Educational Discourse Research Articles

The Impact of Metaphors on Academic Text Comprehension: The Case of Students With Dyslexia.

Metaphor has long been used by scholars to make concepts more comprehensible. However, this use of figurative language has never been investigated in relation to the way students with dyslexia learn from academic texts. This study aims to assess the impact of metaphors on overall academic text comprehension in university students with and without dyslexia. Excerpts from scientific articles containing metaphors were adapted to be presented in two comparable conditions: metaphorical and literal. Legibility indexes were controlled for to guarantee the same difficulty between conditions. Twenty-eight students with dyslexia and thirty students without dyslexia underwent a multiple-choice comprehension task for two texts, one for each condition, and provided evaluations of text perception. A standardised assessment of general reading comprehension and cognitive abilities, such as reading speed, reading accuracy, and working memory was conducted. Data revealed that, when reading ability was controlled for, students with dyslexia presented significantly lower comprehension scores only in texts containing metaphors, despite comparable perceived complexity and increased interest in metaphorical texts. These findings suggest that metaphors used in educational discourse may not be entirely inclusive, as they seem to impose additional cognitive demands on students with dyslexia.

Yes means yes and no means no? A critical sociolinguistic analysis of cultural assumptions and transnationalism in Polish online sexual education discourses on sexual consent

Yes means yes and no means no? A critical sociolinguistic analysis of cultural assumptions and transnationalism in Polish online sexual education discourses on sexual consent

Teachers’ enactment of Freirean democratic pedagogies in primary school physical education

ABSTRACT Background Despite its ubiquity in education discourses, social justice is a highly contested concept that can be framed in different ways [Dowling, F., H. Fitzgerald, and A. Flintoff. 2012. Equity and Difference in Physical Education, Youth Sport and Health: A Narrative Approach. Routledge]. The ‘social’ element of social justice is always framed by broader cultural and socio-political contexts. Therefore teaching for social justice cannot be conceptualised as a single pedagogy that can be enacted without regard for the learning content and the learning context. Purpose The rationale for this research is to bridge the gap between advocacy for pedagogies for social justice and practices done in the name. The specific aim of this paper was to explore how specialist primary school physical education teachers in Spain enact democratic practices that promote social justice by engaging students in decision making in ways that ensure their voices are heard and considered. Method The research was informed by Critical Incident Technique (CIT) methodology. Data were generated through six classroom observations and stimulated recall interviews with three Spanish primary PE teachers. Data analysis was informed by Paulo Freire’s [1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Seabury Press] democratic pedagogy and associated concepts of dialogue, problem posing and critical consciousness. Findings The findings demonstrate how the teachers’ PE teachers’ practices have strong roots in democratic principles that are consistent with the scholarship of Freire. The two themes; (1) ‘Student-led dialogical encounters’ and (2) ‘Pedagogy of questioning and exploration’ provide insight into how the Spanish primary school PE specialists in this study teach for and about social justice in contextually relevant ways. Discussion These findings remind us that PE provides a fertile educational context for implementing democratic pedagogies due to its interactive activity-based context and curricular focus on holistic development. The findings provide insight into both how democratic pedagogies in PE are possible even with very young students. Conclusion We argue that democratic pedagogies are essential to social justice outcomes in school PE. They can enhance student participation, foster relationships, and empower individuals to become active agents of change. Democratic pedagogies in primary schools provide a sound foundation for scaffolding a critical consciousness in secondary school PE contexts.

Musical Counterstories: Racialized Experiences of Asian/Asian American Music Teachers

Despite being the fastest growing population in the United States and a part of many music education programs, Asian and Asian American (AAM) music teachers’ voices often are unheard in music education discourses. The purpose of this study was to begin bringing visibility to the experiences of AAM music educators. The research questions explored in this article are: How do AAM music teachers describe their experience in relationship to their racial identities? and How might AAM educators’ experience be similar or differ in relation to immigrant generational statuses and transnational contexts? We utilized Asian critical race theory as a framework to examine the experiences of 10 AAM music educators. Although collective themes emerged around patterns of racialization, each participant had unique experiences shaped by transnational contexts and immigrant generation. We hope that these data become part of a more robust discourse around AAM experiences in music learning and teaching.

