Search

Although the lack of diversity in newsrooms and reporting remains a serious issue in the journalism industry, college journalism education and student media provide a critical opportunity for change. Yet prior research has found notable diversity gaps in both. This study analyzed the state of diversity at a Midwestern university student newspaper and found significant gaps in coverage of diverse populations. The findings suggest the need for more comprehensive diversity education within the college classroom and campus media advising. This is important not only for more representative student media, but also for the future of journalism.

This paper analyses public conflicts over school policies that seek to advance Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) equality. It focuses in particular on conflicts where Muslims, who protest LGBT-inclusive policies, become racialised as other to secular national/Western values. Growing attention has been paid to the secular arguments used by majority and minority religious groups to publicly counter LGBT-inclusive education. In this paper, I contend that neither contemporary arguments for, or against, LGBT-inclusive education are neatly secular, i.e., non-religious, in their public appearance. Introducing a Critical Secular approach, I contend multiple parties in such conflicts work with "strategic" secularisms. Strategic secularisms are prevailing discourses which privatise, and deprivatise (make public), aspects of minority religious and sexual identities on neo-colonial, secular Christian terms. I present a thematic analysis of 149 newspaper articles covering protests largely by Muslims against LGBT-inclusive education outside schools in Birmingham, England. The analysis shows that newspapers foregrounded discourses seeking to privatise (assert private authority over) or deprivatise (publicly surveil) Muslim religiosity. LGBT identities were also variously framed as "beliefs" to be kept private, or an essential part of the public self which must be confessed to be "free". Based on this analysis, I argue public discourse should certainly challenge queer/Muslim and secular/religious dichotomies. But more fundamentally, there is a need to cultivate education publics that refuse strategic secularisms based in neo-colonial, racialised discourses of secular Christian civilisation, and engage the losses created by the privatising and deprivatising of specific forms of minority religious and sexual identity.

As newspapers follow editorial work, the author's identity remains in the background. Hence, newspapers' discursive features should be studied from textual perspectives to understand the social dimension of the messages produced in such texts. What is more, pragmatically, the text as a whole and its separate language units with their structural elements require careful attention. Thus, this paper aims to analyze onomastic metaphors as one of the structural-stylistic types functioning in the language of newspapers. We analyzed the Moskovskij Komsomolets, Arguments and Facts, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and Izvestia during our analysis, with specific attention paid to the proper names as the binding elements with their substantial and semantic functions. Our results suggest that certain metaphorical language uses appear repetitively in the texts.

Experts in different fields have claimed that the UK has experienced a process of growing economic inequality since the 1970s. Following Fairclough's dialectal-relational approach, this paper presents a detailed, systematic analysis of the representation of homeless people and homelessness in "The Guardian" and "Daily Mail" from 2000 to 2018, in order to explore how these have been discursively represented over time. Therefore, our study addresses two specific research questions: How have homelessness and homeless people been represented in the UK press? Are there any discoursal changes in representation with the passing of time? The analysis, which has employed mostly qualitative but also quantitative (statistical) methods drawing on corpus-assisted discourse analysis, is informed by the theory of TRANSITIVITY within Systemic Functional Linguistics. Results indicate that, within an overall negative representation of homeless people and homelessness in this period, there have been some significant discoursal changes over time. As such, this paper contributes to critical discourse studies and transitivity research on a relevant social problem, that of growing economic inequality in the UK.

The American educational policy agenda has been fraught with neoliberal laws that center educational improvement and innovation (Barros, 2012). Neoliberalism operates on the premise that market competition will spur excellence in educational opportunities and decrease the education debt in marginalized communities (Fejes & Salling Olesen, 2016). Moreover, in the case of urban education systemic reforms, researchers need to endeavor how marginalized communities relay their concerns or endorsements in the media. News articles are one appropriate unit of analysis for investigating this problem. In this paper, I examine how an education reform law in Puerto Rico, "Ley de Reforma Educativa de Puerto Rico" (LREPR), was reported on in the four most popular newspapers on the Island. Conducting content analysis of newspaper articles produced findings that contribute to the policy literature by describing three central frames found in the media coverage of LREPR: (a) rhetoric on the "Free Selection of Schools" school voucher program, (b) the effects of mass school closures on municipalities, and (c) rhetoric on Alianza Schools--Puerto Rico's Charter Schools Initiative. I close with how the frames depart from the Republican-leaning political affiliation of the newspapers and present a collective resistance to the neoliberal education reform policy.

