Browsing by Author "Kalske, Kreetta"

Aims. In my thesis I analyze rhetoric of columns by Tommi Kinnunen for the yle.fi online service. My aim is to understand how they link to the Finnish educational discourse. I am particularly interested in how they produce educational discourse linked to the discourse model of education reforms formulated by education sociologist Simola (2002b). I am also interested in how texts are linked to the teacher position in discourse presented by Suoranta (2008) and Salminen (2012). Methods. The data consists of five columns written by Tommi Kinnunen for yle.fi online service. Every text relates somehow on organizing basic education. To observe different reader constructions, I have used a narrative reader theory by James Phelan (1996). Results and conclusions. Analysis produces two different rhetoric aspects: emotion rhetoric and expertise rhetoric. The latter consists of features of political rhetoric and the former with epideictic nature. Emotion rhetoric seeks to persuade reader and that is produced mostly in anecdotes. Then again expertise rhetoric has more of an influential purpose. Argumentation in that leans on information from official and unofficial sources. Then again, different constructs of an implicit reader according to Phelan's (1996) model do not seem to vary by rhetorical aspect in a straightforward manner. In other words, it can not be stated that emotional rhetoric would always be directed to a construction of a general public and expertise rhetoric to a construction of expert. Thus, variation of rhetoric used between implicit reader constructions seems to produce educational discourse in which teacher has a buffer role between the actual classroom work and reform discourse. This observation is in line with that presented by Simola (2002b) and Salminen (2012) though it would need more in depth research to make any generalizations from it.