Credentialing Structures, Pedagogies, Practices, and Curriculum Goals

Abstract

Objective:To examine the discursive strategies deployed by community colleges to sustain legitimacy in an evolving and contradictory institutional environment.Method:Using corpus linguistics software, I compared 1,009 mission statements from 2012-2013 with a reference corpus of 427 mission statements from 2004.Results:Keywords analysis, collocation analysis, and concordance analysis suggest that mission statements have changed along four discourse trajectories: credentialing structures, pedagogies, practices, and curriculum goals.Contributions:These findings situate the community college as a point of entry into understanding the relations among institutional legitimacy and a changing cultural, political, and economic milieu.