The objective of this paper is to inform a critical analysis of how the media portray family support in Ireland. Findings of a content analysis carried out on national and regional Irish newspapers between 2014 and 2017 are presented which describe communication about family support services provided by Tusla-Child and Family Agency. Results show that even though child protection was not used as a specific search term, news items on the Child and Family Agency and family support were usually focused on child protection and children in care. Results also show that family support activities are reported more positively in local papers compared to national papers. In the discussion, we argue that these findings are important as the media plays an important role in how the public understand, view, and engage with integrated child protection and welfare systems. We consider the implications of the research and advocate working with the media to inform their interpretation and understanding of family support. We suggest this is important as the manner in which the media communicate and frame family support as part of the overall child protection and welfare system is one of the main influences on public understandings and awareness of preventative family support and child welfare services.

Based on Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, Lakoff's definition and Prince et al.'s classification of hedges, this paper takes New York Times and China Daily from January 23rd to April 8th, 2020 as corpus sources, randomly selects 39 COVID-19 reports, and makes a contrastive study of hedges among them, aiming at exploring the similarities and differences in the use of hedges in COVID-19 reports selected from Chinese and American mainstream newspapers and further revealing their influencing factors.

This paper engages with the Freirean concept of politicity for critical policy studies in education. The first part lays the ground to expand the conceptualisation of teachers' politicity. I argue this entails an examination of the limits and possibilities within a juncture. To develop the argument, the second part focuses on a teacher strike that took place in Chile and draws on corpus-driven discourse analysis to explore news from a national teacher organisation and from an influential newspaper. Through the angle of politicity, I identify and discuss ideational projects during the strike with an emphasis on counterhegemonic resources for change.

The purpose of this historical investigation was to contribute to the growing body of knowledge about women in music education by means of documenting the life and career of Genevieve F. Hargiss (1912-1995), a lesser known yet exemplary twentieth-century music educator. Through the investigation of primary source materials including Hargiss's personal scrapbooks, interviews, and her scholarly publications, as well as newspaper articles and oral histories, this paper explores Hargiss's contributions to the field of music education from 1929 to 1982. This study argues that Hargiss made a lasting impact in her field through her innovative, research-based improvements to professional teacher-training programs and elementary general music programs in Kansas, Arizona, and across the U.S. Hargiss blazed a trail for women in the field of music education through her excellence in performing, research, mentoring, and teaching; a brilliant educator and scholar -- "not just for her time, but for any time."

Sinophobia (anti-Chinese sentiment) has become normalised and increasingly acceptable in Hong Kong in recent decades. Such Sinophobia intersects with aims of protecting what is local in the society, as seen in Hong Kong news media. This paper first explores the concept of "Sinophobia." It then provides a background on Sinophobia in Hong Kong, explaining the tensions between the identities of Hong Kong/HongKongers and Mainland China/Mainland Chinese. After elaborating on the role of media and the nature of local media in Hong Kong, this paper examines Sinophobic, stereotypical and quasi-racist discourse in three major Hong Kong news sources. While respecting Hong Kong heritage is a valuable goal, the Sinophobia accompanying some such aims can be seen to fuel hatred among people. In this context, encouraging a more inclusive and reflective discourse is warranted to work against the pitfalls of Sinophobia as a particular form of xenophobia in Hong Kong.

This paper analyses meaning-making processes in a blended setting--face-to-face interaction and web forum--purposely created for collaborative learning activity. The analysis focuses on one pair out of 14 dyads. The dyad comprises two female students aged 17 and 18 who attended a Brazilian third-year state secondary school. We envisioned intertextuality in a seamless thematic flux using a single theme--about everyday problems in the culture--by two different problem-solving tasks. Task#1 required discussing two polemic reports published in an online newspaper: one in favour of using digital technologies in class, the other against it. Task#2 involved perspective-taking, where students should imagine the school in 20 years. Afterwards, the pair participated in an episodic interview focusing on their participation in both tasks. The interactions were video recorded. To map the meaning-making processes, we applied the dialogic thematic analysis looking for centripetal and centrifugal forces. A semantic map was drawn and discussed. Altogether, the paired and grouped collaborative activities in blended learning promoted authorial production. Our dyad achieved reflective meta-analysis when they compared their viewpoints with the perspective of their colleagues by using justifications and explanations grounded in their production, generating reflexivity and agency in dialogue.

Using authentic materials in the English as a second language (ESL) classroom can develop students' critical thinking (CT) skills, expose them to more realistic English, and support their motivation. Carrying out text analyses of authentic materials in the ESL classroom can also help students become more critical in their approach to reading. Grounded in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) concepts, this paper puts forward a series of text analysis tasks, so ESL teachers can introduce their adult students to the concepts of transitivity and intentionality found in opposing newspaper articles dealing with conflict. Overall, these analyses show how the active voice can highlight the semantic value of intentionality via material processes, and how writers use strategies such as passivization and fronting of items in clauses to emphasize the responsibility for wrongdoing when reporting news. The analyses also show that context is important in determining degrees of intentionality, and intentionality can be attributed to the material processes of human actors portrayed as non-human actors. Understanding these concepts can help adult ESL students become better critical readers/thinkers.

