Notes on Nicole’s Presentation

Nicole’s work, I believe will provide some very interesting insight into what Boerema presents in his article. While Boerema looks at mission statements alone and the way they represent the founding principles of the school, I think looking at the ways the mission statements are borne out in their connections to each other and to the eventual comments that the parents make about the schools. I thought, however, that this reading gave us a very good footing with which to go on and analyze the data Nicole gave us, particularly since it all dealt with the same type of school. It allowed us to think carefully about what that school’s background might be when we looked at the data.

The Fairclough I thought also provided a really nice scaffolding for the work that Nicole is working on. Particularly useful I thought was the table she presented in her workshop, from Ch. 3 of Fairclough, which related each of the constraints in discourse (contents, relations, subjects) with its structural effects (knowledge and beliefs, social relationships, social identities). I think that this might be one of the more useful pieces for my own research, in that it provides a very concrete tie from the discourse feature to the effects it has on the world around it.

What I was most interested in within Nicole’s workshop was actually the repetition. The ways in which a single word or words appeared and reappeared I thought was one of the most interesting parts of her data. This was particularly salient when the same words were picked up in the parent and student testimonials about the school. I thought this went back to Fairclough’s thoughts on experiential values—certainly the words which are most being repeated often have a great deal to do with the ideologies about the schools that the schools administrations most want their parents and students to associate with the school (even if the school doesn’t truly embody them), and in that sense, the presence of the same words in the parent testimonials indicates a certain “taking up” of these ideologies. This would be a really interesting site to explore, and the area where I think Nicole’s work will most significantly expand on Boerema’s.

Most useful to me from Nicole’s presentation were the discussion and application of the values of the word and grammar from Fairclough. I think asking myself many of these same questions about how the text is being construed with regards to ideology, euphemism, expression and connectivity will be very useful in analyzing the way white-knighting ins entextualized in an interactional context.