Deconstructing traditional discourses of schooling: An example of school reform

Recent developments in critical discourse analysis and critical ethnography have argued for a broader institutional perspective in the study of schools. In this view, the concerns of micro‐linguistics and micro‐ethnography are broadened to include an examination of how school discourses are situated within wider societal discourses and power relations. The dialectical nature of this process—which allows for the possibility of contest, and a degree of institutional autonomy for schools from dominant discourses—is also emphasised. Drawing principally on critical ethnography, the following account of Richmond Road School in Auckland, New Zealand highlights how a school can be successfully engaged in this kind of dialectical process. The school's contesting of wider power relations, and the discourses by which they are conveyed, offers an educational model for fostering alternative emancipatory discourses within education.