Despite the heated debates on the implementation and its massive impact on the lives of Filipino people, only a dearth of research has been conducted to investigate the free college education project of the Duterte administration. Informed by corpus-based investigation of discourse, this paper critically compares news articles on the free college tuition discourse written by seven English online newspapers in the Philippines. The findings revealed that thematizing key public officials in the "Manila Times," "Philippine Daily Inquirer," and "Philippine Star" highlighted strong regard on the sources of information and the attribution of full authorial responsibility to information sources. "CNN" and "Rappler's" focus on educational institution news themes depicts the thematization of the indispensable role of key agencies as implementers and venues for implementing the free college education project and the indispensable stance of these public higher education institutions. The "Manila Bulletin" and the government-owned "Philippine News Agency's" strong rendition of free college tuition as a subject matter simply focused on state-of-affairs, where the absence of authorial sources may lower the credibility and trustworthiness of the news.

Scout Rally at Birmingham and Imperial Scout Exhibition organised in July of 1913 by the Boy Scouts Association constituted educational propaganda of the British Empire. The term "imperial", which was used in the British press, reflects the ideological meaning of this outsized event which gathered scouts from the United Kingdom and its dominions, and much smaller groups of scouts from Europe, including quite numerous groups from Poland. In the eyes of Poles, British "imperialism" or "patriotism" confronted as an ideal compared to Russian and German rule, and their attitudes were enthusiastically Anglomaniacal. This is the psychological key to understand the attractiveness of performing on the British arena for the representation of the young generation of Poles who were invited. For Polish scouts, the Scout Rally in Birmingham was an opportunity to demonstrate not only their skills but also patriotism as a function of political presence. This is how the Polish press understood these things, and which after the British -- what needs to be emphasised -- paid the most attention to the events in Birmingham. The most important Polish dailies publishing in Cracow, Warsaw, Poznan, and Lvov (now Lviv) closely followed the course of the rally, which was given the rank of success by a two-sentence "depeche" from London and a lengthy letter published in the "Czas" daily paper. The object of interest for the author of the article is the book written by the founder of Polish scouting, Andrzej Malkowski, which constitutes a noteworthy record of observations made by him during the Scout Rally as well as those made by other organisers of the Polish delegation's trip and of letters from journalists who accompanied this delegation and sent their correspondence to the Polish press from Birmingham, London, and Paris. Only one journalist broke out from apologetic opinions about the excellent performance of Polish scouts, who noticed shortcomings in performance and wrote about them. The article introduces the content of these letters and interprets and compares them. The opinion about the triumphant rally in Birmingham rooted firmly in Polish public opinion, constituting an important element of the founding myth of Polish scouting, which in the history of this movement is worth noting.

Mediocrity as a concept in education has frequently been used by modern-day and historical actors to express discontent with the status quo of pedagogy and schooling. Despite its pervasiveness in discourse, however, the concept has largely evaded academic scrutiny, particularly in terms of its historical development in the years leading up to its appearance in the famous United States Government report, "A Nation at Risk." This paper aims to construct a conceptual history of mediocrity in American education through the analysis of newspaper articles from "The New York Times," to explore how the concept developed amidst the rise of neoliberalism and meritocratic discourse in education. This study finds that the concept of mediocrity between 1971 and 1983 had a number of nuanced conceptualisations and played a pivotal role in developing meritocratic discourse on natural talent and ability, as well as neoliberal and marketised narratives in public debates over educational equality, business approaches to education, and performance pay for teachers. These findings allow educational researchers to reflect meaningfully on the ways that language shapes, and is shaped by, historical developments in education, and provides layers of meaning and context to oft-used educational concepts that are crucial for the authentic evaluation of our modern education systems.

In several countries where immigration influxes have changed or increased, citizenship education policies have been strengthened as a way to build social cohesion. In this paper, I took the case of Chile to explore citizenship education policies throughout their references towards immigration. Methodologically, I use the Foucauldian notion of dispositive as an analytical tool to explore the knowledge-power network that shapes citizenship education. I took samples of public opinions, educational documents and reports, and legal documents as part of the heterogeneity that shape the dispositive. These samples come from Chilean magazines, newspapers, and documents released by educational institutions as well as laws. Findings indicate that, if viewed from how it references immigration, the dispositive of citizen education in Chile works as a managerial dispositive of cultural differences; one that places immigrants themselves as commodities. In current neoliberal times, where capitalism multiplies differences and produces cultural commodities, citizenship education works as a technique of governing at a distance to administrate such differences.

