Case Study 5:

Discourse evaluation

 

Contents

 

Introduction

In a series of articles, I have set out to revision some ‘sacred cows’ or normative discourses in education:

The process of ‘revisioning’ (a term I borrow from Hillman, 1995; see Bleakley, 1989) is to ‘look again’ at an established notion or practice in order to make the familiar strange. This second look, in terms of a research practice, I call ‘discourse evaluation’, to distinguish it from ‘discourse analysis’ (Willig, 1999). The latter term is traditionally used to refer to a detailed linguistic analysis of utterances in social contexts (Potter, 1996).

However, there is a growing literature which has made the term ‘discourse analysis’ elastic, moving out of close, word-by-word analysis of talk, and looking more broadly at general social interaction, the contours of specific social practices, and the interaction between social practices and material artefacts (Jaworski and Coupland, 1999). This may be characterised as a shift from ‘conversation analysis’ to ‘critical discourse evaluation’. The research method, as I describe below, draws most heavily on Foucault’s early work (Marshall, 1990), but also on Derrida’s deconstructive method (Usher and Edwards (1994), social constructionism (Gergen, 1999), postmodern ethnography (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) and critical psychology (Walkerdine, 2001). A key figure in the application of this ‘new’ discourse analysis to education is Norman Fairclough (1992), and a key text on method is Kendall and Wickham (1999). Ropers-Huilman (1999) suggests that education researchers in the postmodern/poststructural should cultivate their role as ‘witnesses’ to discourses.

Willig (1999, pp.160-1) defines ‘discourse’ as ‘a loose network of terms of reference which construct a particular version of events and which position subjects in relation to these events.’ To this, I would add that a discourse also produces shared meanings for objects used in material practices (for example a record of achievement, a register, a computer, a patient record). A computer, for example, is constructed as a legitimate aid for learning when it is being used according to the teacher’s or lecturer’s wishes, such as searching a database. It is illegitimated as a medium for learning when it is used in an educational setting surfing websites for fun, or playing games.

Willig goes on to define ‘construction’ as ‘the process by which particular versions of reality are manufactured’. For ‘manufactured’, we can also say ‘produced’ or ‘constituted’. ‘Deconstruction’ then exposes the nature of such constructions. A discourse may be analysed in a deconstructive way, to explore:

The sum of this approach may be called ‘discourse evaluation’. As a research method, such evaluation may be broad and ambitious (such as Foucault’s historical analyses of the emergence of modern discourses of ‘madness’, social control, and sexual identity), or focussed (such as Willig’s (1999) account of sex education amongst adult learners). Much of the emerging literature offers research upon texts, or upon textual representations of social practices. However, much of the research also has a ‘cutting edge’ quality, in making us, again, ‘revision’ our social life and practices.

In an article on sex education with adult learners, Carla Willig (1999, p.114) neatly sums up the tenor of discourse evaluation research: ‘discursive constructions’ (such as advice on condom use and information concerning sexually transmitted diseases), ‘have implications for sexual practice by offering a range of subject positions which constrain and/or facilitate what can be thought, said and done sexually.’ In other words, our sexual activities and sexual beings (identities) are not instinctual but heavily culturally coded, and constituted by discourses about sexuality. Willig goes on to say that discourse research ‘always requires us to think about alternative ways in which the discursive object could have been constructed.’ In this case, how might sexuality be conceived differently to construct differing kinds of sexual identities and practices?

Willig’s article can be fruitfully contrasted with Judith Rabak Wagener’s chapter in Popkewitz and Brennan (1998) on ‘The Construction of the Body Through Sex Education Discourse Practices’, in which the author offers a genealogy of current sex education practices in American schools. Such practices (the products of discourse) define not only what is considered normal, healthy and appropriate sexual behaviour and attitude, but how this constructs a certain kind of sexual being or sexual identity. A variety of discourses about sexuality come to shape education policy, especially curriculum policy, which in turn comes to normalize and govern children’s behaviour. Yet sex education, although riddled with ethical dilemmas, proceeds as if it were engaged with the presentation of neutral knowledge, ignoring the possibility that the will to knowledge is disguised as will to power (knowledge as ‘disciplining’, in Foucault’s term).

