Collecting and analysing data should be processes that occur simultaneously (Merriam, 2009). It means that I, as a researcher, started the analysis of the data at the beginning, i.e. after analysing the first set of documents and after the focus group sessions. The reason is that several issues were unknown at the start and others emerged while I was collecting the data. For example, even when I constructed a tentative interview schedule, it was during the process of interviewing people that I found out that other topics were emerging from the answers given by the participants which became meaningful keys for findings. So, I had to re-formulate, delete and add some questions to better explore interviewees' understandings of the topic being studied and to answer the research questions.
The process of data analysis started with the analysis of the documents ‘Curriculum for Secondary Schools: Fundamental Objectives and Minimum Mandatory Content’, ‘Plans and Programmes’ for secondary schools and the analysis of content and language of the HGSC textbook for grade 12.
I looked at their coverage of citizenship, citizen, rights, responsibilities, community, participation, gender, socio-economic status and geographical location. One of my
purposes was to look at language in the text that could reflect a specific ideology or theory about citizenship.
I used some tools of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyse which theories of citizenship are embedded in the education documents and texts, specifically the curriculum in its three versions, and to explore whether these documents and texts show the intention to motivate, help or encourage the exercise of citizenship in students. In the words of Fairclough (1997, 352), CDA is:
A type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context…it takes an explicit position, and thus wants to understand, expose and ultimately resist social inequality.
Fairclough and Wodak (1997, 271-280) summarise the main tenets of CDA as follows: it addresses social problems; power relations are discursive; discourse constitutes society and culture; discourse does ideological work; discourse is historical; the link between text and society is mediated; discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory; discourse is a form of social action. About tools to be employed, the following have been chosen (Fairclough, 2003, 213): assumptions, hegemony and ideologies. I used this technique of data analysis in this study for the purpose of contrasting the contents of education policy and ideological discourse within the curriculum with the understandings students have developed about citizenship and the opinion they have about CE. Also, it was important to reflect on how education policy documents could maintain current power relations, increasing social inequalities.
Some tools of CDA were chosen for the analysis because of how they enable exploration of the implicit theories underpinning citizenship and CE embedded in the texts and images, and how they help to reveal and problematize the curriculum. If CE texts are intended to contribute to the formation of a citizen who understands the context in which s/he lives, empower and promote social responsibility, then how that is captured or represented in the texts used in schools is crucial. The application of CDA in analysing curriculum text enables an understanding of how ‘…social power abuse, dominance and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context’ (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997, 352). According to Van Dijk (1997, 353) ‘theory formation, description and explanation, also in discourse analysis, are socio-politically
‘situated’ whether we like it or not'. This asseveration can be seen in the themes that emerge from the analysis of the different documents, one of these is how the various actors called by MINEDUC to participate in their design have systematically influenced the ideologies embedded in these documents, depending on the political, economic, social, cultural perspectives they align with.
With respect to tools employed, I chose the following ones (Fairclough, 1997): assumptions, hegemony and ideologies. These tools were used to analyse the importance of topics considered in the enactment of the curriculum, what ideologies are embedded in shaping these documents and the extent to which these ideologies have found their way into conceptualising citizenship. Finally, it is to provide a framework for determining the form of CE implemented in the case study schools.
Assumptions: these are the implicit meanings of texts. Fairclough (2003, 213) argues that
three types of assumptions are distinguished: existential, about what exists (definitive articles and demonstratives: the, this, that, these); propositional, what is the case; and value assumptions, what is desirable or undesirable. All forms of fellowship, community and solidarity depend upon meanings which are shared and can be taken as given, and no form of social communication or interaction is conceivable without such ‘common ground’.
Hegemony: Fairclough states that politics is seen as a struggle for hegemony, a particular
way of conceptualising power which amongst other things emphasises how power depends upon achieving consent or at least acquiescence rather than just having the resources to use force, and the importance of ideology in sustaining relations of power’. Dominant groups exercise power through constituting alliances, integrating rather than merely dominating subordinate groups, winning their consent through discourse and the constitution of local orders of discourse. As Fairclough argues, hegemony naturalises unequal power relations and builds them into people’s common sense understanding of the production, distribution, and consumption process of discourse, and consequently interpellating them into subjects and reproducing the existing orders of discourse in such discursive practices. In this sense, what documents represent is a ‘battle’ for power: an elite or dominant political class trying to keep their dominance and the dominated struggling with the possibility of being liberated from that system.
Ideologies: these are representations of aspects of the world that contribute to establishing
and maintaining relations of power, domination and exploitation. Ideologies may be enacted in ways of interacting and inculcated in ways of being or identities (Fairclough, 2003). Not all discourses are ideological, whether symbolic forms or symbolic systems are ideological or not depends on whether they serve to establish and sustain relations of power in specific social contexts (Thompson, 1990). Subjects are ideologically positioned, but they are also capable of acting as agents to critique and, in this sense, oppose and transform ideological practices and structures, this means to change relations of power.
The topics or issues that have emerged from the analysis are: a) the national context in which the documents were enacted; this helps to better understand general characteristics of the discourse embedded in them; b) structure of the documents, i.e. what sections are present in them, objectives and the main contents in each one; this leads to reflection on why the documents were designed that way and if this could have been conceived in a different way (Fairclough, 2003); c) how citizenship and CE are being constructed, and if those concepts align to certain ideologies; d) ideologies embedded in the curriculum, reflecting on whether the way documents are being designed and enacted is influencing discourse that maintains unequal power relations (Fairclough, 2003; Thompson, 1990); a gap between theory and practice, in other words, what is said in the curriculum in terms of citizenship (importance, concepts, types) and how it is or should be practised.
Finally, this technique of data analysis was used in this study for the purpose of contrasting the contents of education policy on CE and ideological discourse within the curriculum. These were re-examined through the prism of students’ understandings of citizenship and CE from exposure to the curriculum.
The question that guided the analysis of the three versions of the curriculum was: ‘how are citizenship and CE discursively constituted in three versions of the Chilean school curriculum (1998, 2009 and 2013) and in HGSC textbooks for grade 12?