Gemma Moss

Research, policy and knowledge flows in education: what counts in knowledge mobilisation?

This Special Issue places discussion of knowledge mobilisation in the context of diminishing government funding for research, and the difficulties the research community has experienced in reaching out to those who might make best use of its knowledge base and research findings. The emphasis policymakers and funders give to demonstrating research impact has the capacity to distort how the academic community interacts with other interested parties. To re-direct attention to some of the more difficult issues in knowledge mobilisation, this paper presents three empirical case studies from education, exploring what happens as knowledge travels from one context of use to another. The cases highlight some substantial inequalities in the rights to define what counts as relevant knowledge that trouble easy acceptance of the concepts of impact or influence as key drivers in knowledge exchange.

The politics of literacy in the context of large‐scale education reform

In this paper, I will consider the lessons that can be learnt about literacy policy and its role in large‐scale education reform programmes, with particular reference to policy‐making in England since the election of New Labour in 1997. New Labour’s promise to the electorate in 1997 was that state‐funded education could be fixed and turned into a high‐quality delivery system from which all would benefit. It could be fixed by direct intervention from politicians committed to overhauling the public sector and applying new principles which would see standards rise. The National Literacy Strategy (NLS) was the main vehicle for change, whilst the target for achievement in literacy became one of the most public and obvious measures of the government’s success in reforming education. Over the decade that followed New Labour’s election, early optimism about what government could achieve has been tempered by the twists and turn of events, which saw the education performance data plateau just short of the government’s targets, and the NLS morph into the Primary National Strategy as it gradually moved from the centre of political action to a more peripheral position. Within government itself the NLS’s progress has acted as an important catalyst for reflection on what works in public sector reform more generally and the challenges those running such programmes face. This paper takes as its central points of analysis the evolution of literacy policy within the policy cycle. The paper reflects on the array of actors within government and beyond who have been involved in trying to make that policy work, or who may have acted as (dis)interested bystanders commenting from the sidelines. What are the lessons that can be learnt which might contribute to the development of literacy policy elsewhere?

Seeing with the camera: analysing children's photographs of literacy in the home

This article examines the issues raised by photographs children took of reading in the home as part of a funded research project exploring the gendering of reading in the 7–9 age group. The main focus is on the dilemmas the images pose for analysis, and what the images, considered in themselves, can be taken as evidence for. This discussion is linked to current concerns about the nature of the support that homes could and should offer to the process of learning to read.

Literacy and Pedagogy in Flux: Constructing the object of study from a Bernsteinian perspective

This paper considers the principles of description that underpin Bernsteins theoretical language, and how these can be applied to empirical data. The particular case explored here is the relevance of the distinctions Bernstein draws between (i) invisible and visible pedagogies, and (ii) competence and performance pedagogies, for thinking about the literacy curriculum from a social practice perspective. The paper argues that it is the generative potential of Bernsteins theoretical language, and the supple and flexible ways in which the dichotomies he delineates can be used to map out changing boundary relations in a given field, which make his work so powerful.

To work or play? Junior age non-fiction as objects of design

This paper examines change and variation in the design of non-fiction texts which have a junior-age readership. Using a multimodal analysis, which draws from Kress and Van Leeuwen’s work, it argues that different forms of presentation of non-fiction offer different ways of reading non-fiction texts, which as yet are neither fully described nor recognised. Using the contrasts between linear and non-linear design, the paper suggests that non-fiction texts can be more or less firmly orientated towards reading as work or reading as play, contrasts which readers’ own choices in different contexts of use make apparent. From this point of view, the eclecticism of the National Literacy Strategy’s references to non-fiction texts provides a starting point for renewed exploration of what non-fiction is and how it really works for its readers.