Wagener describes the normative discourse in the early part of the twentieth century that treated sex before marriage as immoral and convinced children of the dangers of sexual experimentation. The latter half of the century reversed the discourse, so that access to knowledge (especially biological sophistication) about sex was considered healthy, under the guise of ‘discovery’, and liberation from earlier repressive norms. Such a liberal discourse, however, offers its own governmentality: biological language essentialises gender, and ‘freedom’ to discover oneself as a sexual being becomes a new imperative, in which those who do not feel liberated by such a climate are constituted as subjects for investigation or treatment.

 

To get us into the swing of ‘doing’ discourse evaluation a starting point is to think of how we might make the familiar strange. Why do we get ‘habitual’ in our social practices and can we stop ourselves in our tracks to ask:

Let us take a ‘fun’ example to make the point, and then focus on a pressing educational example. First, ‘why do we eat peas with a fork?’ If we make this familiar habit strange, it does not take much to see that it is little to do with utility (a spoon or your hands are better tools for eating peas from a plate than a fork). Hence, the use of a fork must be a ‘compromise’ aspect of the overall discourse of using cutlery. The historical development of the use of cutlery in our culture is tied up with a complex of social position, class, manners and hygiene (Elias, 2000). The particular use of the fork is a side aspect to a larger, permeating web of discourses that excludes eating with our hands as a hygiene issue and a mark of respect to guests (status and manners). The proliferation of rules about the use of cutlery is a historical product of another (class) discourse that sets certain groups of people apart through attention to legitimised ‘manners’. The hygiene and the manners discourse intersect to provide a powerful web of activity that (a) constructs identities (the ‘civilized’ and the ‘uncivilized’ person, the socialised and marginalised), and (b) regulates behaviour. All such discourses have a history, which can be traced to a certain extent, and a presence, which is regulating and socialising. Another example, to drive home the point of making the familiar strange, is to think of the absurd lengths the bourgeois household goes to in order to keep food from the floor/dirt. This is again a discourse of hygiene intersecting with a discourse of manners and social position that has evolved into a middle class aesthetic. A concrete floor is covered with underfelt, which is covered with a carpet, on top of which sits a rug, on top of which sits a table. An undercloth sits on the table, covered by a tablecloth on which sits a tablemat, and on the tablemat is a plate of food! Eight layers of historically contingent and culturally contingent social custom, habit and practice separate food from floor.

Now we know why the sociologist Max Weber defined ‘discourses’ as ‘unintended consequences of history’. Discourses are often unconscious or habitual accretions, layers of practices that can loosely be tied together under headings such as ‘hygiene’, ‘manners’ and ‘class’.

One last example: Ivan Illich (1985) traces the history of the W.C. (water closet) in Britain, as a discourse evaluation. That is, he does not simply tell us, as a piece of functional history, how the components of the toilet came together, but why they may have appeared at all in the way that they did. His answer is that the emergence of the W.C. was not a product of the discourse of hygiene, as one might imagine at first glance, but of the emerging upper- and middle-class discourse of ‘privacy’ and the private individual (individualism) in the eighteenth century. The ‘object’ (water closet) and its associated practices are then ‘produced’ from the chance intersection of a number of discourses related to the need for persons to be ‘private’ or display individuality. The issue was not about closeting yourself away because of shame of defecating or urinating (the appearance of such shame was a later phenomenon, associated with a discourse of clean/unclean), but of making certain spaces in a house ‘private’ or individualised. Of course, this intersected with a class discourse, because only the privileged could afford houses large enough to create private spaces. (The interpenetration of the discourses of capitalism, privacy and the development of separate domestic spaces, as this produces new ‘private’ identities, is traced in Eighteenth-century Britain by Barker-Benfield, 1996)

 

Exercise 4

At this point, think of one habitual social custom that you practice every day, and ask yourself:

 

Exercise 5

The first edition of the right wing manifesto for schooling The Black Papers (Cox and Boyson, 1975), produced in several editions through the 1970s, opens with this statement:

Children are not naturally good. They need firm, tactful discipline from parents and teachers with clear standards. Too much freedom for children breeds selfishness, vandalism and personal unhappiness.

