Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a qualitative analytical approach for critically describing, interpreting, and explaining the ways in which discourses construct, maintain, and legitimize social inequalities. CDA rests on the notion that the way we use language is purposeful, regardless of whether discursive choices are conscious or unconscious. CDA takes a number of different approaches and incorporates a variety of methods that depend on research goals and theoretical perspectives. This methodological guide presents a general CDA analytic framework and illustrates the application of that framework to a systematic literature review of CDA studies in education. CDA research studies are no less likely than other forms of scholarly research to reproduce ideological assumptions; qualitative rigor and trustworthiness are discussed.

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Definitions of rurality in education research are inconsistent, making generalization across studies difficult at best. We review published research in rural education between 2005 and 2015 ( n = 17) and characterize the way each defined rural. A common technique for classifying rural schools is the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) locale code. We argue that the NCES locale codes fall short of most conceptual understandings of rural. We recommend a school size filter to address the mismatch between the NCES codes and conceptual understandings of rurality. We compare non-rural districts with rural districts using NCES codes for grouping with and without the school size filter. Observed effects vary depending on whether the school size filter was used. We argue that the school size filter along with NCES codes better captures the concept of rural education and could improve research design and generalization across studies involving rural schools.