Languaged landscape: Power passion and gender within the writing classroom.

摘要

St. Pierre declares, "We are ethically bound to pay attention to how we word the world" (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 484), and so the Discourses of my writing classroom have become the focus for this study. The study is poststructural "Poststructuralism is not concerned with asking essentializing questions about the 'meaning' of anything....Poststructuralism is concerned with a different set of questions: 'How does discourse function? Where is it found? How does it get produced and regulated?"'(St. Pierre, 2000, p. 485). My research questions echo these questions: Where are power and gender in the teacher's language within the composition classroom? How are they produced and regulated in language?;Potential benefits of this research are twofold: firstly, the information that it may give to me as a writing teacher could inform instruction and hopefully lead to empowering student writers and secondly, the findings can be offered as a "window" or a "mirror" for other writing teachers allowing them to consciously reflect on their current practice within the writing classroom. It could act as a reaffirmation or a critical reflection benefiting future practice.;The study utilized Fairclough's three stages for Critical Discourse Analysis: Description, Interpretation and Explanation. During the Description stage, the data revealed sites of ideological struggle for the teacher and sites of tension within power relations. During the Interpretation stage, four key Discourses emerged: the Discourse of industrialized-factory writing, the Discourse of evaluation, the Discourse of dependancy and the Discourse of passion. During the Explanation stage, again sites of tension were revealed pertaining to the situational, institutional, and societal expectations of female teachers.