Contrast this with a quote from Albert Einstein on children and learning:

It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.

You will have no problem in spotting the difference in values informing each of these statements. Our concern here, in terms of a discourse evaluation, is to note the certainty with which each statement is made. There is no ‘perhaps’, ‘possibly’, ‘maybe’ or ‘as if’. The points are absolute, not relative.

Further, as deconstructive analysis suggests, the strengths of conviction of the two value statements depend upon positing a ‘hidden enemy’ – the opposite, the absent perspective, criticised by implication. Where the Black Papers manifesto begins ‘Children are not naturally good’, such a statement gains meaning through dependence upon its difference from the (devalued) ‘other’ position that children may be ‘naturally’ good.

The discourses that produce such responses are clearly working well, regulating the authors in divergent ways. The conservative discourse advertised in the Black Papers manifesto is heralded with an epistemological position: ‘Children are not naturally good’, or they are biologically ‘bad’. This biblical ‘original sin’ position leads to an assumption concerning practice: children must be socialised into being ‘good’ through firm discipline, otherwise, at every available opportunity, their innate ‘badness’ will show through (‘Too much freedom … breeds … vandalism’). The process is one of stiffening, hardening, otherwise weakness and debilitation will set in. In this sense the discourse is gendered, as stereotypically masculine. Recall the Jamie Bulger murder case and the public and media hysteria surrounding the case, which reinforced the ‘original sin’ discourse. A whole set of educational practices is then justified on the back of an ideological position which itself is not reflexively examined, but stated as truth, and gains its power (presence) from its denied opposite (absence). Paradoxically, both the Black Papers and Einstein’s view have a commonality: the assumption of an inborn state that can be corrupted or socialised. In Einstein’s case it is a ‘holy curiosity’, in the Black Papers’ case, an intrinsic counter-blessing of original sin.

Now do a similar, thumbnail, discourse evaluation of Einstein’s statement. Suspend your own point of view and ask:

Did you focus on those last words in Einstein’s account: ‘without fail’? The child goes to ‘wrack and ruin without fail’ where his or her innate curiosity is strangled by educational directives. Did you also note the fragile plant metaphors and images that inform Einstein’s rhetorical position? Note also how, if you dismiss this position, you are constituted as ‘harsh’ or ‘violating’ (where, in the Black Papers rhetoric, if you refuse their assumptions, you are constituted as ‘soft’, undisciplined and probably open to manipulation from ‘naturally’ devious children). Did you note how Einstein’s discourse is also stereotypically gendered, as feminine?

Einstein’s liberal rhetoric is as powerful as the conservative rhetoric of the Black Papers. The discourse evaluation methodology does not suggest that people should not have viewpoints and be able to express them. The point is that such views arise from being embedded in particular discourses that may remain unexamined: social and material practices, conversations, habitual ways of being that are heavily rule bound and follow certainties that remain unexamined, or have become crystallized, taken as fact and truth and established as norm, rather than as one of many possible alternatives. Discourses proceed to produce and regulate the objects (outcomes) of their processes: social and material practices, and identities (Mills, 1997; Torfing, 1999).

If we were to delve into the historical ‘origins’ of the conservative and liberal viewpoints informing the two views, we would find ourselves drawn into complex historical debate, for there would be many routes of inquiry and we could not firmly establish a point of origin. Postmodern inquiry suggests that the historical dimension to discourse is central, but that a search for absolute ‘origins’ merely repeats the mistake that rests at the heart of ideological practice – the claim that there is a ‘right’ way to do things, based again on truth, fact or evidence. Foucault’s work suggests an alternative way of dealing with the historical dimension to discourses.