Teachers' voices and quality education in the basic education discourse in South Africa

Teachers' voices and quality education in the basic education discourse in South Africa

Discourse, Knowledge, and Practice

This article presents the findings of a three-stage qualitative study examining how English language teacher education in Colombia conceives its teaching practicum and student-teachers. Insights emerged from three key sources: English language student-teachers’ autoethnographies, Colombian-authored scholarly articles, and undergraduate programs’ relevant institutional documents. We analyzed each source using tailored methodologies: narrative analysis, epistemic discourse analysis, and documentary analysis. The findings reveal that the practicum is understood by three points of convergence: foundation, knowledge, and practice. This framework defines English language student-teachers by their discourse, knowledge, and practice. The study highlights that the teaching practicum is a pivotal space where student-teachers apply language education discourses and their knowledge in practice. Reflecting on how English language student-teachers are formed and how the practicum is conceived has prompted the undergraduate programs and the community to advocate for a transformation from a theoretical approach to a more flexible, experience-based approach.

Immersed in the Dominant Global Imaginary: Reflecting on Internationalization of Higher Education Discourses in Brazil

Immersed in the Dominant Global Imaginary: Reflecting on Internationalization of Higher Education Discourses in Brazil

Generative AI and future education: a review, theoretical validation, and authors' perspective on challenges and solutions.

Generative AI (Gen AI), exemplified by ChatGPT, has witnessed a remarkable surge in popularity recently. This cutting-edge technology demonstrates an exceptional ability to produce human-like responses and engage in natural language conversations guided by context-appropriate prompts. However, its integration into education has become a subject of ongoing debate. This review examines the challenges of using Gen AI like ChatGPT in education and offers effective strategies. To retrieve relevant literature, a search of reputable databases was conducted, resulting in the inclusion of twenty-two publications. Using Atlas.ti, the analysis reflected six primary challenges with plagiarism as the most prevalent issue, closely followed by responsibility and accountability challenges. Concerns were also raised about privacy, data protection, safety, and security risks, as well as discrimination and bias. Additionally, there were challenges about the loss of soft skills and the risks of the digital divide. To address these challenges, a number of strategies were identified and subjected to critical evaluation to assess their practicality. Most of them were practical and align with the ethical and pedagogical theories. Within the prevalent concepts, "ChatGPT" emerged as the most frequent one, followed by "AI," "student," "research," and "education," highlighting a growing trend in educational discourse. Moreover, close collaboration was evident among the leading countries, all forming a single cluster, led by the United States. This comprehensive review provides implications, recommendations, and future prospects concerning the use of generative AI in education.

Counternarratives of COVID‐19: Girls' stories of disrupted schooling in Malawi

AbstractThis article challenges mainstream discourses of girls' education during COVID‐19 that sexualize girls in the Global South and reproduce racialized differences. We draw on a longitudinal cohort study of Malawian young women conducted from 2020 to 2023 to offer counternarratives of the intersecting risks to school retention. We argue that the pandemic was less a rupture for girls' status quo than an intensification of the conditions that already characterized school‐going amidst “syndemic” conditions, including climate change, the transformation of relations of care, and the privatization of public education.

Book Review: Basso et al. Aprender en Comunidad: Prácticas Colaborativas para Transformar la Evaluación (Learning in Community: Collaborative Practices to transform Assessment)

Aprender en Comunidad: Prácticas Colaborativas para Transformar la Evaluación (Learning in Community: Collaborative Practices to transform Assessment) is the joint creation of Argentinian and Uruguayan practitioners. As much of the current discourse in comparative and international higher education is on the Global North, this book expands the discussion to territories historically excluded from the conversation. The book has a prologue by a university lecturer and researcher and is structured in seven chapters, which go from telling about the constitution of the work team, through the statement of their common goal: the design of improved course planning with authentic assessment tasks, to the reflection on the implementation of such proposals, as well as on the experiential knowledge gained from the collaborative work within the community of learning. The book’s purpose is then to describe and reflect upon those proposals with the intention of inspiring similar collaborative assessment practices. While the book is written in Spanish, the intended audience is any teacher, teacher trainer/trainee, college/university educator or tertiary level student who wants to read about varied innovative assessment experiences, carried out mainly at higher education (HE) institutions, and the synergy that learning from and with other colleagues harnesses.

