ProDIC-Discourse Structures and Dis-/Integration in Education: Promotion of Critical Discourse Competencies

The project fits into the thematic priority “Identities, Diversity and Integration”. Building on prior research activities that gave insight into the characteristics of Luxembourg’s schools and society as well as into the arising dynamics of change, the project aims at elaborating critical concepts of social agency inside this specific socio-cultural context.

Coordination: Dr. Carola Mick
Funding: Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR)
Duration: 2010-2011

Abstract

School as a social institution cannot be separated from its context; it is part of and influencing social reality (cf. New London School; Gee; Yurén). However, few schooling practices take into account this dimension of ‘agency’ of schools as institutions as well as of the implied individual actors, in the re-/co-/construction of social reality. The present project tries to cope with this lack by deconstructing institutionalised discursive constraints of agency in a Luxembourgish primary school, and by elaborating a critical concept of agency at the intersection of French discourse theory and critical educational research, that is adapted to the Luxembourgish socio-cultural context. It aims at finding ways to empower actors, in particular learners, to actively participate and take over responsibilities in the re-/co-/construction of the reality of school, classroom and learning activities, as well as of the individual life as social being and of society as a whole.

This biennial project is conceptualised as a praxeologic research activity that intervenes in a primary school classroom in Strassen, Luxembourg. It invites children to design a school project related to the UNESCO educational guidelines of democracy, tolerance, integration and global sustainable development (the Hueflach school has just been nominated member of the ASP-net of UNESCO associated schools) and to link this project to their daily school practices, to internal school partners (other projects and classes, e.g. the ‘integration class’) and to external organisations from the township Strassen (e.g. the youth/senior club, the commission for integration). The project will be documented, presented and evaluated by the children themselves, in diverse media formats. This activity is meant to encourage children to autonomously integrate social life inside classroom and school, and to link these school experiences and their lifeworld reality (cf. Schütz/Luckmann), by integrating all the available diverse socio-cultural resources.

The ongoing activity will be scientifically monitored through video-taped participant observation and qualitative interviews, in an ethnographic, emic approach to the participants’ reality re-/co-/ construction (Mick 2009). The data based analysis uses a combination of methodologies from linguistics and sociology to focus agency at the interplay of interactional micro- and social macro-phenomena: ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, ethnography of communication and activity theory, as well as (critical, mediated) discourse analysis. Observations and intermediate results of analysis will be discussed within a multitudinous board of Luxembourgish and international scientific experts, as well as with PhD students and a network of pedagogues in Luxembourg, in view of a profound, multi-faceted insight into the research question. Results of these interactions will be published in articles, a popular and a scientific book, and will be disseminated through a public scientific conference with interventions of all the implied project actors.

The project contributes to CORE’s domain “Identities, Diversity and Integration”, by lighting the dynamics of social change and of individual/collective identity as a matter of mediated, collaborative, interactional re-/co-/construction. The critical concept of agency looks for ways to foster and promote a social commitment ‘bottom up’, in view of interactive re-/co-/construction of a cohesive and harmonious living together.

Partners:

• Gaston Greiveldinger (Mayor Strassen)
• Charmian Kenner (Lecturer: Goldsmiths, University of London, Department: Department of Educational Sciences)
• Teresa Yurén (Professor, Universidad del Estado de Morelos, Department: Department of Educational Sciences)
• Michel Lanners (Director, Ministry of Education, Department: SCRIPT)