CDA

[David Stacey]

At 10:42 AM 1/10/99 -0500, you wrote:

Hi Again Pegeen and Georgina and Others,


>
>I was wondering if either of you or anyone else on the list has used CDA in
>an undergraduate writing classroom, or any other kind of undergraduate
>class?  I'm especially interested in how it can be used in a pedagogy that
>focuses on _producing_ text, rather than "just" analysis of others' texts.

I''ve done some pretty informal things with bits and pieces of Fairclough's
_Language and Power_.   Mostly with Chapter 4, "Discourse, Common Sense and
Ideology."  This in an Advanced Composition course, with "traditionally
unprepared" students--who had never really heard the word "ideology" before
much less studied it or its relevance to their daily lives.

One thing that worked kind of well was the section in chapter 2, "Discourse
and Power" where NF analyzes the "He'll Do His Job Well Says Major's Wife"
headline (it's on p. 53).  "The power being exercised here," says NF, "is
the power to disguise power."  To read this headline with accompanying
(tabloid) text andn photo is to take the attitude of the supportive
subservient wife.

So then we imitate this, taking ads and photos from all over and talking
about what they actually _make us do_.

Now as I've mentioned, Fairclough's "activities" are really not all that
pedagogically sound.  By which I mean--in a lot of textbooks nowadays you
see "activities" followed by "discussions" or such that *DO* the activities
and then talk about them.

With Rob Pope, as I've mentioned before, you get a whole lot more of
activity-based explanations of critical discourse, and then he gets the
students honestly and fully involved.  So once again I'd mention that if
you like Fairclough, go to Pope to see what you can do in a classroom with
this material.

Dave Stacey