Foucault notes that the emergence of a discourse as an established social practice, a habitual way of doing and seeing, is historically contingent. It arises in a sense by ‘accident’ or by a confluence of factors that can only be tracked in hindsight (or remains unpredictable). Rather than attempting to fix a certain point of origin, Foucault suggests that we can track a ‘family tree’ (a genealogy) for a practice, which relates a current practice back to a necessarily selective web of associated historical practices within a period. For example, Einstein’s view above could be linked genealogically with Rousseau’s seminal work Emile, describing liberal education practices based on the ideology that ‘man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’. This view can be contextualised within the historical period of the eighteenth century European Enlightenment and its overall discourse of liberation from authority, humanism, free speech, autonomy and the emergence of the rights of slaves, women and children. The Black Papers conservative view can be linked genealogically with the persistence of the biblical discourse of ‘original sin’ contained in the story of the Fall from innocence of Adam and Eve in Genesis. The family tree is thick with a revival of such views in Victorian and Edwardian educational principles and its narrative representations can be fruitfully studied through Dickens or Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

Foucault had originally described his method as a ‘history of the present’, where one makes sense of current discourse through excavating necessarily selective seams of historical accounts. He termed this an ‘archaeology’. However, he abandoned this method in favour of ‘genealogy’ or a set of historically relevant correspondences (a family tree) because ‘archaeology’ tended to imply too direct a connection between what is ‘excavated’ (historical evidence) and current practice. In postmodern fashion, Foucault was wary of the reader being lulled into cause-and-effect thinking. For Foucault, a historical circumstance (supposed cause) does not lead to a predictable or determinate current dominance of a discourse (supposed effect). Rather, a study of historical context cannot be taken as ‘evidence’ but as a background, a narrative, against which the emergence of current discourses may be appreciated and explored, not explained. Some writers have returned to Foucault’s ‘archaeological’ method as a basis to discourse evaluation, thinking that he abandoned this too readily. You may have already met this in Case Study 4 on policy studies.

If you are confused as to why the section (Case Study 4) on Scheurich’s postmodern approach to policy studies offers an example of ‘archaeological’ research methodology, please return to this section and refresh the idea.

 

Reading

It would be useful at this stage to read Chapters 1 and 2 of Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham Using Foucault’s Methods (see bibliography at end of this section). To see discourse evaluation in practice, as a research method, consult Carla Willig’s chapter on sex education referred to above (Willig, 1999, chapter 6), or the first half of my article critiquing unexamined humanistic assumptions in dominant discourses of ‘reflective practice’ (Bleakley, 1998).

 

The nuts and bolts of discourse evaluation

Discourse evaluation, as an education research method in the postmodern, is highly flexible. It can be short, sharp, focussed upon a particular incident, practice or idea and necessarily limited in description; or it can be lengthy, exhaustive, focussing upon a complex of intersecting discourses that serve to produce knowledge, practices, material effects and identities, including a study of historical dimensions.

Discourse evaluation follows a social constructionist view. If you need to be reminded about how social constructionism works, go back to Case Study 1.

Recall that social constructionism challenges naïve realism, which assumes that ‘reality’ can be accurately represented through direct investigation by objective researchers. The postmodern interest in the ‘crisis of representation’ points to the possibility that the world is never described in this naïve realist manner, but phenomena are always mediated by individual and collective human constructs (Potter, 1996; Gergen, 1999). Here, ‘reality’ becomes a representation of either an individual’s cognitive state operating on the world to give it meaning (constructivism); or of a collective (introjected) set of historically-sensitive, culturally organised rules (discourses) embodied as social practices, that ‘filter’ the world or actively construct meanings (social constructionism). The constructionist view suggests that research, as a social practice, constructs, rather than reveals, the objects of its gaze.

Discourse evaluation, in the tradition of social constructionism, asks ‘what are the conditions of possibility for the emergence and continuation of a social practice, and how may resistance to that practice arise? In other words, how might the emergence and effects of a dominant discourse be traced and explicated? Central to this is to describe how a dominant discourse produces identities. For example, how does the humanistic discourse of ‘reflective practice’ produce introspective ‘reflectors’, and how is this identity then legitimated as ‘good practice’ that must be ‘disseminated’, where other identities are illegitimated as ‘poor practice’ inviting intervention (Bleakley, 1999)? Postmodernism is interested in how subjectivities are constituted through practices, and researches this, while it reflexively notes that such research also produces identities. To illustrate this again, think of how the subjectivity of ‘lifelong learners’ has been produced by the discourse of lifelong learning (which ‘subjects’ us to its rules) (Bleakley, 2000c); and how action research’s humanistic/ personalistic practices includes (legitimates) research as a collaborative activity with persons, but excludes (illegitimates) research on persons as potentially oppressive. This constitutes the action researcher as emancipatory, an identity position that paradoxically positions the researcher as (potentially) paternalistic. Socially conscious education researchers who come out of a Marxist background and have been influenced by postmodernism’s challenge to ‘grand narratives’ such as Marxism, agonise over conflicting identity positions as ‘researcher’ and ‘emancipator’ (see for example McLaren, 1997).

