Discourse in Educational and Social Research

This volume aims to be both practical and provocative. It demonstrates the insights and irritations of a discourse-based orientation to educational research. Drawing on a wide range of educational "texts" - including policy documents, ethnographic interviews, press articles, video-taped lessons, textbooks, informal chat and parent-teacher consultations - the author shows how knowledge, power identities and realities are constructedd and problematised in discourse. The book also deals with educational research itself as a set of discursive practices, examining the texts which educational researchers produce and consume: research, reports, dissertations, and journal articles. The book provides practical help to researchers and students wishing to "interrogate" their own data from a discourse perspective, and at the same time develops a critical awareness of the researcher's role as writer/reader of research texts. The book draws on discourse-focused traditions, including conversation analysis, posrtstructuralism, interaction sociology, feminist ethnography, literary theory and philosophy.
What holds it together is the persistent question: how to do educational research within a "crisis of representation" that has shaken faith in a stable relationship between words and worlds?