Educating for Meaningful Citizenship: A Critical Corpus Analysis of Public Education Policy in Canada

Abstract

Public education is tasked not only with educating, but also with instilling values, knowledge and skill building, and preparation for citizenship Noddings, 2016;Westheimer, 2015). In Canada, education is provincially mandated, but there have been growing pressures and efforts to standardize policy, curricula, and practice across the country under the banner of inclusion, testing and assessment, and accountability within a globalized neoliberal society (Polster & Newson, 2015;Stack, 2016;Westheimer, 2015). Of particular concern is how these pressures are manifested within education policy and how they may in turn affect the way students and citizenship are invoked and talked about.This study critically investigates the discursive construction of particular actors (students and citizens) within policy-level education discourse (PLED). Informed by Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), I combine the discourse-historical approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016) and corpus-assisted discourse studies (Mautner, 2007(Mautner, , 2016 to analyze the discursive construction of and agency afforded (or not) to students and citizens. A total of 22 policy texts collected from the Ministries/Departments of Education across the provinces and territories between 2018-19 formed the basis of the small reference corpus, from which six provinces-British Columbia,

The Development of Students' Assessment Literacies as They Transition to University: An Exploratory Case Study

“…A number of historical and socio-political forces have shaped Canadian higher education through the decades. Post-secondary institutions enjoyed a period of expansion in the 1950s and 60s due to post-war baby boom population growth and increased enrolment (Fortin Lalonde, 2022;Harmsen & Tupper, 2017). Around the same time was the birth and evolution of various social movements and changing attitudes about post-secondary education, including the need to serve more diverse populations and perceptions about the economic importance of higher education (Fortin Lalonde, 2022;Harmsen & Tupper, 2017).…”

“…Post-secondary institutions enjoyed a period of expansion in the 1950s and 60s due to post-war baby boom population growth and increased enrolment (Fortin Lalonde, 2022;Harmsen & Tupper, 2017). Around the same time was the birth and evolution of various social movements and changing attitudes about post-secondary education, including the need to serve more diverse populations and perceptions about the economic importance of higher education (Fortin Lalonde, 2022;Harmsen & Tupper, 2017). However, when the federal government significantly reduced its health, education, and social funding to provinces in the mid-1990s, provinces responded by cutting operating budgets of tertiary institutions (Shanahan, 2015c).…”