Finding my Voice as a Public Scholar: A Discourse Self-Analysis of My Own Opinion Writing about Education

This dissertation is a discourse analysis that includes a self-examination of the entirety of my 72 op-eds about my experiences as a Chicago Public School educator, a suburban public school educator, a mother, and a graduate student to discover how my writing has changed over time in terms of influences, discourses, and diction with the ultimate goal of using this analysis to improve upon my writing as I continue to write in the public sphere. I charted and memoed the 72 articles in terms of influences, discourses that they spoke to in terms of equity, social justice and/or failure/achievement, and asset-based and deficit-based language I used to frame people, communities, and systems. Then, I divided the collection up evenly into three separate corpi to designate a beginning, middle, and end. From there, I selected six focal articles, two from each corpi to demonstrate my change as a writer over time. After close analysis and reflection, I identified three findings from the data. First, over time, my discourses shifted from having an equity focus to becoming a blend of equity and social justice and finally to having solely a social justice focus. As I continued to write op-eds and began UIC’s doctoral program, I saw the social justice discourse appear and combine with the equity discourse in my second corpus. In my most recent writings, the social justice discourse dominated all others. Secondly, as I reflected narratively and closely coded and analyzed my diction, over time, my language used to frame students and communities became more asset-based, while my language used to frame politicians, education leaders, and long-standing educational institutions became more pointed and deficit-based. Lastly, I developed as a public intellectual to write about a wide array of topics instead of just a select few as seen in my first corpus. I attribute this both to professional and academic influences that came with time and experience as a public school educator and doctoral student. This research has implications for the research community itself as although there have been many studies on teacher writing and even self-studies on teacher writing all of the studies have been focused on how the writing relates to the practice of teaching. This research focuses on the writing itself for the sole purpose of becoming a more well-rounded public intellectual. In addition, this research has implications for teacher education programs as it can show teacher candidates, especially in urban settings, the multiple ways that forces outside the classroom can impact the novice teacher, and it can also showcase the power of teacher voice in agency for educational change. Finally, this dissertation contributes to the field of education as it challenges institutions to provide support for teachers and students at all levels of academia to become public intellectuals.