The Regulation of Pedagogic Discourse: Relationships between the State and Intellectuals after the Cultural Revolution in China

Based on the theoretical model of pedagogic discourse proposed by Basil Bernstein, this paper proposes two notions, elaborated ideological orientation and restrictive ideological orientation, to understand the new relationship between the State and intellectuals in China, which is crucial to understanding intellectual practices after the Cultural Revolution in China. The reform has made it possible for the production of discourse in education which is not directly derived from Marxism and Maoism. Such diversification of legitimate positions does not amount to an autonomous discourse in education. This paper chooses the case of an influential journal, Jiaoyu Yanjiu (Educational Research) to illustrate the ways in which the editors of the journal have taken up the role of mediator between the State and authors.     

Frailty in transition? Troubling the norms,boundaries and limitations of transition theory and practice

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on ‘transition’ and how it is understood within higher education. Drawing on data from concept map-mediated interviews at two institutions, we examine the conceptions of transition held by academic and professional staff, who work to support students’ learning into and through higher education. We suggest that normative understandings of transition often draw upon a grand-narrative that orchestrates and reiterates a stereotypic understanding of students’ experiences. Often this narrative involves students’ interpellation into a field of discourse where the subject is constructed as both homogeneous and in deficit: ill-prepared, lacking in independence, as vulnerable and in need of support. However, this study suggests that beneath this discourse lies a more nuanced picture: one where students’ experiences can be conceptualised as diverse and fluid. Moreover, we employ the concept of pedagogic ‘frailty’ to expose the significance of the environments and wider contexts in which students ‘transition’, and to explore the impact of systemic tensions upon students’ experiences. This article further argues that future research should shift discussions away from the deficits of students, and examine how we can make underlying environmental and systemic challenges more explicit, in order to widen our understanding and discussions of these constraints.     

The complexity of Chinese pedagogic discourse

This is one of X commentaries on Wu’s ‘Interpretation, autonomy, and transformation: Chinese pedagogic discourse in a cross-cultural perspective’ (JCS, 43(5), 569-590). It highlights the paper’s demystification of Western pedagogic discourse and recovery of the meaning of Chinese traditional pedagogic discourse as a response to the long-lasting debates on the Chinese–Western/traditional–modern dichotomies seen in China’s modernization. However, the paper overlooks the complexity of Chinese pedagogic discourse: it over-emphasizes the formal or linguistic dimension of pedagogic discourse, and presumes the dichotomy of Chinese–Western discourses and the discontinuity of traditional–modern cultures. After elaborating the ends, substances, methods, and teacher roles found in Chinese pedagogic discourses, this study argues that contemporary pedagogic discourses are essentially inhabited in indigenous traditions, and actively entangled with Western discourse. The meaning of Confucian traditional pedagogy should not (and cannot) be ‘recovered’ from the past, but be ‘found’ in the present.     

Emotional responses to documentary viewing and the potential for transformative teaching

This paper examines the relationship between specific documentaries and white student teachers’ emotional responses to their viewing as part of a postgraduate teacher education course on educational equality. Documentaries are considered in terms of features (including elements of text), form (including stylistic conventions) and function in order to evaluate those elements most important in involving students emotionally. It argues that certain documentaries have the pedagogic potential to transform student thinking via the evocation of particular emotions which act to disturb white hegemonic practices, attitudes and cognitions. However, given that emotion is understood as integral to the operationalisation of whiteness, students’ emotional responses are analysed from a critical whiteness perspective to reveal emotion as also potentially obstructive to student transformation. Hence, the paper shares the pedagogic decisions taken to capitalise on those emotional responses conducive to transformed student understandings and to stymie those which act as investment in whiteness to impede student development. Finally, it is argued that a conceptual lens is vital for understanding the relationship between documentaries and emotional responses in order that transformed thinking is enabled.     

