This article explores the rhetorical work done by discourses of professional development in education. In particular it outlines the ways in which the rhetoric of technical expertise, competence and reflective practice are deployed to mobilise professional practices and identities in particular ways and position certain practices and dispositions as specifically professional. The article explores the ways in which audiences are mobilised and the strategies to persuade educators that particular discourses of professionalism are about and for them. This is illustrated through an analysis of a particular discourse of professional development for academics in the UK. The authors argue for and illustrate the illuminating potential of rhetorical analysis to an understanding of different practices of professional development
We argue two major difficulties in current discourses of citizenship education. The first is a relative masking of student discourses of citizenship, by positioning students as lacking citizenship and as outside the community that acts. The second is in failing to understand the discursive and material support for citizenship activity. We thus argue that it is not a lack of citizenship that education research might address, but identification and exploration of the different forms of citizenship that people already engage in. We offer a fragmentary, poststructuralist theorization oriented to explore the 'contemporary limits of the necessary', drawing on specific resources from the work of Michel Foucault and others for the constitution of local, partial accounts of citizenship discourses and activities, and exploration of their possibilities and constraints. We argue this as a significant tactic of theorization in support of an opening of discourses of citizenship and in avoiding the discursive difficulties that we have identified. Our theorization then is significant in its potential to unsettle discourses that confine contemporary thought regarding citizenship education, and support exploration of what might be excessive to that confinement.
In the analysis of polices for lifelong learning, the gap between the rhetoric and reality has become the focus for much debate and concern. Reality is compared with rhetoric and both are found wanting. In this paper, we argue that such critiques misconceive the significance of rhetoric and we outline the form a rhetorical analysis of lifelong learning policy could take. Using the UK government's 1998 Green Paper and 1999 White Paper on lifelong learning as illustrations, we suggest that rhetorical analysis helps to point to the politics of discourse that is at play in policy-making processes. This is a politics - often dismissed as spin-doctoring - with which we need to engage if our own attempts to develop lifelong learning are to be persuasive
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