A good example of identity construction through discourse is provided by Alison Lee (1992, p.1) in a study of ‘the construction of gender relations in school geography’. Using poststructuralist theory as an informing frame for her research, Lee notes how geography as a discipline ‘disciplines’ both teachers and learners into a set of binary notions that are gendered, such as physical geography (masculine):human geography (feminine). Boys are socialised into preference for the more factual physical geography, and girls into the more ambiguous human geography. She notes that physical geography is the more privileged arm of the discipline, as it is closer to the sciences. Lee speculates as to how her reading of the teaching and learning of Geography at school may lead to a disruption of this binary logic. Such a logic currently constructs boys as the active achievers and talkers in the more favoured arm of the discipline, and girls as the passive writers and thinkers in the marginalised arm of the discipline, leaving girls in a position of ‘lack’.

 

There are many more points in Alison Lee’s article, which you should now read:

Poststructuralism and educational research: Some categories and issues. Issues in Educational Research. 2:1, pp. 1-12.

Click here to access, print off and read Alison Lee’s article.

Consider:

Discourse evaluation’s method is rooted in Nietzsche’s perceptive insight, that I have invoked several times, that the will to truth is the same as the will to power. In other words, when truth or fact claims are made, this is a disguised way of saying ‘I am right’, as a statement and position of power. Schools of thought claiming that all they are doing is adding to our knowledge base, with a neutral political or ethical agenda, are fooling themselves. They are always implied in a power struggle concerning the status of knowledge, and how knowledge holding and access to knowledge creates power structures in society (Latour, 1996). Foucault greatly sophisticates Nietzsche’s insight, noting that all ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ claims are expressed through regulatory webs of actions, ideas and material artefacts (discourses). Foucault claims, counter-intuitively, that power is not oppressive or repressive (as ‘sovereign power’) but is productive. Power produces knowledge, as knowledge produces power, in historical ‘flows’, where certain views are legitimated, and others are marginalised. Power also produces identities. These identities come to form the ‘self’ through regulation – we are ‘subject’ to power/knowledge interplay, which creates ‘subjectivities’ or sense of self. What is marginalised, including marginal identities, in Foucault’s model, necessarily produces resistance to the dominant discourse, maintaining some fluidity even in discourses which have crystallized into habitual ways of being, or are ‘dominant’.

In summary so far, discourse evaluation, as a research method on a small or large scale, attempts to untangle the web of regulatory practices to expose and explore the conditions of possibility for the emergence, continuation and disruption of any social practice or idea. Thus, where traditional research makes sense of the strange, or makes the strange or once unknown now familiar or explicable, discourse evaluation makes the familiar strange, challenging the ‘naturalised’, ‘habitual’, or ‘taken for granted’.

The focus for a discourse evaluation is limitless. Any aspect of a social practice can be investigated, such as, in education: why do we assess (examine) school learning in the ways that we do, and how and why have such assessments changed in character? Why do we institutionalise learning (for example, ‘lifelong learning’), offering credit, when ‘learning’ can be seen as a life-based activity that cannot be avoided, whether we are changing nappies, talking in the café, club or pub, watching a soap opera, or attending school or an evening class? In investigating the discourses that shape our behaviour, experience and identities, and in turn are shaped by our active interventions, we are looking at what can be said and done in any social situation, such as a classroom or computer suite. How are behaviour and experience regulated or rule-bound, and how did such rules come into being? How do such arbitrary regulatory contexts become established as normative and then as uncontested ‘truth’?

 

Exercise 6: Six steps in a discourse evaluation

Your overall object is to closely interrogate aspects of a social practice to make the familiar strange, asking ‘what are the conditions of possibility for the emergence and continuation of the practice’ and ‘how is the practice resisted’? Remember to focus – you cannot be comprehensive in a discourse evaluation and can only do what is feasible.

