WP349 From critical analysis to critical education: The TRACE Research Report

The research project “TRACE: Tracing Racism in Anti-raCist discoursE – A critical approach to European public speech on the migrant and refugee crisis” adopts a critical discourse analytical perspective to examine how racist discourse can be implicitly embedded in seemingly antiracist texts. To facilitate this, we developed an open-access digital database in a Wiki format, which includes indicative text analyses and teaching proposals. The project also foregrounds the role of education in cultivating critical literacy by enabling students to identify the subtle ways in which texts reproduce and normalise social and linguistic inequalities. Hence, TRACE offers specific educational tools that help students detect racist assumptions and representations in antiracist discourse. Acknowledging the central role of teachers, we organised a series of training seminars with both prospective and practicing teachers in primary and secondary education and documented their responses to our critical teaching proposals. The effective application of these proposals relies on educators’ willingness to engage reflexively with language, challenge dominant discursive norms, and participate as co-researchers and co-constructors of both educational practice and broader social realities.