Designing pedagogic strategies for dialogic learning in higher education

This article focuses on the pedagogic value of dialogue to strengthen pre-service teachers’ reflective practices and improve their knowledge about the power of talk for learning. Dialogic learning was introduced to a unit of study taken by a final-year cohort of students in an initial teacher education degree at an urban university in Australia. Various opportunities for dialogue were designed into the unit through blended learning such as face-to-face tutorials, social networks and Viva Voce contexts. In the face of mixed opinion on their efficacy, the author profiles the use of social networks as a means of incorporating more interactive discourse through Web 2.0 platforms in higher education. The mixed-methods study reports on data collected from focus group interviews run at the end of the semester. An analytical framework based on Alexander’s principles of dialogic learning is used to interrogate the data set. The results illustrate the positive impact that dialogue employed as a pedagogic tool had on the value students perceived of their learning experience. It is recommended that designs for learning in higher education incorporate iterative exchanges across a variety of blended learning contexts to encourage productive interactions between students, peers and tutors.     

Sociological tools in the study of knowledge and practice in mathematics teacher education

In this paper, we put Basil Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse to work together with additional theoretical resources to interrogate knowledge and practice in mathematics teacher education. We illustrate this methodology through analysis of an instance of mathematics teacher education pedagogic practice. While the methodology itself is our focus, the particular example provides a compelling story at the heart of which is the problem of integration of knowledge(s) within a pedagogic practice. Here, a constructivist pedagogy is at work, but differentially with respect to teaching/learning mathematics and teaching/learning mathematics teaching. The example illuminates mathematics and teaching, and their co-constitution in a particular pedagogic context.     

Basil Bernstein at the Micro Level of the Classroom

This paper focuses on questions related to pedagogic practices in the classroom and is fundamentally based on Bernstein's theory of pedagogic discourse. It discusses the interplay of the characteristics of pedagogic practice which former studies have indicated contain the potential for a better scientific understanding. It also discusses the importance of a mixed pedagogic practice with strong or weak values of classification and framings, depending on given aspects of that practice. The paper continues with a discussion of some aspects of the methodologies used, and a discussion of education as a horizontal structure of knowledge with science educators' common reluctance to accept ways of teaching based on horizontal structures of knowledge with weak grammars (e.g. sociology). The paper suggests how this can be reversed if Bernstein's theory, with its high conceptual structure, is considered.     

Standards of practice to standards of evidence: developing assessment capable teachers

Abstract

Teacher education is a hotly debated policy area in higher education and schooling portfolios, with increasing emphasis on standards and accountability. It is in this environment that The Standards Project (2013–2015) presented in this article began. It has at its core a three-part commitment: first, to undertake a comprehensive audit and analysis of all teacher education programmes in the state of Queensland, Australia, to establish the approaches and practices Universities relied on to preparing beginning teachers as assessment capable; second, to take account of multiple perspectives and approaches in initial teacher education to integrating data into how beginning teachers are prepared to source and use evidence for improving learning and teaching; and further, to develop new principles, policy and practices for reviewing and moderating teacher education programmes against professional standards. The paper proposes a move beyond the discourse of professional standards of practice towards a complementary discourse of standards of evidence. In our collaboration we drew on two fields, namely the writing on teacher education including reviews, and the field of assessment, both considered within broader sociocultural theory applied to assessment.     

The body made flesh: embodied learning and the corporeal device

Over recent years there has been growing appreciation of the body’s corporeal significance in how children learn in educational settings. ‘The body’ has been conceptualised from a variety of perspectives that we characterise as: ’the body without flesh’, ‘the body with fleshy feelings’ and ‘the body made flesh’. We reflect on these perspectives with reference to the model of embodied action used in our ongoing research on relationships between education and disordered bodies, outlining what they might differently offer in terms of understanding body/mind/culture relationships. We suggest that Basil Bernstein’s notion of the ‘pedagogic device’, when reworked around the concept of a ‘corporeal device’, may provide one way of better conceptualising such relationships avoiding some of the fault lines and dualistic thinking inherent in other perspectives. If, as sociologists or school practitioners, we are to address the agency of ‘the body’ in cultural reproduction and better understand how the corporeal realities of children influence their sense of position, value and self, then we will need to deal with both the ‘physical’ and the ‘phenomenal’ universes of discourse, and the ‘somatic mediations’ of lived experience. This will mean giving as much attention to the biological dimensions of embodiment as its discursive representation currently receives.     

