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The theoretical/epistemological and methodological frameworks I developed above guided me to analyse both data and discourses (Babbie, 2014; Layder, 1998). The first analysis stage involved transcription of the recorded interviews, FGD, and some classroom lesson observations. I systematically transcribed the recordings by listening and re-listening to the audio recordings which were completed for a period of four months, between November 2012 and February 2013. In order to ensure data quality, the transcripts included all recorded verbal talks, and as a novice qualitative discourse analyst, this helped me to construct a rich dataset for identifying discourses during the coding stage. However, I excluded some theoretically irrelevant non-verbal communication details, such as laughing and unheard recordings. Throughout the

transcript constructions, I presented by maintaining the sequence of speakers’ talk with a focus on the “meaning which is created through interaction” (Yates, Taylor, & Wetherell, 2001, p. 37) between the speakers. Transcription also involved translations of the recordings from Swahili to English because most participants were less confident

in responding in English. However, this process challenged and complicated the transcription process by adding working time. To simplify the discourse analysis, I used a few major ‘discourse transcription notations’10 (see Notes). The transcription resulted in long and detailed transcripts of over 250 pages, while documents were adequate enough to provide for triangulation.

I then read and re-read the interview transcripts several times for a period of four months, although this process was iterative. The purpose was to understand the data and identify various discourses in the form of words, metaphors, statements, and chunks, which contained discourses representing school marketisation policy actors’, teachers’,

and students’ subjective experiences and practices embedded with ideologies, power relations, perceptions, desires, and beliefs. I extended similar processes to FGD transcripts, documents, and observation notes for ‘triangulation’. Subsequently, consistent with the theoretical frame, I applied coding for the purpose of ‘data condensation’ (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014) through

the construction of ‘matrices’ which helped to reduce data, and identify and compare concepts and themes across individual interviewees, academic subjects, and case study schools (Johnson & Christensen, 2008). From the matrices, I conducted a “detailed

analysis of a small number of discourse samples” (Fairclough, 1992, p. 230) I selected from the major corpuses of data collected from the field. The selection was guided by the research questions that aimed to understand teachers’ work practices in the context of marketisation policy reform. I then analysed the discourse samples identified

following the theoretical framework based on Fairclough’s (1989, 1992, 2001) three CDA dimensions and stages of analysis of texts, discourse practices, and social practices.

Consequently, I developed a ‘coding frame’ as an ‘initial coding’ or first and second cycle coding (Saldaña, 2013) by selecting three teachers’ comprehensive interview transcripts, one from each school for the three academic subjects. The coding frame I developed guided the coding process for the remaining interview data and policy documents, while triangulating with ethnographic observation and FGD data. I then crosschecked the concepts, themes, and categories from the other forms of

discourse data: documents, FGD, and classroom observations to discern participants’

beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, and biases towards marketisation policy interpretation processes and discourses.

In data condensation and throughout the analysis, I employed what Willig

(2013) calls “social constructionist reading of the data” (p. 41), a process that requires the researcher to consider participants’ narratives ‘as a production’. This enabled me to understand how participants constructed their experiences of marketisation policy using available linguistic resources and, more importantly, what subjects and objects were produced in their narratives. Furthermore, this enabled possible alternative interpretative meanings of those experiences.

Thus, I was identifying dominant marketisation policy discourses and social practices that were constructed and reconstructed in the societal, institutional, and local levels of policy interpretation. Similarly, I identified contradictory and competing

policy discourses that intersected to shape and reshape teachers’ work in these three

levels. Thus, I categorised the identified discourses into three broad types: the societal, the institutional, and the classroom discursive practices, which reflected the politics of power relations, ideologies, and cultural practices within them. Coding in this stage also involved inductive identification, marking, sorting, and a summarisation of “concepts,

