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Measuring quality, framing what we know: a critical discourse analysis of the Common Inspection Framework
Author(s) -
Dennis Carol
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
literacy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.649
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1741-4369
pISSN - 1741-4350
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4369.2011.00595.x
Subject(s) - framing (construction) , literacy , sociology , numeracy , betrayal , critical literacy , quality (philosophy) , critical discourse analysis , pedagogy , discourse analysis , public relations , psychology , epistemology , linguistics , political science , social psychology , engineering , politics , law , ideology , philosophy , structural engineering
In “Measuring quality: framing what we know” I offer a critique of Success in Adult Literacy, Numeracy and ESOL provision ( S uccess in ALNE ) – a contextualised reworking of the common inspection framework. This document offers a government‐sponsored account of what quality means when applied to the teaching of adult language, literacy and numeracy. The paper draws on critical discourse analysis to argue that the writers of Success in ALNE imagine an ideal reader, inviting the actual reader to fall in with the characteristics ascribed to this positioning. I argue that Success in ALNE adopts a series of positionings regarding quality, practitioners, learners and learning, each of which require the actual reader to adopt a relational stance. Central to the argument developed is that government‐sponsored discourses around quality in adult literacy have effectively marginalised or silenced other discourses. The artefacts associated with quality – the individual learning plan – are argued to exert an agentic power; they are invested with the capacity, indeed they are required, to redefine literacy learning. Compliant with the requirements of the quality regime, they co‐opt practitioners in an act of translation and an act of betrayal in which the actuality of literacy learning is fitted to prescribed lexical categories until it coheres with the abstractions of what quality requires.