Teaching adult-immigrant students in Chile : Critical discourse analysis on the teacher’s voices

Due to a recent substantial influx of Haitian immigrants, the Chilean government has had to adjust and react with a variety of policy changes especially in educational programs, health services and housing. The purpose of this thesis was to carry out qualitative research using critical discourse analysis (CDA) to identify meanings behind the way Chilean teachers talked about their everyday experiences of teaching immigrant students from Haiti. I was interested in what are the meanings attached to these experiences and how the teachers perceive this new reality of working in a more diverse environment. The community of teachers that I interviewed individually work in an adult-education secondary school in Chile. I chose this topic for two main reasons. First, this is a new reality in my home country. The new diversity in terms of population is a recent phenomenon of no more than ten years. As a student of the Master Program in Intercultural Encounters, my interest in research about education for immigrant-related issues increased enormously. Second, adult education generally attracts less academic interest compared to other types of education, but in Chile it has also been neglected by the authorities. I was theoretically committed to produce knowledge from a critical perspective. My data was obtained through semi-structured interviews carried out in Chile between November and December 2019. To analyze the data, I used Teun A. Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to CDA. From my data, I identified four different meanings, namely, meaning of fulfillment, meaning of silence, meaning of resources and meaning of agency. These meanings were present in different ways in my data and I used them as a means to understand the way the teachers talked about their experiences. I argue that these four meanings best represent a clear relation between the three main elements of Van Dijk’s “discourse-cognition-society triangle” and discourse