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Doctoral Research

"Visions of What We Know: School Subjects Depicted through Shifting Internet Discourses"

Tona Williams, Department of Sociology,
University of Wisconsin - Madison (Ph.D. 2006)

Abstract

Like all social institutions, the organization of the educational system is actively maintained by its participants and influenced by broader cultural contexts. The standards and accountability movements, with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, are among the most profound policy influences on contemporary formal education. In each school subject, the response to these developments varies and is affected by that subject’s positioning within the system. This project explores the distinctions among seven K-12 school subjects (mathematics, science, English/reading, social studies, foreign languages, the arts, and physical education), “core” versus “peripheral” subjects, and their shifting depictions over a three-year time period. The data set comprises public depictions of the curriculum on the websites of 279 formal educational organizations, accessed at three points in time from 2001 through 2004, with follow-ups in 2005 and 2006. Research questions include: How do depictions of different curricular subject areas compare with one another; what do the website depictions say about associations among status, autonomy, cultural emphasis, and resources; and how does discursive change and stability, appear over time?

A discourse analysis explores the links among a classification system that defines distinct areas of knowledge and the broader cultural context within which these classifications occur. Drawing in particular on Pierre Bourdieu’s work, it extends and integrates scholarship that compares the cultures of subject areas and traces histories of school subjects, discussing what it means for discourses to be marked and unmarked and incorporating the analytic categories of discourse, ideology, frame, field, and agent.

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Overall, the data suggest substantial distinctions among core and peripheral subjects, and more marking within subjects trying hardest to increase their resources. This is most evident in the greater use of the “recognition” discourse in the relatively peripheral areas of the arts, foreign languages, physical education, and social studies. The core areas appear to have the most top-down control imposed on them, with the peripheral enjoying fewer resources but more flexibility. Controversies in the core fields of mathematics, science, and English/reading are marked more prominently and depicted more contentiously than those in the peripheral fields, with one exception: debates within mathematics that are primarily internal. The discourse of “curriculum integration” is the most muted of all the discourses examined, and collaboration among subject areas appears to receive less support than initiatives oriented towards single subjects. In fact, the data provide evidence of No Child Left Behind intensifying competition among the subjects. Finally, the largest expansion of frames over time appears in the arts education websites and the US Department of Education website; at the periphery and at the top of the curricular hierarchy. Change from the top-down appears to happen most easily within core subjects, whereas ground-level change emerges most readily in the periphery.

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