The knowledge gap: examining the rhetoric and implementation of peer education for HIV prevention in Myanmar

In this paper, I report on an examination of the rhetoric and implementation of peer education in Myanmar. I demonstrate that while there was widespread consistency on interviewees' views of what peer education should involve, there was a significant gap between this rhetoric and the ways in which peer education was implemented, particularly in relation to the training of peer educators. It is my argument that this gap occurred because of failure to utilise, or even recognise, a particular form of knowledge: knowledge as phronesis, which is most commonly translated as ‘practical wisdom’ and incorporates factual, emotional and experiential knowledge. Instead, as I show, the pedagogic processes in use in peer education practice in Myanmar drew on an (unexpressed) understanding of knowledge as episteme: a form of knowledge that is facts-based, technical and presumed objective.     

Inclusive education in the academy: pedagogical and political imperatives in a master’s course

Many universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in inclusive education. There has been much research into the impact of these courses, but little is written about their design. This article focuses on a master’s course in inclusive education in a South African university. The course positions inclusive education as a critical education project and is designed around the four propositions presented by Slee in The Irregular School (2011. Milton Park: Routledge). Using Bernsteinian ideas about pedagogising knowledge, this article accounts for the pedagogical choices made in content selection and course design. The focal questions in the course are described, together with an indication of the range of additional texts that students read. Given that Slee asserts that inclusive education is a political project, and that Allan (2010. “The Inclusive Teacher Educator: Spaces for Civic Engagement.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 31 (4): 411–422) urges inclusive teacher educators to reorientate themselves towards civic duty, I argue that producing a pedagogic discourse of inclusive education is a political task that should result in both the teacher educator and the students being oriented towards a critique of existing exclusionary arrangements and an activism that leads to change.     

Frames for emotional expressions across discourse forms in an ecology course

ABSTRACT

Research on emotions illustrates a range of emotions that students and teachers experience, both individually and as a collective, in science learning settings. However, not as much attention has been given to how opportunities for emotional expressions are framed. Since emotions and their expressions are embedded in the discourse in which they are constructed, this research sought to describe the ways in which expectations for emotional expressions were constructed during an ecology course for education undergraduates. Utilising sociolinguistics, emotional expressions were examined across and within forms of discourse (discourse events, written artifacts) to make salient how cues informed the number of emotions expressed. Data sources were ethnographic field notes, video recordings, and written artifacts from an entire semester of the course. The specific features of the emotional frames in discourse events and on written artifacts are presented. Contrast points are utilised to showcase the ways different emotional frames were constituted by the members of the course under different conditions and across discourse forms. Implications for considering how to support learners’ emotional expressions within a science classroom are discussed.     

Pedagogic practice in company learning: the relevance of discourse

In discussions of work-based learning in anglophone countries, a relatively new question concerns different learning opportunities for differentially positioned novices in the workplace. Basil Bernstein relates learners’ positioning with respect to knowledge and within a community of knowers to variations in a discourse underlying and regulating the transmission. This article describes modalities of pedagogic practice in companies that give rise to such specific positionings of learners and discusses their relationship to a pedagogic discourse for company learning. It does so using the case of German company vocational education in the ‘dual system’, where a distinct macro-social pedagogic discourse underlies and regulates the transmission in companies. The data are drawn from problem-centred interviews with dual system graduates and analysed from a social-realist stance in relation to Bernstein’s ‘framing’. Although for Bernstein, who draws predominantly on school-based research, the control over ‘framing’ is always with the transmitters, this article points to instances of acquirers taking control in the data and traces them to the particular pedagogic discourse underlying German vocational education. The article points to further research possibilities with the goal of reconstructing, in a rule-directed way, an implicit discourse underlying company learning that lacks explicit macro-social discursive regulations.     