  1. Choose the ‘text’ to be evaluated. This may be a ‘live’ educational practice (illustrative examples collected ‘naturally’), or a representation of practice in a text (article, book, website). Do not be too ambitious; choose a slice or a focussed example of a wider practice (for example, a ‘reading period’ in a Primary School; the notion of playground ‘breaks’ in compulsory education; a compensatory ‘computer literacy’ session in adult education; the introduction of key graduate attributes and skills in higher education teaching, learning and assessment).

  2. Articulate the discourse(s) at work through identifying key metaphors offered in the rhetoric, and the key rules and regulations at work. 

  3. Can you track to any extent how the discourse came to be established (archaeology), and what ‘family tree’ of a complex of intersecting discourses this particular practice inhabits (genealogy)?

  4. How does the discourse (its rhetoric) legitimate what can be ‘said’ and what can be ‘done’ (inclusion)? i.e., how do the rules become regulatory, in practice?

  5. In contrast to 4, how does the discourse exclude, or marginalise, through illegitimising activities, and how is the discourse resisted?

See if you can map identity constructions that arise as a result of the effects of the discourse (power as productive), for example ‘good’ and ‘bad’ readers; ‘well behaved’ and ‘disruptive’ pupils. For example, is ‘computer literacy’ assessed by a person’s ability to play computer games? If not, why not? Why is ‘gaming’ an illegitimate educational activity in an age of ‘infotainment’ and ‘edutainment’?

 

If you feel that you have achieved something with this research exercise, moving towards making the familiar strange, seeing the habitual in a new light, appreciating the complexities of a social practice, noting that a practice has a historical dimension, and/or appreciating the production of identities, you can move on to more sophisticated options suggested below. If you have achieved any of the above, you will have been researching in the postmodern, exploring creative ways of inquiry, turning things around, seeing them in a new light, and, above all, exposing how practices and practitioners become habitual or frozen, refusing reflexivity and the imaginative route of optional approaches.

Resist making a claim for the power of ‘discourse evaluation’ – it is only one amongst many ways of inquiry. Its seductive power is great, because you look as if you are ‘working things out’ as they ‘really are’. This is, however, working against the grain of the postmodern project.

 

Exercise 7

Pause for a moment, and note down why discourse evaluation has more of an exploratory than explanatory focus as a method of research in the postmodern.

 

(Advanced) Exercise 8

On a spiral curriculum basis, let us revisit the guidelines for ‘doing’ discourse evaluation set out above, and sophisticate these, focusing now upon an aspect of your own practice:

  1. Choose a central aspect of your practice, or characterise your practice in general. Write a paragraph on this.

  2. Now characterise your practice as if you were an anthropologist visiting an unknown tribe and attempting to get a picture of its daily life. In broad terms, write out what is ‘sayable’ and ‘do-able’, and what cannot be said and done. As you do this, check how much of what can be said and done has been rationalised, naturalised, or become habitual and has remained unacknowledged.

  1. Sticking with what is ‘sayable’ and ‘do-able’, map how the boundaries between what can and cannot be said and done are ‘policed’. What rules and regulations are clearly at play within the discourse, and how are these maintained? (For example, you may receive ‘corrective action notes’ from a Quality Assurance Unit where you do not follow certain procedures. You will be open to OFSTED inspection or QAA review). Write a couple of paragraphs on each of the following:

  1. Write a couple of paragraphs reflecting on how a practice identity or even plural, competing identities, may have been constituted through either conformity to the discourse or through acts of resistance. Formally, this would be a beginning account of the production and regulation of subjectivities. Note how you have been ‘subjected’ to the rules and regulations of the practice you are considering, as an aspect of a regulating discourse.

