Discourse, Identity and Community

This chapter outlines the theoretical framework underpinning the book and my reasons for adopting it. In the process, I hope to make the nature of my engagement with the issues implicit in the book explicit, as well as to provide an opening for further debate and discussion (Holliday, 2002; Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005; Phillips & Jorgensen, 2002).

The notions of discourse, identity and communities of practice provide an integrated and aligned conceptual framework throughout this study at the levels of epistemology, theoretical principles, methodology, analysis and interpretation (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005: 15). These theoretical concepts are introduced for their productive capacity, for as Phillips and Jorgensen (2002: 21) note, in the quote cited in the Introduction, 'It is by seeing the world through a particular theory that we can distance ourselves from our taken for granted understandings and subject our material to other questions than we would be able to do from an everyday perspective.' It is critical therefore to examine each of these concepts in some depth, to illustrate their appropriateness for researching teacher formation and to highlight their complementary contributions in addressing the questions motivating this study. I begin by examining discourse since in many ways it forms a bridge between the social worlds of communities of practice and identities.

Exploring Discourse

In the introductory chapter I noted the passion with which the student teachers were embracing the discourses of education as one of the sources of impetus for this study. Indeed, among other things, this study is crucially concerned with the power of discourse. However, in order to fully appreciate this productive power, we need to unpack the complex meanings carried by this term.

Discourse, like culture, is one of the most widely used terms in social and educational discussions, and like culture, it is also a term that is often used in different ways though often left undefined (Mills, 2004). These uses include reference to extended stretches of language beyond the sentence level, as well as to linguistically embodied systems of meaning, knowledge and belief, akin to notions referenced by the term ideology. These different senses are of course related, in that systems of belief will be evident in language-in-use. Discourse in the broader 'systems of meaning' sense is also used in different ways. We can refer to 'discourse' as an abstract noun, meaning something along the lines of language as social practice, or as a countable noun, when speaking of particular discourses (Fairclough, 1992). Within this latter use, at times we refer to the discourse of a field, such as the discourse of law, or teaching, while at other times we refer to the discourse of a social community, such as Emirati women, urban educated youths, upper-class Brits, etc. So discourse references both knowledge and communities. But discourses should not be thought of as separate, self-contained silos of meaning; rather, there will be polyvalent relationships between and among them involving differing degrees and combinations of articulation and overlap, complementariness and contradiction, similarity and difference, as a result of which discourses may produce, transmit and reinforce, but also contest and undermine, social meanings and social relations (Bove, 1995; Foucault, 1978, p. 100–102).

Overall, the most fruitful approach with discourse is to maintain a degree of openness and flexibility in relation to its meaning since the value of the term is as a heuristic tool, similar again to culture, and that value is likely to be lost if we try to pin the meaning of the term down too precisely (Phillips & Jorgensen, 2002). Working definitions of the term discourse, consonant with this study include the fairly loose: 'a relational ensemble of signifying sequences' (Torfing, 1999: 91), as well as the more detailed: 'a pattern of thinking, speaking, behaving, and interacting that is socially, culturally, and historically constructed and sanctioned by a specific group or groups of people' (Miller Marsh, 2003: 9).

Related to the wide usage of the term, are four common misunderstandings about discourse-based theories (Torfing, 1999: 94–96). These include:

(1) The view that discourse theory involves a belief that there is no external world – rather, discourse theory asserts that it is only through discourse that we can talk meaningfully about the external world.

(2) The view that discourse refers to the merely linguistic within the wider social world – rather, discourse theory views the linguistic and the social as coextensive in that 'All actions have meaning and to produce or disseminate meaning is to act' (Torfing, 1999: 94).

(3) The view that relations and identities within discourse are entirely arbitrary, stemming from Saussure's arguments about the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and signified within the sign – rather, discourse theory views the relationship between the whole and the parts, as well as between the parts, within discourse as one of reciprocal and mutual conditioning.

(4) The view that discourse theory entails a chaotic flux of meaning – rather, meaning within discourse is constrained by what Torfing (1999: 96), drawing on Derrida, refers to as a 'determinate openness', in that the fixation of meaning within discourse is always only temporary and partial.

Of the above misconceptions, the first is perhaps the most prevalent and one to which Laclau and Mouffe provide a robust response:

The fact that every object is constituted as an object of discourse has nothing to do with whether there is a world external to thought, or with the realism/idealism opposition. An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of 'natural phenomena' or 'expressions of the wrath of God', depends on the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive conditions of emergence. (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985: 108)

Torfing's work is primarily concerned with the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe (1985). In this book, I draw on Laclau and Mouffe's view of discourse as a series of temporary, unstable and ambiguous closures of meaning and their post-structuralist insights into the way that the positive content of any discourse relies on the strategy of positing of an 'other' or 'constitutive outside', against which the terms of a particular discourse are negatively defined. But there are...