RESEARCH TALK: Education of Linguistic Minorities

How does the nation conceptualize Public Education in 2014?

Santa Ana (2002) spelled out how Americans conceptualized US public education in the late 1990s. He used a rigorous method, critical discourse analysis, on a large quantity of newspaper articles, interpreting the findings on the basis of cognitive metaphor theory, which claims to reveal how people make sense of their world. At that time three antiquated 19th c. metaphors for SCHOOL, CURRICULUM and SOCIALIZATION predominated. The three conceptual metaphors limited the discussion of public education, restricting political and policy discussion on other bases. After NCLB, R2T, and millions spent by reform-minded foundations, we return to the question. Have the outdated conceptual metaphors been replaced, thus up-to-dating the everyday understanding of public education for the nation and policy makers? Santa Ana reports on a large-scale work in progress.

 

Otto Santa Ana has a PhD in linguistics from University of Pennsylvania where he worked with William Labov. Santa Ana pursues three research strands. First, he is an empirical sociolinguist who has written about the languages of Latinos in a dozen articles, and an anthology: “Tongue-Tied: The Lives of Multilingual Children in Public Schools.” He is currently working on a sourcebook on the languages of US Latinos. Two, he studies how unjust social inequity is structured and validated by the mass media. His books in this strand, “Brown Tide Rising,” on newspaper representations of Latinos and, “Juan in 100,” on television network news imaging of Latinos, have both received national awards. His recent co-edited anthology, “Arizona Firestorm,” is a case study of today’s anti-immigrant political actions and news media's role therein. In strand three, he is now writing a book on the fundamental nature of political laughter in a monograph tentatively titled: “Thin Edge of the Wedge: The Power of Political Humor.”