Interrogating Discursive Data: How News Media Narratives Assemble Truths About the Teaching Profession

Abstract

This project provides a framework for interrogating the language often used in media reporting on education, and making those often hidden ideological underpinnings more visible. Explored through this analysis are the language, metaphors, logic, and rhetorical devices used by various news media reporting on educational concerns, and in particular the concerns revolving around teacher quality and teacher preparation, which allow the construction and circulation of specific kinds of knowledge and assert certain kinds of truths. This analysis is guided by the premise that education writ large, which includes the profession of teaching as well as the field of teacher preparation, is charged with helping students, our youngest citizens, develop an understanding of the practices and problems of people-power, self-rule, and shared governance in our democratic society. If education primarily involves preparing students for democratic citizenship, as a long history of scholarship has established (Barber, 2001 Barber, B. (2001). An aristocracy of everyone. In S. J. Goodlad (Ed.), The last best hope: A democracy reader (pp. 11–22). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. [Google Scholar]; Bean & Apple, 1995 Beane, J. A., & Apple, M. W. (1995). Democratic schools. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. [Google Scholar]; Beard, 1937 Beard, C. (1937). The unique function of education in American democracy. Washington, DC: National Education Association. [Google Scholar]; Dewey, 1916 Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York, NY: Free Press. [Google Scholar]; Bode, 1937 Bode, B. H. (1937). Democracy as a way of life. New York, NY: Macmillan. [Google Scholar]; Giroux, 1989 Giroux, H. (1989). Schooling for democracy: Critical pedagogy in the modern age. London, England: Routledge. [Google Scholar]; Gore, 1993 Gore, J. (1993). The struggle for pedagogies: Critical and feminist discourses as regimes of truth. New York, NY: Routledge. [Google Scholar]; Gutman, 1999 Gutmann, A. (1999). Democratic education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; McLaren, 2001 McLaren, P., & Farahmandpur, R. (2001). Educational policy and the socialist imagination: Revolutionary citizenship as a pedagogy of resistance. Educational Policy, 15(3), 343–378. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904801015003002.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Nussbaum, 2010 Nussbaum, M. (2010). Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]), educating citizens to critically examine, analyze, and understand social worlds is essential to democracy.

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