when i say When I say … discourse analysis Tim Dornan
Let’s imagine you are on a bus in Oxford. The person sitting beside you is an etymologist working for the Oxford English Dictionary. He uses the word ‘discourse’ and you ask him what it means. From its Latin origins, he explains, it means running about. The term came to be applied to the spoken word so, for example, a preacher might discourse on a topic. Indeed, he comments, the two of you are discoursing about discourse. It would be understandable if you went home to London thinking Oxonians use unnecessarily complicated language to describe a chat on a bus. But let’s examine the event more closely. If your fellow passenger had cold-shouldered you, he would have made you a nobody. The chat, to the contrary, makes you a small part of the social fabric of Oxford. It opens up to you the prestigious institutions of Oxford University and the Oxford English Dictionary. His performance of the identity of an etymologist allows you to perform the identity of an intelligently interested rather than a silent and lonely visitor. The story does not end there. The discourse of Oxford has given you ‘social goods’ – you are able to give an Oxford etymologist’s explanation of the word ‘discourse’. You might, however, resist the status and power of Oxford and say that London is a ‘proper’ city and therefore a better place to study than Oxford. If you were to enter Oxford University as a student, you would enter its discourse more fully than any short conversation on a bus could allow. Your way of talking and even the clothes you wore would show how you identified with the discourse of Oxford. Let’s take the fantasy a stage further and suppose you want to find out more about how a person’s
Maastricht, the Netherlands Medical Education 2014: 48: 466–467 doi: 10.1111/medu.12291
466
university background influences his or her appointment to a job as a teacher. You are intrigued that prestigious, fee-paying schools appoint many Oxford graduates, whereas less prestigious, publicly funded schools mostly appoint people from other types of university. Teaching jobs are scarce so there are plenty of applicants to both types of school. Equal opportunities legislation prevents discriminatory behaviour by interview panels. So how, exactly, does the imbalance come about? Imagine that one candidate brings a little slice of Oxford into the interview room by talking about etymology and the Oxford English Dictionary, whereas another, whose academic performance is equivalent, enthuses about receiving a university education in an industrial town with high unemployment but a very successful soccer team. Close attention to the language of interviewers and candidates might show how the first candidate was ‘suitable’ for the fee-paying but not the publicly funded school and vice versa. ‘Suitability’, your research might show, is not an inherent property of candidates. It is socially constructed, context-sensitive, and contested. Moreover, your analysis might identify competing discourses of a ‘good’ university education, linked to the competing discourses of suitability. The phrase ‘discourse analysis’ is preceded by the adjective ‘critical’ when it explores how discourse affects social goods like power and status. There are different types of critical discourse analysis and a roughly inverse relationship between the detail in which language is examined and the size of the datasets. Foucauldian (based on the writing of Michel Foucault) analysis is ‘macro-linguistic’ and examines how large archives of text construct social
Correspondence: Professor Tim Dornan, Department of Educational Development and Research, Maastricht University, PO Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, the Netherlands Tel: +31 43 388 5726;. E-mail: [email protected]
ª 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. MEDICAL EDUCATION 2014; 48: 466–467
When i say institutions and people’s positions within those institutions.1 Conversation analysis, at the other extreme, examines how conversation affects social action in minute detail. I have conducted ‘mesolinguistic’ critical discourse analysis to examine how power is linked to competing discourses of curriculum in undergraduate medical education.2 Linguistics, sociology and psychology are the parent disciplines of discourse analysis. Lacking a formal background in linguistics, I am drawn to a sociological approach,3 which nicely fits my use of socio-cultural learning theory to shed light on workplace learning. Perhaps you are puzzled or frustrated by the abstract and political tone of this article and its lack of ‘scientific’ clarity. If that is the case, we could learn a lot by talking with one another. But please don’t use discourse to construct the research approach I have described as superior or inferior to
other approaches. Ideological struggle about the superiority of one methodology over another is about as useful as squabbling about what makes a ‘proper’ university city!