Schooled in our own minds: mind-wandering and mindfulness in the makings of the curriculum

Curriculum discourse focuses understandably, on the formal and enacted curriculum; however, studies demonstrate that much of individuals’ waking hours are spent in task-unrelated thinking and mind-wandering. No less, this pervasive phenomenon has been shown to affect us in many ways that can be linked to education. This paper examines this null-hidden inner curriculum that is enacted within students’ minds when they are not attentive to the formal/enacted curriculum. Drawing on a review of research in cognitive science, the paper develops a theory of ‘the mind as a curriculum deliberator’ and explains how the mind can be seen as ‘schooling itself’. Different states of mind such as mind-wandering, rumination and mindfulness are discussed in terms of their educational effects and a systematic framework that renders them in curricular terms is suggested. Based on this analysis, the paper aims to mobilize this inner curriculum from opaqueness and absence to a more explicit presence in curricular discourse, in an attempt to broaden our understanding of how the mind can both enhance and hinder education.     

Policy talk: reflexive modernization and the construction of teaching and learning within postcompulsory education and lifelong learning in England

This paper explores the policy contextualization of teaching and learning within post-compulsory education and lifelong learning (PCET) in England and aims to locate PCET in a range of arguments that frame discussion. These arguments are necessarily discursive in that whilst they bear some relation to socio-economic conditions they move beyond these to construct an understanding of the nature of society, the economy and education. The paper critically examines globalization, reflexive modernization and its links with third way politics. It concludes by exploring debates concerning pedagogic practice and the organization of waged labour. It argues that the progressive nature of this pedagogic discourse is compromised by its acceptance of capitalist relations. Nevertheless space for intervention remains building upon the democratic concerns of reflexive modernization as well as the contradictions of a consensual capitalism that claims to offer social justice.     

Educational Accountability and Market Ideology: some socio‐legal considerations

ABSTRACT

Sociology of education, particularly in Britain and to a limited extent the USA, is examined in its relations to law and socio‐legal discourse. It is argued that in order to develop our understanding of educational accountability a fuller exploration of the institutional interface between law and education will be required. Several lines of scholarship and empirical inquiry are suggested, particularly with respect to the functions of law professionals and legal institutions in the contexts of ’public choice’, ‘juridification’ and the institutionalisation of irresponsibility in education.     

Modes of discourse about education, peace and human rights in the 1974 UNESCO Recommendation

How do culturally, politically, and economically different actors define education in the UNESCO 1974 Recommendation concerning Education for International Understanding, Co-operation and Peace and Education relating to Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms? This exploration of the document aims to increase understanding of the work of organizations such as UNESCO, as well as stimulating new attention to the area of education for international understanding, peace, and human rights. The text of the Recommendation is analysed discursively, and five repertoires are identified: instruction, principled, factual, stand-taking, and adjusting, as well as a wider discourse of rationality. Repertoires construct positions for the speaker, here the General Conference of UNESCO, and for those to whom the Recommendation is addressed (member states). The adjusting discourse, in which member states are given opportunities to define alternative modes of implementation, is especially important. Identifying the modes of discourse used in the document helps to explain implicit aspects of the normative texts drafted by UNESCO and by international organizations generally. This analysis also provides a basis for reflection on the interaction between international organizations, education policy makers, and educators in this area.     

A fragile autonomy in a performativity culture? Exploring positions in the recontextualising field in a Norwegian rural municipality

Internationally, the autonomy of schools and teachers is under pressure. In Norway, recent policies emphasise output control through national testing, combined with holding schools and teachers accountable for students’ results. Whereas recent research documents that the autonomy of schools and teachers is weakening in Oslo, there is little research on the rural parts of Norway. Recent political intentions aim to improve the results by establishing a better learning environment and classroom management. These intentions are related to the regulative discourse, ‘the rules of social order’, which is crucial to control as it dominates the instructional discourse. Two different projects were implemented in a rural municipality. Analysing their positions on three levels (author, actor and identity) this study finds considerable autonomy from the state in the pedagogic recontextualising field. However, this autonomy may be fragile as the teachers seem to have surrendered personal values. If teachers are disciplined, then the state may effectively reduce the potential discursive gap by reducing the autonomy of key agents in education. Investigating teachers’ rationalisations is imperative if we are to understand the relations between interests, ideology and class, and thereby the potential for autonomy in the recontextualising field in a performativity culture.