Critical Discourse Analysis in Comparative Education: A Discursive Study of “Partnership” in Tanzania’s Poverty Reduction Policies

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The study of policy in comparative education has been approached using methods associated with the principal social science disciplines that have informed the field since its inception. In particular, the disciplines of history, political science, sociology, and anthropology have had a significant influence on determining the acceptable methods for comparative educational policy analysis, as evident by studies of policy published since the mid-1990s in Comparative Education Review. Given the multidisciplinary orientation of comparative education, it is curious that the discipline of linguistics remains virtually absent from the pages of the field’s flagship journal. This dearth is particularly anomalous today when one considers the interest in critical inquiry as a framework for interpreting the discursive aspects of knowledge production. Such interest makes it an opportune time to consider how one type of linguistic analysis—critical discourse analysis (CDA)—could enhance the comparative study of educational policy. The field of policy studies is a particularly fruitful area in which to explore the critical strand of discourse analysis because policies are, by definition, texts imbued with authority. Broadly constructivist in methodology, CDA asserts that knowledge is socially constructed and shaped by relations of power that are both material and discursive. It rejects the premises of structuralism and, instead, embraces the view that certain meaning systems—or discourses—are privileged by their relationship with dominant groups in society and are, themselves, constitutive of social relations (Rogers 2004). Policies, according to Stephen Ball, are particularly important expressions of social power in that they convey the values of authoritative actors and institutions whose particular forms of knowledge about the social world are reflected in these texts. Ball (1990, 17) utilizes a Foucauldian notion of discourse to explicate this power/knowledge relationship: “Power and knowledge are two