Discursive Discourse Practices in Pakistani Schools

The process of Performance Evaluation of teachers in Pakistan is mostly carried out in a traditional style where teachers are the passive recipients of the judgments and feedback given by the school administrators. Position of administrators as Evaluators puts them in a position where they qualify to evaluate teachers thus employing discourse as a powerful tool. It is through discourse that values are established and re-established, beliefs are modified, identities are constructed and re-constructed, power relations are established and ideologies are built. The way 'text and talk' is produced, distributed and consumed defines the societal discursive discourse practices of an organization and ultimately the society. The researcher has gathered data from the Pakistani schools to analyse the discourse of Performance Evaluators within a school set-up. The hybrid model devised to analyse the data incorporates Fairclough's (1995) three dimensional framework and Van Dijk's (2009) concept of socio-cognition and explores how discourse structures are employed in the production and reproduction of social dominance of one group over another and establishes the power relations.