Teaching,teacher formation,and specialised professional practice

This paper starts by exploring the relevance of Bernstein’s work on vertical and horizontal discourses and the constitution of professional knowledge for conceptualisation of the knowledge needed for teaching practice. Building on arguments for the differentiated nature of knowledge, and drawing on the work of Winch, Young and Muller on expertise, and the sociology of the professions, this paper advances a conception of teaching as a ‘specialised professional practice’ that requires the support of particular socio-epistemic arrangements and conditions embedded in professional communities. Prevalent notions of teaching and teacher education that find favour in some European countries are examined in the light of these arguments, with particular reference to recent reforms in England.     

Elaborating pedagogical content knowledge: what it means to know students and think about teaching

The purpose of this study was to examine how a teacher understood her students and then thought and made decisions about content, curriculum and pedagogy. Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and Deweyan philosophies of experience and education provided the theoretical frameworks. Data were collected through observations (N?=?38) and interviews (N?=?38) over four months and analysed using constant comparison. Findings indicated that this teacher possessed a broad repertoire of knowledge about students that she used to think and make decisions about content, curriculum and pedagogy. The connections between knowing students and thinking about teaching were more sophisticated and interconnected than is typically recognized or articulated in teacher knowledge literature. Three themes are used to explain how this teacher understood her students’ emotional and social lives in and out of her classroom, and ways it influenced her thinking and teaching. The discussion centers on the need for more comprehensive analyses of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge.     

Authority and ethics: A case for estrangement in educational research and research education

This article focuses attention on an underexamined issue in the literature on educational research ethics: how ethical authority is established in educational research. We address this from a perspective that disrupts naturalised approaches to ethics, arguing that rather than seeking ‘rights’ or ‘wrongs’, researchers are always tasked with constructing ethical stances. Attention can then be placed on the array of embodied and objectified resources that might be recruited in establishing these. Through an engagement with published academic accounts of ethical reflection and decision-making, the article explores the ways that educational researchers achieve or sometimes question their ethical security in respect of their research activity. The analysis we present draws out the referential strategies that constitute ethical subjectivity and maps the diversity of anchoring points that might be recruited in this action. We also draw attention to the process of recontextualisation that is inevitable when one activity (or aspect of an activity) regards another, introducing necessary incoherence into ethical practice. The case we present celebrates rather than seeking to conceal or repair such disruption.     

In-service training programmes for mathematics teachers nested in transnational policy discourses

Results in mathematics on international knowledge surveys like Programme for International Student Assessment and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study have become one of the most important factors for the perceived success or failure of schools and even entire education systems in the policy arena. In this article, we explore the complex recontextualising processes that occur when translating educational policy into actual programmes for teachers’ education. First, the transnational education policy discourse(s) of teachers’ in-service training with a focus on mathematics will be explored. Second, we examine how this transnational discourse is recontextualised in a national policy discourse resulting in a national reform programme for in-service training of mathematics teachers in Sweden. In a third step, concrete teacher training courses in mathematics are examined. The result shows a convergence between the official policy discourse and the pedagogic recontextualising field in terms of a broad teaching repertoire and peer discussions about reflections on certain common objects of learning.     

Knowledge recontextualisation in academic development: an empirical exploration of an emerging academic region

As an emerging field within higher education, academic development remains fragmented, both as a field of theory and practice. In the vibrant, on-going debate about the theoretical foundations and directions of academic development as a nascent field, some relatively wide-ranging claims which have been made seem to be lacking in supporting empirical evidence. With regards to this limitation, this paper contends that more systematic empirical explorations of the knowledge-base of academic development are vital to gain a better understanding of the field. Informed by Bernstein’s social realist frameworks on the structure of academic knowledge, the paper presents an analysis of knowledge recontextualisation processes in two English and two Flemish academic development units, based on semi-structured interviews with 30 academic developers. From the analysis, contrasting patterns of knowledge recontextualisation emerged between the four sites and between the national contexts in particular, pointing towards an increasing epistemological fragmentation.     

Panacea or nostrum? Open Educational Resources and the recontextualisation of pedagogy

Open Educational Resources (OERs) have become a global educational phenomenon because of claims that they are a panacea for issues of access and quality. However, little consideration has been given to the social significance of this digital platform, particularly for teachers and students in low-income countries. This article draws on Bernstein’s (2000) notion of recontextualisation to investigate the influence of structuring conditions on pedagogy within OERs. The findings of this research demonstrate how wider economic agendas have influenced the recontextualisation of pedagogy within OERs to de-centre learning from the pedagogic relationship.     

For public (and recontextualized) sociology: The promises and perils of public engagement in an age of mediated communication

This article argues for the analysis of public engagement as an essentially mediated activity. Although recent studies note that academic knowledge is increasingly available for consumption by nonacademic audiences, they tell us little about how it gets recontextualized while passing through the hands of media professionals on its way toward such audiences. In Burawoy’s (2005) influential call for the rebirth of public sociology, as in the debates his work provoked, the media is treated solely as a means for the transportation of knowledge. But as this article demonstrates, the media does not simply transport knowledge; it also, and at the same time, translates that knowledge in various, rhetorically consequential ways. Focusing on the mediated trajectory of an attempt by a group of academics to connect with audiences beyond academia, their initial contribution is compared to its subsequent translation(s) across various British newspapers. A discursive analysis reveals the techniques via which a classic form of public sociology came to be recontextualized such that, remarkably, these authors were left appearing to voice nothing but their own petty prejudices. The article concludes by noting that where public engagement involves mediation, public sociology should pay more attention to the recontextualizing affordances of media discourse.     

Bernstein revisited: the recontextualisation of equity in contemporary Australian school education

This article draws on the sociology of Basil Bernstein to show how his detailed theories of ‘recontextualisation’ and the ‘pedagogic device’ provide useful analytic levers to examine the politics of educational change. We focus on recent policy developments that have significantly impacted Australian school education: the Program for International Student Assessment; the National Assessment Programme for Numeracy and Literacy; and the government’s public dissemination of school achievement data through the MySchool website. The analysis illustrates the ways in which the logics of economic rationalism not only have become ubiquitous in Australian education policy, but have come to recontextualise – or reshape – discourses of social and educational equity through new norms of competition, standardisation and commensurability. In doing so, the paper highlights the value of a Bernsteinian approach to understanding the vernacular character of neoliberalism in contemporary educational policy.     

Incorporating the notion of recontextualisation in academic literacies research: the case of a South African vocational web design and development course

This article describes a small scale ethnographically oriented research study seeking to contribute to understanding student academic literacy practices in a South African vocational, web design and development course. In this course digital multimodal assessments are the main means whereby students demonstrate their learning. The findings of the study provide insights into the contextualised ways in which student academic literacy practices are shaped by academic and professional contexts where digital and multimodal practices are privileged. The academic literacies perspective used in this study, while useful for exploring the nature of student academic literacy practices, has not paid enough attention to theorising how literacy practices are shaped by broader contextual influences. To address this limitation the paper speculates about how the Bernsteinian concept of knowledge recontextualisation might be used alongside an academic literacies frame. The inclusion of an empirical focus on recontextualisation can provide an opportunity to explore how knowledge construction and transformation processes in the academic and professional domains result in the privileging of particular academic literacy practices.