ProDisG: Professionalism in the focus of discourse-analytical examinations of group discussions - 'references to family' as an integral part of discursive gendering of professional acting under situational and supersituative conditions of statements. (follow-up project of the project NeO)

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Susann Fegter; Professor Dr. Kim-Patrick Sabla-Dimitrov
• Subject Area: Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism ; General Education and History of Education
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 283586677

ProDisG is a discourse-analytical study that investigates speaker statements from KiTas and SPFH teams about their work generated in group discussions using a newly developed model for discourse analysis of group discussions from the the project "NeO - (New) Orders of Professionalism and Gender. Discourse-analytical examination of the statements of professionals in a contrastive perspective"(term 09/2016-09/2018). It examines how situational and supersituative conditions of statements made in group discussions form references to family. This has been identified as a central discursive practise constituting ‘professional action’ as a gendered object of knowledge; showing how (re)ordering these fields as 'gendered professions' currently takes place in the context of historical dis/continuities and changed educational and welfare policies. As a follow-up project, ProDisG uses the methodological model, one of the central milestones of the project, which has been successfully developed in NeO. The model makes it possible to think and analyse group discussions from the perspective of discourse theory (in accordance with recent developments in educational discourse research). Situational and supersituative conditions of statements made in group discussions are conceptualized as constitutive elements of discourse as practises, constituting the objects and subjects of knowledge in the act of doing statements: ‘How is it that at this point this statement appears and not others?’ ProDisG use transcripts of group discussion with teams from the two aforementioned fields of action plus a corpus of further material, which includes observation protocols, methodological documents such as letters to the institutions, and the institutions’ concept papers. Thus, the discourse-analytical procedure for the analysis of the statements in group discussions is now fully realized and methodologically critically reflected upon. The guiding questions are: Which insights can be produced with the discourse-analytical procedure? Which possibilities and limits of the methodological heuristic are evident in the practical analysis? How do the analytical steps work in the complex interlinking of different levels and types of material? What situational and supersituative conditions of statements empirically reveal which make 'references to family' an integral part of discursive gendering of professional action in the fields of early education and SPFH?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants