Ethics for researching language and education: What the discourse of professional guidelines reveals

How do the guidelines provided by language and literacy professional organizations configure the ethical stances of their members, who are practitioners and researchers? As part of a larger project involving the lived experiences of teacher educators and researchers who work with multilingual populations, we present an initial critical discourse study of four professional organizations’ ethical codes of conduct. This article focuses on ethics as it materializes through contemporary textual analysis of public guidelines readily accessible to educational linguistics professionals during the 2021–2024 timeframe. It examines how ethical statements operate on the imagination of professionals desiring membership. We employ critical discourse analysis (CDA), where Van Dijk’s (1993) definition of discourse conceptualizes how language use creates power to dominate, resist, and build social hierarchies. We characterize each code as within deontic ethics by interpreting how the choice of modality guides members’ actions and values. During 2021–24 our corpus included documents detailing guidelines from AERA (2011), MLA (1992), LRA (2016), and AAAL (2017).

Our findings highlight the characteristics of these ethical codes and their differences. These documents configure an assemblage that affects members through assumed values and obligations. Furthermore, we identify unexamined ethical needs that arise in actual lived realities of researchers that require more fluid, contingent, and responsive ethics; hence, we propose a critically and dialogically engaged stance open to periodic yet continual reformulations.