiences to reveal the impacts of policy.

References

Ball, S. J. (2016). Neoliberal education? Confronting the slouching beast. Policy Futures in Education, 14(8), 1046–1059.

Diamond, F., & Bulfin, S. (2023). Care of the profession: Teacher professionalism and learning beyond performance and compliance. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 33(2), 503–521.

Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Peim, N. (1993). Critical theory and the English teacher: Transforming the subject. Routledge.

Artificial intelligence declaration: The author used Gemini Notebook to synthesise their own thesis and and to isolate relevant aspects for this blog post. The author takes full responsibility for the accuracy and originality of this publication and complied with the terms of .