When transnational curriculum policy reaches classrooms – teaching as directed exploration

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to explore how education policy that is both enabled and constrained by transnational policy flows and national policy built up by social, cultural and historical traditions are enacted through curriculum at the classroom level. The focus is on how policy rationality embedded in the structure and content of curriculum is transformed into certain rationalities in classroom teaching. By understanding lessons as ‘curriculum events’, the study reveals a dominant classroom discourse of recitation and similar triadic communication patterns, which is in accordance with other classroom studies. However, in the article it is argued that the version of teaching that emerges in this study, interpreted in a broader context of an international standards movement, can be understood in terms of directed exploration based on the teacher’s role as an explorer of what the students know, think and understand in relation to the acquisition of knowledge prescribed in the curriculum’s knowledge requirements. Even though the form of recitation is well known, the reason for choosing this teaching repertoire is somewhat new and can be related to the teacher authoring a basic oral text in accordance with assessment standards.     

“一带一路”框架下中国话语权的建构——基于“再情景化”视角的分析

“一带一路”倡议自2013年提出以来就成为中国对外政策的核心主题之一。它推动中国与世界各国文化上的互通交融,也带动“一带一路”沿线国家和地区的经济发展。与之相关的是中国如何讲好“一带一路”倡议,构建话语体系。“再情景化”无疑为“一带一路”话语体系的构建提供了新的视角,它在“一带一路”话语权的建构过程中将发挥重要的作用,同时需要中国政府和人民根据再情景化模式掌握话语艺术并加以灵活运用。中国要在国际社会上消除质疑的声音,完全掌握话语权,还需要一个长期努力的过程。     

Regulating the unthinkable: Bernstein’s pedagogic device and the paradox of control

Drawing upon Bernstein’s writings on the pedagogic device, this article examines how critical thinking is regulated in Singapore through the process of pedagogic recontextualization. The potential of critical thinking to speak to alternative possibilities and notions of individual autonomy as well as its assumptions of a liberal arrangement of society are problematized in Singapore. By documenting how such curricular discourses are articulated by the state and taken up in schools and classrooms, the article provides a sociological account of the relations between the organization of knowledge and the distribution of social power and control. The analysis reveals that even as official understandings of critical thinking are transmitted in the classroom, alternative, non-official orders of meaning are inevitably made available. Showing how teachers and students act to resist and challenge these prescribed understandings the article argues that the very ideas of change and indeterminacy are fundamentally built into the pedagogic device.     

Processes of Writing as Mediational Tool in Higher Education

This article addresses writing in higher education with the primary aim of conceptualizing writing as a mediational tool. The conceptual framework consists of three concepts: learning trajectories, mediation, and recontextualization. The article describes how writing can work as a mediational tool and suggests possible implications for higher education. An empirical study from the context of initial teacher education in Norway is used for the purpose of illustration. Writing activities can mediate learning in important ways. However, design elements that make students explore, contrast, and compare different meaning potentials and position themselves within disciplinary or professional discourse are crucial when considering the potential of writing as a mediational tool in higher education.     

Studying the recontextualisation of science in pre-school classrooms: Drawing on Bernstein’s insights into teaching and learning practices

This paper explores pre-school pedagogic practices related to science, and argues for the relevance of sociology of education for such exploration. It also argues that this approach has a wider applicability in analysing the effects of changes in education policy on (pre)school practice. A basic characteristic of pre-school organization in many western societies for many decades has been its play-like activity. This has required teachers to structure the experiences of young children by acting upon the contexts of learning rather than the content. However, current policy initiatives and developments in a number of countries in the 1990s, including Greece, demand that teachers make systematic use of specialised content from science, mathematics and other subjects to structure pre-school curriculum activities. In order to analyse pedagogical practice in a systematic way, and to explore issues such trends in policy might raise, we have obtained data by video-recording school science activities in a nursery classroom, and have developed a tool of analysis based on Bernsteins conceptual framework. In demonstrating the usefulness of the analytical tool, we provide evidence to support developing concerns that the emerging discourse of pre-school teaching and learning of specialised content is in tension with dominant pre-school pedagogical practices, and that the contradictory demands placed upon teachers might lead to a narrowing of the view of learning in pre-school classrooms.     

The interplay between subject recontextualizers: Social reproduction through critical reading

This article uses a Bernsteinian approach to explore, examine, and theorize about an activity in the upper-secondary curriculum within the Swedish Language subject. Based on an examination of the interplay between different educational actors in this recontextualization process the possibilities for pupils with different social backgrounds and their possibilities to gain access to valuable knowledge are delineated. The analysis is conducted in relation to a specific classroom activity called ‘reading critically’, of which four different aspects are described, each of which in its own way illustrates how didactic choices are justified in general and also specifically for pupils from different social backgrounds. Finally, an attempt is made to examine the findings in light of the recent neo-liberal turn in education in Sweden.     

微博语言的互文性特征探析

微博是2008年兴起的公众网络交流平台,微博语言具有鲜明的个性特征。运用互文性理论从语篇角度探讨其特征,认为微博互文可分为词语互文、句子互文、篇章互文等类型;而互文性语篇形成过程中的重新语境化则体现出长度受限从而更为凝练,用词求新,突出古语方言的特征。