Session Information
23 SES 08 A, Education as a Site of Struggle: Discourse and Subjectivity
Paper Session
Contribution
School Development appears to be a phrase that generates a number of narratives. It produces a series of stories about the state of society and its historical mapping. School Development, today almost something commonsensical and self-explanatory, can be used as a rhetorical resource for various kinds of societal narrative with political and moral intrigue. At the same time, school development is part of a bundle of narrative of political nature – its potential meaning is given through other types of agreed narratives – most of all the grand narrative about progress with the help of efforts and good intentions by the good forces in society.
In this study, texts from authorities are used for doing narrative and rhetorical analysis. Texts produced by official authorities can be contextualized in many different ways: as politics, policy-making, as exhortation, wishes, writing the history of the problems in school, predicting the societal future, narrating the present and the past, naming and blaming the heroes and villains of progress - and much more. Methodologically this project is combining ironic reading and constructionist rhetorics in order to see what possible narratives that are locked out in the making of standard versions.
Texts of this sort have a number of rhetorical challenges in order to persuade the potential reader. It has to convince about it's own rationality, it's legitimacy, it's humanitarian standards - lots of rhetorical work has to be done for all these matters, especially in a historical time where the authorities is bound by a grand political discourse saying that policymaking is, at the same time, a democratic necessity and a balancing on the edge of authoritarianism.
On a closer level, there are also a number of concrete rhetorical problems that has to be dealt with in texts from the authorities, for example the constant balancing between school development as prerequisite versus effect, as means versus goal, etc. Furthermore, we can see the circular way of reasoning where school development is school development is… On top of this, we can also often see how the narrative nature of scientific variables is held at a distance; such as (narratives about) good leadership, order in the classrooms, teachers competence. Many more ideological dilemmas is seen in the material and focussing the rhetoric’s of this genre gives us a possibility to do analysis of what seems to be at stake in a broader political perspective (Billig 1996).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Billig. M Arguing and Thinking. A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge university press. Hutcheon. L (1994) Ironys Edge. The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge. Johansson. U. & J. Woodilla (eds.) Irony and Organizations. Epistemological Claims and Supporting Field Stories. Liber. Copenhagen Business School Press. Potter. J. (1996) Representing Reality. Discource, Rhetoric and Social Construction. London: Sage.
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