As an educational researcher with an interest in media representations of education, I’m a relative newcomer to corpus-assisted methods and approaches.

Analysis of print media representations of education, schooling, teachers, and so on, is a small but fairly well-developed field, dating back to at least the 1980s in Australia and elsewhere. Much of this media and education research, including my own, has relied on close critical analysis of small groups of carefully selected media texts, often analysed alongside other texts such as political speeches and press releases, to craft an argument around the role of the media in education policy making or the social imaginary. Until recent times, relatively few education researchers working in this space have moved beyond this close work to take a broader approach to media analysis. Marianne Fenech and David Wilkins’ corpus-assisted work on media representations of early childhood education published in The Australian Educational Researcher and the Journal of Education Policy are exceptions to this.

For my own work, encountering Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery’s Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes: Representations of Islam in the British Press while on sabbatical  in 2013 was a game-changer. It was the first extended piece of corpus-assisted discourse analysis I’d read, and it got me thinking about how I might expand my methodological repertoire to take a more ‘wide-angled’ view. While I’d always considered my work to be located within what’s often known as the critical paradigm, and employed qualitative research methods (life history research, anyone?), I had been firmly convinced during my doctoral studies by Guba and Lincoln’s argument (1998) that particular paradigms and approaches to research do not ‘own’ particular methods – that research tools or methods, whether qualitative or quantitative, can be employed to many ends. Quantitative research is no more the property of positivism than qualitative research is the property of post-structuralism: the issue is how well we align our research problem, the theoretical and methodological tools we use, and the knowledge claims we make.

One thing led to another. Four years later, having gone from tinkering with an early version of Laurence Anthony’s Antconc to a healthy diet of scholarly reading around corpus approaches to discourse, to a corpus linguistics course my colleague and friend at the University of Sydney, Monika Bednarek, kindly allowed me to audit, to the Corpora and Discourse Conference and a Lancaster Summer School in Corpus Linguistics, I finally felt well-equipped enough to publish my first piece of corpus-assisted discourse analysis.

Some of my old friends joke that I’m on a decades-long one-woman mission to change the way we talk about teachers and education in the public space. Happily, unlike my old friends, I know I’m not at all alone on this mission, but they’re right in that a lot of what fires me up as a researcher is about understanding public discourse around education and the impact it has on teachers’ work and identities. In order to shift the discourse, we need to understand it, and to do that we need to map it, writ large. Corpus-assisted methods can help us to do that in ways that close study of a handful of texts simply can’t. That’s not to say we should jettison the small and close study – in my current work I’m trying to integrate the two, as many have done before me – but that corpus-assisted methods complement and provide good context for those close studies. As researchers, the more tools and lenses we have at our disposal to help us interrogate the protracted research problems we encounter, from varying angles and at varying distances, the more chance we stand of making an authentic and enduring contribution to knowledge. Adding a corpus-assisted approach to her repertoire has helped this researcher to take a small step closer to such a contribution. 

References

Guba, E., & Lincoln, Y. (1998). Competing Paradigms in Qualitative Research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Landscape of Qualitative Research:  Theories and Issues. Thousand Oaks, C.A.: Sage Publications.

Posted by Nicole Mockler, Associate Professor of Education, School of Education and Social Work, The University of Sydney