Educating through Democracy: a Critical Analysis of Classroom Discourse

In this dissertation, the researcher examined teachers’ and students’ discourses through a social constructionist framing of democratic education to understand how they disrupted or maintained traditional schooling discourses. Data were generated during four consecutive days of video and audio recording of teachers’ and students’ discourses. Other data sources included open-ended interviews; observations; field notes; methodological journal; analytic memos; and the school’s website. Two cycles of coding were employed to identify the teachers’ and students’ discursive enactments. The researcher then utilized a process of micro-ethnographic Interactional Sociolinguistic Transcription as well as Gee’s (2014) processes of micro-ethnographic and macro-ethnographic critical discourse analyses to understand how the teachers’ and students’ discourses disrupted or maintained traditional schooling discourses. Findings demonstrate that teachers and students enacted discourses that disrupted and maintained traditional schooling discourses, sometimes simultaneously. Additionally, findings indicate that it is necessary to employ a social constructionist framing when studying democratic education in order to understand how democracy is nurtured within discourse. KEYWORDS: democratic education, social constructionism, critical discourse analysis, discourse, democrac