ES 3208: Current Issues in Education
Week 7:
Reading Luke (1995)
Return to module outline.
Last updated 6.11.08.
Luke, A. (1995) Text and
Discourse in Education: an introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis Review of Research in Education 21 pp.
3-48
You can Google or Google Scholar this article to read it online – you have access
rights to JSTOR if you use your
A few words of caution
This
article was written for an educational research journal and the focus on
producing research about educational practices – not critiquing representations
of educational ideas and practice.
The
introduction section (pp. 3-7) provides general contextual information about
developments in educational research concerns/methodologies, which isn’t overly
relevant for our purposes in this module, but does include this helpful
quotation:
‘ … a great deal of service and information-based work,
consumption, and leisure depends on [one’s] capacities to construct, control,
and manipulate texts and symbols. It should not be surprising, then, that many
of the new social conflicts are about representation and subjectivity. In terms
of representation, they involve the production and consumption of texts, access
to and legal control over texts, and the rights to name, to construe, to
depict, and to describe. In terms of subjectivity, they involve how one is
being named, positioned, desired, and described and in which languages, texts
and terms of reference.’ (Luke, 1995: pp. 5-6)
The
Section Discourse Analysis in Education is
most relevant for this module
CDA is
concerned with the ways in which discourses systematically construct versions
of the social and natural worlds, and positions individuals in relations of
power (Williams, 1992)
Poststructuralist analysis of
discourse
Identifies
the flexibility (intangibility?) of boundaries of discourse as a defining
feature, which is both its strength and weakness
Foucault
(1972) refers to the ‘constructing character’ of discourse – it defines and
positions human subjects
The
knowledge-power relation that characterises hegemonic discourse is evident in
the taken-for-granted definitions/categories by which societies govern
themselves and which the members of those societies collude in their government
This is
not a straightforward imposition or manipulation: communities and individuals
participate in discourses in idiosyncratic ways
The general and the specific
The
distinction between Discourse and discourse (Gee, 1990) highlights the
difference between a general discourse and a specific instance of discourse.
Luke (1995)
highlights this distinction by referring to Discourse (as a general discourse)
and Text (to a specific instance of discourse, which may reflect or challenge
the general Discourse)
Text
Luke
refers to this as language in use, which may be written, spoken, visual,
audiovisual, or gestural
Texts
are the artefacts of individuals’ production/communication of meaning. They are
the media by which socially constructed values, meanings and identities are
made and remade.
Luke
refers to moments of intersubjectivity: where language is used for symbolic
exchange
Discourse
Context
for the generation/interpretations of texts
Particular
discourses can be systematically traced to larger ideological and social
formations
‘But the “rules” of social institutions […] do not
finally determine or restrict what people do in local events and site. […]
discourse often unfolds in uneven, contested, and unpredictable social
configurations’ (Luke, 1995: pp. 13-4)
But neither
are texts wholly random nor arbitrary
Discourses
consist of recurrent statements and wordings across texts, marking out
identifiable systems of meaning, knowing and belief. Texts operate at differing
levels of unity and disunity and at different levels of specificity.
The keywords
of discourses reflect particular orientations to the world, but are also
dynamic, changing in accordance with the needs of the institution or community
in question. The medium of change is the accumulation of changing texts.
‘Texts connect with each other, sometimes systematically
and sometimes unsystematically, sometimes through authorial choice and
deliberation and sometimes through coincidence.’ (Luke, 1995: p. 14)
Subjectivity
Language
constructs and enacts social relations and realises forms of social identity
‘Spoken and written texts, then, are moments in which
cultural representations and social systems and identities are articulated
through languages and other sign systems.’ (Luke, 1995: p. 18)
In so
doing, discourse has a hegemonic function that constructs subjectivity