themes, examples, events, and topical markers” (Rubin & Rubin, 2012, p. 193). Coding for themes was further facilitated by three main textual criteria relevant for thematic identification: ‘recurrence’, ‘repetition’, and ‘forcefulness’ (Owen, 1984). Similarly, while Fairclough (1992) emphasises the first two textual criteria, in the same way, he calls forcefulness as “force of utterance” (p. 75). Owen (1984) argues that recurrence occurs when participants construct different texts with similar meanings, even if they

use similar or different words to imply such meanings. Thus, I examined text meanings’

recurrence, which were explicitly foregrounded or implicitly backgrounded, and the presuppositions involved (Huckin, 1997). Recurrence also relates to Owen’s second criterion of repetition in terms of “key words, phrases, or sentences.” (p. 275). Finally, the criterion of forcefulness helped me to identify meanings in the texts by considering

“vocal inflection, volume, or dramatic pauses which serve to stress and subordinate

some utterances from other locutions” (Owen, 1984, p. 275). In addition, within the written policy and professional texts, I also identified forcefulness by focusing on underlined words and phrases, the use of capital letters, colourings, and bolding. Such textual features were central in exposing the meaning inherent in policy texts and

discourses that constructed school policy actors’ and teachers’ work practices.

In the third stage of the analysis, I was looking for consistent patterns, relationships, or themes (Hatch, 2002) emerging from the identified discourses, within

and across the sampled academic subjects and schools. Hatch defines ‘patterns’ as ‘regularities’ which take the form of similarities, differences, frequency, sequences, correspondence, and causation. I analysed the relationships in the data by focusing on the links, from which I drew conclusions from the textual evidence. Hatch also defines themes as ‘integrating concepts’. Through coding, I constructed themes in the form of subject positions, and dominant and non-dominant discourses from discourse samples, as implied in the course of language used by policymakers and implementers. Thus, for example, I described, interpreted, and explained how heads of schools, teachers, and students used language to categorise MCR, and define themselves, their work, students, the government curricular policy practices, and the institutions involved in the implementation of marketisation policy. Ianalysed the discourse practices involving text production, distribution, and consumption (Fairclough, 1992). These discourse practices included the processes of school departmental meetings, school policy decision-making processes, and government policy text production and reproduction over the past two decades. The third analysis was of the social practices of teachers, schools, departments, and students, in which I identified and described discourse categories, ideological investments, and social practices (MacNaughton, 1988). In this section of analysis, I focused on how secondary school teachers’ subject positions were constructed and negotiated in interactions with marketisation policy texts, processes, and discourses. That is, I examined how the policy texts, processes, and discourses shaped teachers’ subject positions through policy discourses constructed at societal, institutional, and local levels of policy implementation between 1992 and 2012. For example, I also

examined the various ways in which teachers’ power/knowledge, beliefs, and social relations were shaped and are reshaped in and through policy texts and discourses. These were reflected in the curriculum planning and decision making processes: MCR selection, lesson planning and preparation, classroom presentation, and evaluation. Thus, analysis determined how teachers and school administrators found themselves working against or in support of the dominant curriculum, pedagogic, and evaluation discourses. That is, how policy contexts shaped their practice differently, like in MCR

selection and use, government funds, students’ participation in curriculum construction, and using MCR in the classroom (Fairclough, 2001).

Further, I examined teachers’ subjective descriptions of their work based on

their beliefs, biases, perceptions, and attitudes on how they selected MCR, planned and prepared their lessons, how they selected and presented the subject matter content and

activities, and how they evaluated their lessons. These analyses revealed the practices, histories, and discourses teachers, heads of schools, and students brought to their work

contexts. Moreover, I analysed students’ expectations and how they engaged in

curriculum development processes, as well as teachers’ perceptions as these determined which MCR were used in learning encounters. This approach helped to identify how marketisation policy discourses intersected with curriculum policy and practices to

facilitate or hinder teachers’ work. These intersections had implications in shaping teachers’ identity and work practices in particular ways that suited dominant groups’

interests and ideologies.

