A Rhetorical Analysis of Teacher Instructional Speech

Beginning with a historical analysis of the original aims of education in antiquity as a moral endeavor and then moving to a consideration of contemporary educational policy and legal structures, this project situates educational discourse, even at the level of the individual classroom as embedded in a tradition and context that privileges industrial discourse. This research project examines the alignment between a teacher’s pedagogical justification for student learning and that of the American institutional discourse of education by studying the relationship between the localized rhetorical choices of three teachers’ instructional speech and the tacit institutional discourses as observed in the teacher’s linguistic delivery in the classroom. By utilizing rhetorical analysis to inform critical pedagogy, teachers can reclaim their pedagogical beliefs that are currently being undermined and diffused by the dominant institutional discourses that have become entrenched in secondary education.