Education and Vulnerability. On the Historiographical Analysis of the German Educational Discourse on Punishment in the “Short” 19th Century

Although the contemporary educational discourses in the 19th century considered educational punishment one of the most effective means of education, and a though it was frequently used in the educational practice, its history in the Germanspeaking countries has been only rudimentarily researched. This is even more astonishing as the history of educational punishment must be understood as a history of violent educational practices. In this article, the question shall be pursued of how a historiography of educational punishment in the 19th century could be theoretically and methodologically based. The research is guided by the thesis that educational punishment must be understood in the sense of exploiting the child’s vulnerability.

Manifestations of affective nationalism and representations of national ‘others’ in literature education: An ethnographic study

Situated in the conflict-affected Cypriot context, this paper aims to explore the affective dimension of nationalism as manifested in the representations of national ‘others’ in a Greek-Cypriot secondary school. Drawing on data from a linguistic ethnographic study looking at the negotiations of ethnic and intercultural education discourses, we focus on a series of classroom interactions discussing a poem written by a Turkish-Cypriot poet and how this text was interpreted by Greek-Cypriot students in focus group discussions. Our analysis shows how Turks and Turkish-Cypriots are affectively construed as national ‘others’, perpetuating dichotomies of ‘we’ and ‘they’. We also discuss the ambivalent feelings the particular poem brought, challenging hegemonic representations and feelings attached to those. The paper concludes with implications for education policies and practices.

Conceptualizing the Dangerous Rise of Ethnoreligious Nationalist Literacies in Education

Reluctance to embrace change leaves societies vulnerable to the rise of authoritarian political ideologies, particularly during times of socioeconomic and political crises. Public schools have seen an increase in incidents where fundamentalist groups with differing agendas have attempted to pressure them into adopting curricula whose literacy practices are rooted in a White, northern European Protestant worldview. This essay examines this contemporary phenomenon in public education discourse, which the authors identify as “ethnoreligious nationalism.” It does so by providing a snapshot of current spectacles of ethnoreligious nationalist activism worldwide, discussing how their affective literacy strategies have contributed to the demoralization of public education as a democratic institution. We conclude by proposing potential questions for critical comparative international research on the literacies deployed by ethnoreligious nationalist movements across educational settings.

Education as capital? A critical discourse analysis of the investment discourse in international research on Chinese rural education

ABSTRACT This article examines the rise of human capital theory and the investment discourse in education with a focus on Chinese rural education. We carry out Critical Discourse Analysis on 38 research articles published in highly cited English-language social science journals between 1978 and 2022. We demonstrate that Chinese rural education boomed as a topic of international research in the 21st century due to intensified academic internationalisation in China, which is intertwined with China’s pursuit of global influence and rising nationalism. The articles in our sample respond more to mainstream discourses dominated by the Global North than to the concerns of local communities, thereby reinforcing the dominance of western social theories and discourses like the human capital theory and the investment discourse. Amidst increasingly antagonistic global politics, we call for the critical ‘double negation’ (this issue) of both coloniality and nationalism to open up possibilities of plural knowledges.

“Inclination Towards Innovation”: Deconstructing Neoliberal Educational Discourses from a School Context

Educational innovation is a key concept for policymakers, school leaders, and families, but its conflicting aspects make it hard to define clearly. This study explores how pro-innovation narratives are created within Spanish educational policies and how these narratives are received in schools. Using principles of critical discourse analysis, we examined a corpus of ten texts from three different discursive fields with a tailored analytical approach. This paper focuses specifically on findings related to regulations and the private school involved in the study. The results reveal a strong connection between Spanish educational laws and the political environment in which they were developed. Additionally, the study identifies new, economically-driven definitions for key concepts like education, quality, and innovation. A major conclusion is that today’s “innovative” schools align with the principles of educational neoliberalism. In this context, the concept of innovation reflects lawmakers’ goals, which school leaders endorse. At the school level, administrators adopt a self-promotional discourse that often appears contradictory and propagandist.