In December 2019, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released the latest results of its triennial Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) testing. What followed was a flurry of media reports in the participant countries about the 2018 PISA results that were interpretive rather than descriptive. Whilst there is a considerable body of literature describing PISA's impact on education policies, there are fewer studies that examine how PISA data is presented to the public by the media and how this contributes to the construction of policy truths. As part of a broader study of policy landscapes in the Asia Pacific region, this paper provides a critical analysis of the mediatisation of the 2018 PISA results in Australia and Singapore. It will be demonstrated that in Australia, much of the reporting was characterised by panic, whereas in Singapore the reporting was much more measured, exhibiting a stoicism. Drawing on a corpus of articles published in Australian and Singaporean newspapers in December 2019, and informed by the work of Michel Foucault, the analysis will make visible how dominant discourses used by the media operated as regimes of truth to advance neoliberal imperatives.

A decade ago, an online survey resulted in the "Protecting Cantonese Movement" (PCM) in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China, around which some articles were produced. Based on the bibliometric analysis of data retrieved from the "China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI)," the "Web of Science," and "Google" Scholar keyword searches during 2010 and 2021, this paper reviews the PCM literature to summarize its major features and general trends. It reveals that the published journals or newspaper articles focus on interpretating PCM, analyzing its causes from sociocultural, sociolinguistic, socioeconomic and media environmental perspectives, and proposing countermeasures and suggestions at political, ideological and sociolinguistic environmental levels. It concludes that PCM is of far-reaching significance to the continuous research ranging from Cantonese preserving, promotion of Mandarin, language planning, language policy, and language conflict to language ecology.

In the education sector, media outlets have been increasingly active in reporting on standardized testing. The purpose of this paper is to identify the most recurrent discursive frames used by the Norwegian regional and local press when informing their readers about national standardized testing, and to explore whether differences over time and across geographical localities exist in the pervasiveness of frames. Our analysis is guided by framing theory, and builds on a corpus of 3,046 articles that focus on national testing, published by 155 Norwegian regional and local newspapers between 2004 and 2018. The analysis identifies four different discursive frames within Norwegian press coverage, namely the frame of 'performance', 'transparency and empowerment', 'misinterpretation and misuse', and 'criticism'. The four frames convey highly distinct causal and normative beliefs and realities about national standardized testing. While the dominance of the frames varies over time and across Norwegian counties, the frame of 'performance' is increasingly pervasive, something that potentially contributes to naturalize performative-oriented reporting and competition in education. The study highlights the importance of systematic media analyses to identify circulating principle beliefs on education, and of not limiting research to national newspapers in order to grasp geographical variation in media coverage.

'School league tables' summarising the performance of secondary schools in England have been published annually since 1992. Although now a firmly established feature of the educational landscape, they have attracted criticism from those who point to their unintended negative consequences. These include 'teaching to the test', entering pupils for easier examinations, and resitting examinations multiple times in order to massage success rates. However, neither the concept of league tables, nor these alleged side-effects are new. Between 1886 and 1900, a series of London newspapers published rudimentary tables that attempted to rank and compare schools based on performance. Initially conceived as an exercise in investigating whether leading public schools really provided educational value, and against a background of political conflict over elite classical education, they provoked intense debate over how to judge the quality of secondary education in late Victorian Britain. This paper examines their short history.

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the construction of social imaginaries of fear by the Chilean press regarding student violence during the 1968 university reforming process. Using an approach inspired by the history of emotions, the primary purpose is to analyze the discourse of two relevant conservative newspapers with national circulation about students' mobilization. Design/methodology/approach: The research rests on the analysis of content in the discourse of the two more representative right-wing Chilean newspapers ("El Mercurio" and "El Diario Ilustrado"). Founded in the early years of the 20th century, both had national circulations and were a part of a tradition in the history of the Chilean 20th-century national press. Through the analysis of a selection of editorials and news regarding students' mobilization during 1968, with a focus on the experience of the most prominent institution (Universidad de Chile), this research highlights similarities and differences in the ways that both media endeavoured to elaborate social imaginaries of menace and fear regarding student movements. Findings: Through the study of the discourse of traditional newspapers, it is possible to identify critical issues concerning the university student movements' purposes to implement breaking (and occasionally violent) methods to carry out the reforms that they promoted, according to the right-wing press. Against this backdrop, the different importance of an anti-communist component is discernible, typical of the Cold War period, in the (political and emotional) arguments of the newspapers under analysis. Originality/value: This article proposes an interpretation that intertwines a local phenomenon (the reformist movement of the University of Chile) with a global one (the May student revolution of 1968). It also establishes a novel approach by linking, through its approach, yet traditional concepts of social and cultural analysis (the idea of social imaginaries) with a new emphasis on social science and humanities (emotional dimensions).