The major discourses I identified are presented in Chapter 6, and their discursive effects are major discussions in chapters 7, 8, and 9. I analysed curricula policy texts and documents used by teachers and students in the curriculum work since marketisation policy adoption to understand the historical, sociocultural, and political implications they had on the production and reproduction of dominant cultures, power/knowledge, ideologies, inequalities, and identities present in the wider social structures. Together with the CDA framework, I used a curriculum analytical framework provided by Smith and Lovat (2003), Beyer and Apple (1998), and other curriculum policy scholars. In analysing curricula texts and discourses, I.deeply focused on the intertextuality described above for critically analysing curriculum texts and discourses in a historical and across framework, as referred by the participants. Such texts included MCR, subject syllabi, and examination papers. First, I identified the kinds of worldviews: ideologies, attitudes, perceptions, and behaviours that were constructed for teachers and students by the MCR discourses used in the curriculum work, and strategies used in this construction. Second, I examined the origin of the cultures, knowledge, worldviews, and experiences contained in those texts and discourses, and which were not incorporated. I followed Smith and Lovat’s (2003) emphasisis on race, ethnicity, class, age, and gender. Third, I identified the groups and individuals whose interests were included and served by those MCR texts and discourses. In all these processes, I was guided by the initial research questions that directed the data collection. Using the research questions, I applied Foucauldian

analysis to identify the main ‘discursive resources’ that were constructed and

reconstructed in and through marketisation policy texts.

I conducted thematic analysis (Guest, MacQueen, & Namey, 2011), which focused on marketisation policy texts and discourses as a form of qualitative data

analysis, an approach Roberts and Sarangi (2005) call theme-oriented discourse analysis. These scholars argue that thematic analysis in discourse research calls for critical and interpretative practices that facilitate movement “beyond counting explicit words or phrases and focus on identifying and describing both implicit and explicit ideas within the data, that is, themes.” (p. 10). To these scholars, the developed codes represent the resulting themes that link to the field data and act as ‘summary markers’ for further data analysis.

I analysed discourse through interpretation of meaning by applying iterative, inductive, and deductive approaches through coding the chunks of data, which varied from words, phrases, or paragraphs (Boyatzis, 1998; Miles & Huberman, 1994) or what Fairclough (1992) calls ‘discourse samples’. I analysed these three textual features to identify power, ideology, and struggle in and through policy texts and discourses (Fairclough, 1992; Wagenaar, 2011). This is because, as argued above, power and ideological struggles are central in critical policy analysis as they operate through texts and discourses and, therefore, affect policy actors’ decisions and teachers’ curricular and pedagogic practices. Recurrence, repetition, and forcefulness in CDA are evidence of the existence of ideologies and power struggles taking place in the local, institutional, and societal levels and reflected relationships in wider social structures.

In the context of this study and its discourse theoretical framework, the patterns, relationships, or themes from the summarised chunks of data containing societal (government, parents, and global actors), institutional (schools and departments), and classroom discourses took the forms of (1) dominant ideologies and (2) power relationships reconstructed in and through marketisation policy discourses. I analysed discourse data at the level of sampled subject teachers, students, school heads, heads of departments, and schools, and compared within and across subjects and schools to delineate any patterns of similarities and/or divergences in terms of practices and challenges faced by teachers in the curriculum construction process.

In summary, data analysis involved “segmentation, coding, developing emerging categories, identifying relationships (themes, patterns, and hierarchies) and drawing

diagrams, tables, and matrices” (Johnson & Christensen, 2008, p. 531). Patton (2002) stresses the sensitivity of data analysis in qualitative research in that it “involves creativity, intellectual discipline, analytical rigor, and a great deal of hard work” (p. 432). The themes I developed reflected marketisation policy discourses and competing and contradictory dominant and non-dominant discourses (Allan, 2008), as well as

dominant and non-dominant ideologies, which were historically constructed and circulated in the local, institutional, and societal levels. They also reflected patterns of identities constructed and reconstructed by the various subject positions occupied by teachers and students in their work practices.