The impact of innovative discourses in school: a case study

Abstract

One of the main challenges in current educational research is to understand the true impact that innovative discourses (on active methodologies, competency-based learning, ICT, etc.) are having on teaching and learning processes. From this point, the work presented here took as a case study the Geography and History classes in Secondary Education taught by one of the authors. These were conceived as a dispositif where the thoughts, actions, and intentions of the research participants, the teacher-researcher and their students, were conditioned by a set of meanings derived from four different discursive fields: the normative framework, the private educational institution, the Department of Social Sciences, and the Geography and History classes themselves. Drawing on autoethnography and critical discourse analysis methods, the twelve constituent texts of the corpus used underwent an analytical procedure articulated in four phases: pre-analysis, lexicometric analysis, content analysis, and linguistic analysis. The results obtained empirically confirmed the gap between innovative discourses and school realities as previously noted by some authors, although they revealed the existence of multiple difficulties and problems unnoticed until now. Contrary to a literature overly indulgent with new educational discourses, the conclusions drawn coincide in that, in contexts such as the one relevant to this study, educational innovation is being conceived and practiced in a mercantilist key, as a trend, representing yet another symptom of the neoliberal educational model.