Discourse analysis as theory, method, and epistemology in studies of education policy

ABSTRACT

Discourse has featured in studies of educational policy as an analytic and methodological tool, theoretical frame, realm of implication, and even a foundational definition of educational policy itself (e.g.) Despite the centrality of discourse as a frame for exploring educational policy and its implications, the ways that discourse is defined or operationalized in educational policy research are often left implicit which can lead to murky relations to larger onto-epistemological questions of how we construct findings from data as well as the nature of policy. In this interpretive analysis, we synthesize a corpus of 37 peer-reviewed journal articles that bring together educational policy and analyses of discourse from varying theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to better understand the breadth and scope of how discourse is defined and operationalized in studies of educational policy, including in ways that are sometimes incommensurate with authors' stated theoretical and methodological positions. After first laying the theoretical groundwork for analyses of discourse in the field of educational policy, we then illustrate how discourse analysis is used differently, and sometimes inconsistently, within contested paradigmatic landscapes. We conclude with an argument for discussions across theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms about how the concept of discourse lends itself to different epistemological vantage points on educational policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse
• paradigm
• post-structuralism
• critical discourse analysis
• methodology

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Stuart Rice for his early help with searching the literature, the anonymous reviewers on both iterations of this manuscript, and to Professor Ball for his editorial guidance and support. Any remaining shortcomings are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Rogers et al. (2005) Rogers et al. (2016)) conducted two extensive literature reviews of educational research studies that use CDA. Their 2016 study comprised 257 total articles, some of which relate to education policy. Rogers and colleagues’ studies differed from ours in focus and purpose in that they specifically focused on CDA but across educational research studies more broadly. Further, they focused on studies’ findings in order to characterize the nature of CDA and implications for methods, theory, and the field of education. The present study, on the other hand, looks at education policy specifically and discourse analysis more broadly to understand how discourse analysts define policy, discourse and the relationship between the two, and how these conceptualizations inform possible findings and implications related to education policy and methodological approaches to policy studies. We therefore focus less on the findings from the studies and more on the processes of the analyses.

2. An important note about terminology is that many scholars also engage in approaches to discourse analysis that are not named like CDA and Foucauldian DA are. Therefore, in our analysis we sometimes had to deduce an approach to discourse from the theoretical stance taken as well as the ways analyses were carried out.

3. A non-substantive use of discourse would entail using the term in the introduction, literature review, or conclusions but not in the theoretical framework, methods, or findings. For example, Woods and Woods (2002) was excluded from the corpus we analyzed because their use of discourse was limited to four instances to refer to ‘dominant technical-rational discourses’ of the Labour party regarding what counts as valued learning (262). Their analysis takes the form of a concept map by which they chart ‘contemporary developments in policy on school diversity’ (254) without an explicit grounding in a theoretical or analytic framework rooted in discourse or discourse analysis (writ large). This is not a value judgment on the article; it merely serves as an example of a study that we excluded because the use of discourse was not substantive.

4. Our initial search yielded many articles that used discourse as a theoretical framework or discussed it as part of policy processes or enactments. However, we limited our analysis to articles that cite discourse as a concept on which an empirical analysis was based. All non-empirical studies were excluded, which included many in the journals Education Policy Analysis Archives, Education Policy, and Discourse: Cultural Studies in the Politics of Education.

5. We chose these databases for their complementarity (e.g. ERIC and JSTOR overlap but focus on distinct disciplinary bases, while Google Scholar is not discipline-specific and also features an easily accessible reverse citation search functionality.

6. We considered all years of publication up to and including the year we began analyzing the studies and writing the article, 2014. A follow-up study targeting years 2015-present would be insightful and could be replicated using our methods.

7. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pushing us to articulate this point.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kate T. Anderson

Kate T. Anderson is an Associate Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teacher’s College at Arizona State University. She is the lead editor of the journal Linguistics and Education. Her research interests include how educational opportunity is shaped locally and through circulating socio-historical notions of what counts (e.g. as ability, acceptable language use). In addition to reflexive qualitative methodological examinations of research and practice, she also examines discursive constructions of race, ability, and language.

Jessica Holloway

Jessica Holloway is a post-doctoral research fellow within the Research for Educational Impact (REDI) strategic research centre at Deakin University. She draws on post-structural theory to understand contemporary modes of accountability and its production of new teacher and leader subjectivities. Her recent publications include ‘Teacher evaluation as an onto-epistemic framework’ in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, and ‘Datafying the teaching ‘profession’: remaking the professional teacher in the image of data’ (with Steven Lewis) in Cambridge Journal of Education.