REFERENCES 1 Kuper A, Whitehead C, Hodges BD. Looking back to move forward: using history, discourse and text in medical education research: AMEE Guide No. 73. Med Teach 2013;35 (1):85–96. 2 Graham J, Dornan T. Power in clinical teachers’ discourses of a curriculum-in-action. Critical discourse analysis. Adv Health Sci Educ 2013;18 (5):975–85. 3 Gee JP. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, 3rd edn. New York, NY: Routledge 2011. Received 1 May 2013; editorial comments to author 11 June 2013; accepted for publication 17 June 2013
ª 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.MEDICAL EDUCATION 2014; 48: 466–467
467
Let’s imagine you are on a bus in Oxford. The person sitting beside you is an etymologist working for the Oxford English Dictionary. He uses the word ‘discourse’ and you ask him what it means. From its Latin origins, he explains, it means running about. The term came to be applied to the spoken word so, for example, a preacher might discourse on a topic. Indeed, he comments, the two of you are discoursing about discourse. It would be understandable if you went home to London thinking Oxonians use unnecessarily complicated language to describe a chat on a bus. But let’s examine the event more closely. If your fellow passenger had cold-shouldered you, he would have made you a nobody. The chat, to the contrary, makes you a small part of the social fabric of Oxford. It opens up to you the prestigious institutions of Oxford University and the Oxford English Dictionary. His performance of the identity of an etymologist allows you to perform the identity of an intelligently interested rather than a silent and lonely visitor. The story does not end there. The discourse of Oxford has given you ‘social goods’ – you are able to give an Oxford etymologist’s explanation of the word ‘discourse’. You might, however, resist the status and power of Oxford and say that London is a ‘proper’ city and therefore a better place to study than Oxford. If you were to enter Oxford University as a student, you would enter its discourse more fully than any short conversation on a bus could allow. Your way of talking and even the clothes you wore would show how you identified with the discourse of Oxford. Let’s take the fantasy a stage further and suppose you want to find out more about how a person’s
Maastricht, the Netherlands Medical Education 2014: 48: 466–467 doi: 10.1111/medu.12291
466
university background influences his or her appointment to a job as a teacher. You are intrigued that prestigious, fee-paying schools appoint many Oxford graduates, whereas less prestigious, publicly funded schools mostly appoint people from other types of university. Teaching jobs are scarce so there are plenty of applicants to both types of school. Equal opportunities legislation prevents discriminatory behaviour by interview panels. So how, exactly, does the imbalance come about? Imagine that one candidate brings a little slice of Oxford into the interview room by talking about etymology and the Oxford English Dictionary, whereas another, whose academic performance is equivalent, enthuses about receiving a university education in an industrial town with high unemployment but a very successful soccer team. Close attention to the language of interviewers and candidates might show how the first candidate was ‘suitable’ for the fee-paying but not the publicly funded school and vice versa. ‘Suitability’, your research might show, is not an inherent property of candidates. It is socially constructed, context-sensitive, and contested. Moreover, your analysis might identify competing discourses of a ‘good’ university education, linked to the competing discourses of suitability. The phrase ‘discourse analysis’ is preceded by the adjective ‘critical’ when it explores how discourse affects social goods like power and status. There are different types of critical discourse analysis and a roughly inverse relationship between the detail in which language is examined and the size of the datasets. Foucauldian (based on the writing of Michel Foucault) analysis is ‘macro-linguistic’ and examines how large archives of text construct social
Correspondence: Professor Tim Dornan, Department of Educational Development and Research, Maastricht University, PO Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, the Netherlands Tel: +31 43 388 5726;. E-mail: [email protected]
ª 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. MEDICAL EDUCATION 2014; 48: 466–467
When i say institutions and people’s positions within those institutions.1 Conversation analysis, at the other extreme, examines how conversation affects social action in minute detail. I have conducted ‘mesolinguistic’ critical discourse analysis to examine how power is linked to competing discourses of curriculum in undergraduate medical education.2 Linguistics, sociology and psychology are the parent disciplines of discourse analysis. Lacking a formal background in linguistics, I am drawn to a sociological approach,3 which nicely fits my use of socio-cultural learning theory to shed light on workplace learning. Perhaps you are puzzled or frustrated by the abstract and political tone of this article and its lack of ‘scientific’ clarity. If that is the case, we could learn a lot by talking with one another. But please don’t use discourse to construct the research approach I have described as superior or inferior to
other approaches. Ideological struggle about the superiority of one methodology over another is about as useful as squabbling about what makes a ‘proper’ university city!
REFERENCES 1 Kuper A, Whitehead C, Hodges BD. Looking back to move forward: using history, discourse and text in medical education research: AMEE Guide No. 73. Med Teach 2013;35 (1):85–96. 2 Graham J, Dornan T. Power in clinical teachers’ discourses of a curriculum-in-action. Critical discourse analysis. Adv Health Sci Educ 2013;18 (5):975–85. 3 Gee JP. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, 3rd edn. New York, NY: Routledge 2011. Received 1 May 2013; editorial comments to author 11 June 2013; accepted for publication 17 June 2013
ª 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.MEDICAL EDUCATION 2014; 48: 466–467
467
