Abstract
The topic of this dissertation is the Discourse on Immigration by primary education teachers and students of pedagogical departments. The aim of our research is to detect the construction of identities within the Discourse of teachers and students of pedagogical departments. The discourse about immigration is, from our perspective, a field in which identities are often explicitly or implicitly constructed, as the subject revolves around "components" of identities, such as culture, religion, language, and so on. The dissertation focuses on how the issue of education of foreigners is related to specific rhetorical dilemmas that are formed in the accounts of the participants, how the participants construct their identity, as opposed to the identity of the immigrants and how they talk about prejudice. The research belongs to the field of social psychology and applies the methodological approach of Discourse Analysis. Discourse analysis does not treat people's talk as coherent and therefore ...
The topic of this dissertation is the Discourse on Immigration by primary education teachers and students of pedagogical departments. The aim of our research is to detect the construction of identities within the Discourse of teachers and students of pedagogical departments. The discourse about immigration is, from our perspective, a field in which identities are often explicitly or implicitly constructed, as the subject revolves around "components" of identities, such as culture, religion, language, and so on. The dissertation focuses on how the issue of education of foreigners is related to specific rhetorical dilemmas that are formed in the accounts of the participants, how the participants construct their identity, as opposed to the identity of the immigrants and how they talk about prejudice. The research belongs to the field of social psychology and applies the methodological approach of Discourse Analysis. Discourse analysis does not treat people's talk as coherent and therefore does not expect to identify fixed attitudes or dispositions through the examination of views expressed, instead of that it focuses mainly on how certain categories of identity are structured and compared through complex structures, which are potentially opposite. An important part of this construction is, according to the representatives of Discourse Analysis, the generation of identity options and the transition from the description to the signification of some attributes (Potter & Wetherell 2009).Regarding the context of our research, the terms mentioned above are questioned related to the developments of the immigration issue in Greece, as it was constructed through the accounts of members of the educational community. This is an issue that concerns the media and is therefore popular in everyday conversations. There are several scientific studies which have been written on this topic and there is a large bibliography related to various aspects of immigration (Zografakis et al., 2009; Figou, 2010; Triantaphyllidou, 2012; Sapountzis, 2013). Immigration, as a topic of public debates, has ideological implications and as we pursued to highlight, it has brought about a kind of debate in the so-called public opinion.Thirty-six semi-structured interviews with active teachers and students of pedagogical departments working or studying in the cities of Thessaloniki and Alexandroupolis were recorded for the research. The focus on the discourse of the educational community on immigration was based on the reasoning that the educational system is a key pillar of integration and socialization and that teachers have a dominant role within it.All interviews were then transcribed and codified, to go through a categorization process and after picking out representative excerpts of every category, we implemented the principles of Discursive Social Psychology. The categorization that was applied in every chapter was based on the identified thematic categories and the subsections were divided according to the line of argumentation followed in each one of them. The analytical part was divided into four chapters. Our aim was to examine whether our findings are in line with existing research in the field of discursive psychology or perhaps new findings were brought to light, pointing to a change in the interpretation of the terms that concern the current dissertation, which means that the terms are in acontinuous process of development or alteration, through a struggle between different ideological powers (Billig et al. 1988). For example, it has been found that people may admit the existence of prejudice but present it as a logical result of circumstances (see Xenitidou & Sapountzis, 2018), or in other cases, negative judgments which arise because of «logical processes» are considered not to be biased (see Billig et al., 1988). The belief in a superior cultural identity which belongs in the western world was also identified (see Fragoudakis & Dragona, 1997; Bozatzis, 1999). At the same time, however, it was found that the students consider the teachers as the main responsibles for the prejudice in the schools, while the teachers attribute the main responsibility to the parents of the students. At the same time, the economic crisis in Greece was for many respondents a factor that justifies the reluctance of Greek society to integrate people from other countries. In these cases, the difference between now and before was emphasized, in the sense that immigrants used to be useful and generally welcome. Finally, regarding integration, despite the discourse of cultural incompatibility, when the discussion is about the general social context (see Sniderman, 2004, Kouki & Triantafyllidou, 2012), in the school environment integration was identified to a significant extent with the will of immigrants to integrate and the language acquisition.
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