Role, Power, Ritual, and Resistance: A Critical Discourse Analysis of College Classroom Talk

This project examines student–teacher talk, offering findings that show the participating teacher questioning and directing students in routinized ways, with students responding passively and participating in familiar discursive patterns. The study also shows subtle but important shifts in authority that function to unsettle normative teacher–student interaction. Ultimately, this research implies that classroom talk can be steeped in hegemonic practices while demonstrating that critical discourse analysis is an effective means for interrogating social relations and power structures in educational contexts.