A linguistic description of popular education: The enactment of pedagogy in the classroom

The paper explores a practice of popular education in Chile, in order to provide a linguistically based description of its pedagogy based on two key pedagogic dimensions: knowledge and interaction. The study is informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics and explores ideational and interpersonal meanings realised in resources from the discourse-semantic stratum, which are understood to construe knowledge and enact social relations through language. Discursive analysis shows continuity and discontinuity in meaning patterns in classroom discourse. Prevalent ideational and interpersonal patterns show an orientation towards the construal of specialised knowledge and the enactment of hierarchical relations between participants. However, instances of discontinuity in discourse show that a more horizontal relation can be enacted when a different patterning of ideational and interpersonal meanings occurs. The paper argues that the pedagogy of popular education, deemed by the literature as 'democratic', becomes so by transmitting to its students knowledge that would be otherwise inaccessible while at the same time opening up the space for instances of more egalitarian interaction in the classroom.