Infographic text as a tool for organizing Russian-language educational discourse

Importance. The significance of the subject matter arises from the potential for organizing effec tive foreign language communication based on contemporary methods of educational materials’ visual representation, one of which is infographic – a relevant, authentic material that presents in formation in a concise and comprehensible form, integrating verbal and non-verbal elements.Materials and Methods. The following methods are used: analysis of academic research on the infographic text application in teaching foreign languages and practical experience generalization with the use of such materials in Russian as a foreign language. The research materials included academic papers that provided methodological justification for the infographics use as well as infographic materials available online and personal experience gained from utilizing infographic texts within the educational process.Results and Discussion. Based on the material analysis results on the topic, it is concluded that there is a significant potential for using infographic text with supporting structures in Russian as a foreign language teaching. In this regard, the theoretical knowledge necessary for a teacher to or ganize productive speech activity in a foreign language is described: the main stages of organizing work with infographics, the requirements for the of infographics content are listed.Conclusions. Infographic texts are valuable methodological material in teaching foreign lan guages, around which a foreign language educational discourse is built. Methodically, the tradi tional pre-text, pre-text and post-text tasks for working with the educational text should be orga nized competently. Here, support structures are important, which stimulate speech activity, con tributing to the effective work organization on the oral and written speech production based on a given algorithm.

Anaerobic rhetoric

ABSTRACT This essay locates breath in a rhetorical taxonomy of anti-Black/LGBTQIA+ phobogenesis that dehumanizes the academic pulse of queer and racialized learning environments. It names and specifies a discursive-material arrangement of public address called anaerobic rhetoric (i.e., rhetoric without oxygen) that circulates in the hypoxic ontologies (i.e., hematic vessels with reduced blood flow and oxygen-compromised tissues) of U.S. higher education. Rhetorical breath work is a paraontological praxis of breathing otherwise and alongside structural-experiential hypoxias of U.S. higher education. Through such fugitive breathing maneuvers, I invite a similarly dispossessed audience of queer and faculty of color in U.S. academia, experiencing professional barriers to educational care, to re-group as a noisy gaggle of the gagged and aspire to re-possessions of otherwise air. The key locational texts for examining these civic hypoxias resulting from anaerobic rhetoric include (a) U.S. legislative discourses of higher education, specifically, Florida state’s house bills—“The Stop WOKE Act” (HB 7) and “Don’t Say Gay” law (HB 1557)—that take the speech-restricting shape of educational “gag” orders to intensify a white supremacist climate of anti-Blackness/LGBTQIA+ness in 2022–23, and (b) Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) based discourses operationalized through white timekeeping techniques of regimenting breath/ing in Predominantly White Institutions (PWI).

Identity discourse in teacher education: Developments in national-cultural identities of pre-service teachers in Israel

In our multi-cultural world, it is crucial that teachers have the ability to engage in dialogical and pluralistic discourse on identities. This qualitative study aimed to characterize the process that preservice teachers underwent in their course, “Identity Discourse in the Classroom,” in a teacher education college in Israel. The analysis focused on the development of their national-cultural identity. The results demonstrated that the students moved from ambiguity to clarity and reflexivity concerning their national-cultural identity. They also demonstrated that the course created an infrastructure for the emergence of a non-essentialist identity consciousness, one that reflects a moderate constructivist view.

The production of a child in conflict in teacher education – research on available storylines

ABSTRACT Teacher education takes part in producing childhood. This is rarely discussed in teacher education. In this study, we are interested in what kinds of positions become normalised for children and youth in the discourses in teacher education. We utilise the concepts of narrative resources and storylines, looking into the storylines in which student teachers take themselves to be in, and in the positions that are opened for pupils in these storylines. The results show that a child in peer conflict is produced in problematic ways, as an ideal child or object of fixing. Teacher is produced as central and important.

Confronting the idealised ‘Nordic model’ in education with contemporary realities of special education in Sweden

ABSTRACT For decades, the Nordic countries have been admired for their inclusive education systems within egalitarian societies, bolstered by PISA studies and global calls to ensure inclusive education as a human right. This paper contrasts idealised perspectives on Nordic education with internal experiences, exploring recent challenges to the relationship between special and inclusive education. Using Sweden as a case study, it highlights internal diversity within the Nordic region, showing differing paths and gaps between research, policy and school realities. The risks of idealising past educational models are discussed, noting that Sweden, once known for its egalitarian education and low special education needs classification rates, now faces higher classification rates and more separate provision due to policy changes. Recent trends have shown a shift towards increased diagnosis and classification, influenced by marketisation and decentralisation policies. The paper focuses on neurodivergence, analysing shifts in government priorities, teacher education, school practices and research agendas. Analysis of recent policies, reports and educational data reveals winners and losers in school participation, providing insights into the implications for educational discourse, the future of the ‘Nordic model’, and Swedish education in a global context.