Discourse Wars in Gotham-West

Discourse analysis is used to examine a community-based adult Spanish literacy project in urban Los Angeles.. In Discourse Wars in Gotham-West, Marc Pruyn paints a multi-layered and textured picture of a year-long critical ethnography he conducted of a community-based, Freirean-inspired adult Spanish literacy project against the postmodern backdrop of urban, working class Los Angeles. Pruyn engagingly draws us into the lives of one group of adult Latina/o learners recently immigrated as refugees from Central America and Mexico who sought to develop their native language literacy skills. This book successfully brings together discourse analysis and classroom data both to criticize and advance the growing work that is being done in the field of critical pedagogy. In Discourse Wars in Gotham-West, Marc Pruyn paints a multi-layered and textured picture of a year-long critical ethnography he conducted of a community-based, Freirean-inspired adult Spanish literacy project against the postmodern backdrop of urban, working class Los Angeles. Pruyn engagingly draws us into the lives of one group of adult Latina/o learners recently immigrated as refugees from Central America and Mexico who sought to develop their native language literacy skills. At the center of his detailed study are analyses from critical pedagogy, Foucauldian and poststructuralist thought, Gramscian neo-Marxism, and critical discourse analysis. Insights from these philosophical traditions form an analytical nexus which Pruyn then focuses on student-teacher and student-student power relations as revealed through verbal and gestural patterns within discourse. His analyses show how discursive interactional patterns can either hinder or encourage the development of what he posits is at the center of the critical pedagogical endeavor: critical student agencya critical way of viewing and acting on the world. This work is sure to be of much use to students and scholars in the fields of critical pedagogy, discourse analysis, linguistics, urban studies, immigrant studies, and radical social theory. As part of an important new generation of critical educational scholars, Pruyn sees the practice of research and scholarship as inextricably tied to a larger project of social and political transformation. This book successfully brings together discourse analysis and classroom data both to criticize and advance the growing work that is being done in the field of critical pedagogy.