Knowledge and numbers in education

This special issue takes as its core theme the relationship between knowledge and numbers in education, with a particular emphasis on the diverse forms of knowledge that emerge from the collection and use of numerical data within education, and the knowledge communities they help create who understand, analyse and respond to the data in different ways. Numerical data encode more or less information depending upon how they are formed, with which context of use in mind, according to whose interpretative rules. Statistics as a knowledge field sets out very precise conditions for the treatment of the numerical data it collects and then analyses. Once the data are assembled and stabilised as objects of (empirical) investigation, statisticians would expect to reflect on the interplay between the objective structure of mathematics that allows logical inferences to proceed from clearly stated assumptions and the nature of those assumptions encoded in the data. How much one might be entitled to conclude from such inferences is assessed in this light. The robustness of the data, the aptness of the method and the strength of the claims made will all be rigorously tested in debate within the field. But such data do not remain within the statistical community. On the contrary they travel out into public, policy and educational domains that appropriate them for other purposes and test them in different ways. This special issue sets out to explore this dynamic at work by reviewing the formation, interpretation and use of statistical data in a range of different settings where judgements about the quality of literacy and education are formed. The papers have been developed from the standpoint of different disciplinary traditions which consider statistical data through the lens of their field’s particular interests, methods and analytic concerns, shaped by their longer institutional and discursive histories (Manzon 2009). How this broader epistemological landscape itself shifts is a matter that Cowen (2014) explores in some depth, taking as his point of departure the ways in which comparative traditions have variously dealt with the issue of ‘outcomes’ and ‘transferability’ from one education system to another at different points in time. Historical studies in the social sciences have tracked the interrelationship between the emergence of statistical data and the formation of the state (Hacking 1990; Porter 1995; Desrosieres 2002; Vincent 2014); they have identified how statistical accounts of the social world shape and are shaped by the development of different statistical techniques and their uptake in different social settings (Wooldridge 1994; Stigler 2002). But statistical understandings do not stand still. They are social phenomena that change their form and purpose over time as they are harnessed in different contexts of use (Lawn 2013; Moss 2014). The propositions they encode about the social world are not immutable but vary in line with broader discursive formations. Where once they played an important role in informing the state about its citizens, statistical data now also represent the state’s activities to the citizen, in terms that the citizen is invited to judge (Byrne 2002, 46–49; Novoa and Yariv-Mashal 2003; Landahl and Lundahl 2013). In part this happens through what has been described as ‘governing by

Putting literacy attainment data in context: examining the past in search of the present

This article examines the construction and design of literacy attainment data in the English school system in two different historical periods: the 1860s and the 1950s. These periods represent contrasting moments in the history of education in the UK when school structures and the governance of education varied, as did the design and interpretation of literacy attainment data, their relationship to pedagogy and the curriculum, and the administrative purposes for which they were deployed. By paying attention to the relationship between the form the data took and their mobilisation in administrative, professional and public discourse, this article will challenge current assumptions about the primacy of numerical data and the certainty accorded the information they encode. Studying the role numerical data played in shaping education in the past reveals tension points between data, discourse and social contexts that highlight the peculiarities of contemporary uses of literacy attainment data and their current role in bringing policy and pedagogy into the same space.

Reframing the discourse: Ethnography, Bernstein and the distribution of reading attainment by gender:

This paper has two aims: to introduce readers to Bernstein’s concept of languages of description, interpreted through the lens of ethnography; and to demonstrate the value of this approach to theory-making by showing how a qualitative study conducted on these principles led to new explanations for gender differences in literacy attainment that can be tested using PISA data.

Vygotsky and sociology

This edited collection is the latest in a series of volumes on Vygotsky that Harry Daniels has produced, exploring the scope of his work and its continuing relevance for education. Vygotsky is worthy of this level of attention and his contribution to a social theory of development remains crucial in many areas of educational research. This volume has a tighter brief than some of its predecessors by setting out to forge closer links between Vygotsky’s social psychology and the sociology of knowledge more broadly, with Bernstein’s work on pedagogic discourse often acting as the central resource bridging these two fields. How the theoretical frameworks of Bernstein and Vygotsky overlap in their accounts of the social regulation of the classroom and the social formation of the mind has been an absorbing question for a generation of thinkers, many of whom have found reason to cross the boundary lines between psychology and sociology. Recording the potential synergies that have emerged and been exploited as these traditions meet is an interesting endeavour, and this book presents a range of contributions in 13 separate papers. Vygotsky and Sociology is not for the beginner, however. There are few concessions to those not already acquainted with the work of both authors, and anyone who comes to the discussion without some sense of their respective chronologies, theoretical antecedents and distinctive contributions within different traditions will not find this an easy read. The brief introduction does set out some aims for the collection: to ‘expand and enrich the Vygotskian theoretical framework’ and ‘illustrate the utility of such enhanced sociological imaginations and how they may be of value in researching learning in institutions and classrooms’ (2). Beyond this, links between the papers rests with a distinction between contributions with a more theoretical or more empirical emphasis. In the absence of any clearly defined orientation or sustained dialogue between the authors on topics of mutual interest, the reader must find their own way through a diverse collection. There are contributions that make the effort worthwhile. Gordon Wells, who began an extensive longitudinal study of the development of children’s