The public and the text

This is the first in a series of papers by a research group which is seeking to analyse discursive meanings offered and created in institutional socialization processes. Our main interest is in the analysis of the meaning‐bearing content of socialization and the dimensions of citizenship. The paper first presents an outline of the move towards a citizenship sociology of education and curriculum. Second, it describes some of the basic theoretical and methodological starting points of the group's research programme, stressing how the forming of the collective consciousness is bound up with an ongoing ideological struggle. This point of reference, in this and the following papers in the series, is linked to aspects of poststructuralism, neo‐ and critical pragmatism and communitarianism. Each of the papers, like the third part of this paper, exemplifies, in different areas, ways of using the research perspective to perform a discourse analysis, a perspective that stresses possible and potential differences in education and teaching as meaning‐creating processes. In the third part of this first paper, a range of competing metadiscourses, different educational conceptions, are developed via an analysis of the possible rationalities of education. These conceptions of education are also used as a critical frame of reference in some of the following papers.