Discourse analysis

Teaching takes place within specific social and cultural contexts where it is given meaning through language and discourse. Discourse analysis is broadly defined as using textual data to gain insights to particular phenomena (Heracleous, 2006). More specifically, ‘discourse’ is defined as a ‘collection of texts, whether oral or written, located within social and organisational contexts that are patterned by certain structural, inner textual features and have both functional and constructive effects on their contexts’ (Heracleous, 2006, p.2). In accepting this definition, language can be seen as the ‘raw material of discourse’ with individual texts as both manifestations of broader discourses and having the power to give organised existence to broader discourses (Hendry, 2000; Heracleous, 2004) with an interest in linking the emergent nature of these discourses to their effects on the social actors within particular organisations and social settings (Heracleous, 2006).

Discourse analysis seeks a critical approach to knowledge that is taken for granted. Discourse analysis argues that our knowledge of the world is not a reflection of reality, but rather products of discourse (Burr, 1995; Gergen, 1985). Through discourse analysis, language is interrogated to gain a detailed understanding of the world of the people who act within it (Heracleous, 2006), illustrating how language is central to shared meanings (Smircich, 1983) and is thus a common identity for organisational members (Evered, 1983) who are ‘products of historically situated interchanges among people’ (Gergen, 1985, p.267). These definitions suggest that if this research was seeking to understand a certain meaning – in this case, the experience of teaching literature at GCSE – shared with a particular group of actors – the teachers in the classroom – then this could be understood through the way that they talked about it. But more than this was needed. In accepting that these teachers were ‘products of discourse’, specifically the discourses surrounding the teaching of GCSE English literature, then this social context also needed to be understood beyond what the actors had

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to say about it. This research needed to listen to the policy as well, thus linking the actor to the social setting – the teacher to the policy, and thus offering original insights.

Within discourse analysis there are distinct traditions that conceptualise talk in different ways. Woofitt (2005) describes these traditions as either ‘bottom-up’ or ‘top-down’. A ‘bottom-up’ approach focuses on interactions and discursive practices without consideration of the wider context or on theories and is therefore inductive. This approach includes conversation analysis and discursive psychology and tends to adopt the ontological position of relativism. Relativism suggests that there are multiple versions of reality being constructed, all of which are equally valid, and so it is meaningless to consider them beyond the text or interaction. This ‘bottom-up’ approach is

interested in what goes on at the interactional level and on empirical data to identify rhetorical devices to achieve particular functions (Edwards and Potter, 1992).

A ‘top-down’ approach focuses on macro-level discourse and on wider societal and cultural contexts. They are less interested in interactional devices in talk and can therefore be said to be deductive. ‘Top-down’ approaches include Critical Discourse Analysis and Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) and tend to adopt a position of critical realism. Critical realism, while there is not one agreed framework (Archer et al., 2016) maintains that while an objective reality is unknowable in full, it is possible to be approximated.

There are shortcomings with each approach. This study chose to adopt Foucauldian Discourse Analysis for reasons that will be explained in this chapter. Of particular importance to this study was that while FDA allowed a consideration of the effects of a wider context on individual subjectivity, it positioned people as passive-users of discourse with no allowance of how language operated and how people negotiated their talk in a given context (Budds, Locke and Burr, 2014). This limitation could be addressed through discursive psychology, for example, which considers local interactions. However, discursive psychology does not consider the context beyond that action. A combined approach called Critical Discursive Psychology sought to overcome these shortcomings (Brunton et al., 2014) but had less focus on social and cultural contexts. Again, this would mean this approach would not be appropriate for the aims of this study.

One reasons that Foucauldian Discourse Analysis was chosen for this study was as a consequence of the social theory of Foucault. Prior to the start of the data collection in school, an initial impression was formed that the classroom and the teachers’ perceptions of it, were panoptic. The classroom was ‘an empire of the gaze’ (Welland, 2001). This was because it has been argued that education policy-making has been appropriated by the central state to control, manage, and transform society (Braun, Maguire, and Ball, 2010). This control subordinates individual schools and local education

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authorities (Fielding, 2001; Fullan, 2003) and results in what teachers teach becoming heavily prescribed by government policy (Day and Sachs, 2004; Maguire and Dillon, 2007). As a

consequence, teachers are expected to teach policies that are planned by others, but to which they are held accountable (Moss, 2007), a conflict that suggests that policy controls what happens in the classroom. To add to this from my own anecdotal experience, I had noticed that the majority of teachers currently teaching the reformed GCSE in English literature bemoaned a perceived lack of freedom to teach ‘what they wanted’ and instead felt that they were simply ‘teaching to the exam’. While these are generalised comments, they portray a feeling within the English department. English teachers did not feel that they were in control of the literature in their classrooms; they felt they were being controlled by something or someone that was watching and judging their progress towards exam results. Based on my own knowledge of Foucault from prior to this research, I felt that this context could be described in terms of the Foucauldian concept of panopticism, and that

Foucauldian Discourse Analysis was the best approach to understand this idea. These ideas will now be explored.