The eye of the storm: discursive power and resistance in thedevelopment of a professional qualification for adultliteracies practitioners in Scotland

• Main Author: Aileen Ackland
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Linköping University Electronic Press 2011-04-01
• Series: European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults
• Subjects: Professionalisation; professional development; adult literacies; discourse
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/rela.2000-7426.rela0018

The claim to be a profession traditionally assumes the need for a University levelqualification. In a previously unregulated area of practice, the development of aprofessional qualification is thus central to the professionalisation process. In Scotland,the development of a Teaching Qualification for Adult Literacies practitioners becamethe focal point for the tensions in the broader professionalisation project and a site ofdiscursive contestation in an emergent field of practice. This paper explores the play ofpower and resistance, drawing primarily on two separate but related research studies–a policy analysis and an exploration of practitioners' conceptualisations of practice.Whilst the first study explicitly used the methodological framework of CriticalDiscourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2003) and the second, Personal Construct Theory(Kelly, 1955), they are connected by their postmodern focus on language use and aninterest in how practitioners are managed by and, in turn, manage and mediatemanagerial and professional forms of power; both aimed to examine 'how discoursefigures in the processes of change' (Fairclough, 2003, p. 205). Brought intorelationship with one another in the context of the nexus of power relations formed bythe development of the new qualification, they illuminate the multiple 'projects'competing discursively in the space.