Critical discourse analysis in education

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has become a promising field for educational research, insofar it allows to describe, to explain, and to analyze the relationship between language and educational issues such as educational policies, practices and discourses inside educational institutions and levels of education, and their connection with the capitalist economic system. In that sense, CDA is an explanatory field of the underlying ideologies of discourses and rhetorical and discursive devices to persuade. Likewise, it enables critical analysis about how educational policies and reforms are shaped by decisions of international agencies such as World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organization (WTO), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), among others. This type of analysis involves identifying the assumptions, contradictions, hidden meanings, and how these policies are legitimized in education. In this article, I argue the importance of CDA in the understanding of discourses and practices that emerge from the educational field, in particular the theoretical and methodological framework proposed by Fairclough (1989, 1992, 1995, 2001, 2004).