  2. Outline the conditions of possibility for the emergence of your practice: what is the historical dimension to the discourse? Is it tied in with wider education policy decisions? Can you find evidence of significant recent historical changes or disruptions that may have shaped the current form of the practice upon which you are now focussed? These are very big areas to encompass. At this stage, just scan, sweep, or get a historical overview. A good model here is Tom Billington (1996) who, in an essay on how the child is ‘constructed’ and ‘regulated’ through practices of educational psychology, shows how we need to ‘be informed by an historical context’ to understand such discursive effects. But his history is ‘lite’, not overwrought. He is not attempting to be a historian by recreating the past, but is using history in the way that Foucault does – necessarily selectively, to create a ‘history of the present’.

 

References

Alvesson, M. and Skoldberg, K (2000) Reflexive Methodology: New Vistas for Qualitative Research. London: Sage. (Chapter 6: ‘Language/gender/power: discourse analysis, feminism and genealogy’)

Barker-Benfield, G.J. (1996) The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: The University of Chicago Press.

Billington, T. (1996) Pathologizing children: Psychology in education and acts of government. In E. Burman et al (eds) Psychology, Discourse, Practice: From Regulation to Resistance. London: Taylor & Francis, pp. 37-54.

Bleakley, A. (1989) Earth’s Embrace: Archetypal Psychology’s Challenge to the Growth Movement. Bath: Gateway Books.

Bleakley, A. (1998) Learning as an Aesthetic Practice: Motivation Through Beauty in Higher Education. In S. Brown, S. Armstrong and G. Thompson (eds) Motivating Students. London: Kogan Page, pp. 165-172.

Bleakley, A. (1999) From Reflective Practice to Holistic Reflexivity. Studies in Higher Education. 24:3, pp. 315-330.

Bleakley, A. (2000a) Writing With Invisible Ink: narrative, confessionalism and reflective practice. Reflective Practice. 1:1, pp. 11-24.

Bleakley, A. (2000b) Adrift Without a Life Belt: reflective self-assessment in a post-modern age. Teaching in Higher Education. 5:4, pp. 405-18.

Bleakley, A. (2000c) From Lifelong Learning to Lifelong Teaching: Teaching as a call to style. Teaching in Higher Education

Bleakley, A. (2002a) Pre-registration house officers and ward-based learning: a ‘new apprenticeship’ model. Medical Education, 36:1, pp. 9-15.

Bleakley, A. (2002b) Teaching as Hospitality: The Gendered ‘Gift’ and Teaching Style. In: G. Howie and A. Tauchert (eds) Gender, Teaching and Research in Higher Education: Challenges for the 21st Century. London: Ashgate, pp. 73-85.

Bleakley, A. (2003) Constructions of Creativity. (Forthcoming, Studies in Higher Education).

Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E. (eds) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. London: University of California Press. (Introduction by James Clifford: ‘Partial Truths’)

Cox, C.B. and Boyson, R. (eds) (1975) Black Papers. London: J.M. Dent.

Elias, N. (2000, 2nd ed) The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell.

Fairclough, N. (1992) Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Gergen, K. (1999) An Invitation to Social Construction. London: Sage.

Illich, I. (1985) H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness. Dallas, TX: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

Jaworski, A. and Coupland, N. (eds) (1999) The Discourse Reader. London: Routledge.

Kendall, G. and Wickham, G. (1999) Using Foucault’s Methods. London: Sage.

Latour, B. (1996) Aramis: or the Love of Technology. London: Harvard University Press.

Lee, A. (1992) Poststructuralism and educational research: Some categories and issues. Issues in Educational Research. 2:1, pp. 1-12.  Click here to access, print off and read Alison Lee’s article.

Marshall, J.D. (1990) Foucault and educational research. In S.J. Ball (ed) Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge. London: Routledge, pp. 11-28.

Mills, S. (1997) Discourse. London: Routledge.

Popkewitz, T.S. and Brennan, M. (eds) (1998) Foucault’s Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Potter, J. (1996) Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction. London: Sage.

Ropers-Huilman, B. (1999) Witnessing: critical inquiry in a poststructural world. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 12: 1, pp. 21-36.

Torfing, J. (1999) New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe and Zizek. Oxford: Blackwell.

Usher, R. and Edwards, R. (1994) Postmodernism and Education. London: Routledge.

Walkerdine, V. (ed) (2001) Critical Psychology: The International Journal of Critical Psychology (Launch Issue). London: Lawrence and Wishart.