Karl Maton

The 'digital natives' debate: A critical review of the evidence

The idea that a new generation of students is entering the education system has excited recent attention among educators and education commentators. Termed ‘digital natives’ or the ‘Net generation’, these young people are said to have been immersed in technology all their lives, imbuing them with sophisticated technical skills and learning preferences for which traditional education is unprepared. Grand claims are being made about the nature of this generational change and about the urgent necessity for educational reform in response. A sense of impending crisis pervades this debate. However, the actual situation is far from clear. In this paper, the authors draw on the fields of education and sociology to analyse the digital natives debate. The paper presents and questions the main claims made about digital natives and analyses the nature of the debate itself. We argue that rather than being empirically and theoretically informed, the debate can be likened to an academic form of a ‘moral panic’. We propose that a more measured and disinterested approach is now required to investigate ‘digital natives’ and their implications for education.

Beyond the 'digital natives' debate: towards a more nuanced understanding of students' technology experiences

The idea of the ‘digital natives’, a generation of tech-savvy young people immersed in digital technologies for which current education systems cannot cater, has gained widespread popularity on the basis of claims rather than evidence. Recent research has shown flaws in the argument that there is an identifiable generation or even a single type of highly adept technology user. For educators, the diversity revealed by these studies provides valuable insights into students’ experiences of technology inside and outside formal education. While this body of work provides a preliminary understanding, it also highlights subtleties and complexities that require further investigation. It suggests, for example, that we must go beyond simple dichotomies evident in the digital natives debate to develop a more sophisticated understanding of our students’ experiences of technology. Using a review of recent research findings as a starting point, this paper identifies some key issues for educational researchers, offers new ways of conceptualizing key ideas using theoretical constructs from Castells, Bourdieu and Bernstein, and makes a case for how we need to develop the debate in order to advance our understanding.

A question of autonomy: Bourdieu’s field approach and higher education policy

The concept of field forms the centre of Pierre Bourdieu’s relational sociology and the notion of ‘autonomy’ is its keystone. This article explores the usefulness of these underexamined concepts for studying policy in higher education. It begins by showing how Bourdieu’s ‘field’ approach enables higher education to be examined as a distinct and irreducible object of study. It then explores the value and limitations of this conceptualization through analyses of policy during two contrasting moments of transition in the same field. First, the insights offered by a field approach are illustrated by analysing the new student debate over the creation of new universities in early 1960s English higher education. This shows how the field’s relatively high autonomy shaped the focus and form of policy debates by refracting economic and political pressures into specifically educational issues. Second, considering contemporary changes in policy highlights how the erosion of the social compact underpinning higher education has increasingly fractured autonomy, necessitating the development of Bourdieu’s conceptualization. A distinction between positional and relational dimensions of autonomy is introduced to capture an increasing disjuncture between the origins of the actors running higher education and of the principles they are adopting, respectively. These concepts are utilized to illuminate the effects of current moves towards marketization and managerialism in higher education on principles, practices and identities within the field.

Cumulative and segmented learning: exploring the role of curriculum structures in knowledge-building

The present article extends Basil Bernstein’s theorisation of ‘discourses’ and ‘knowledge structures’ to explore the potential of educational knowledge structures to enable or constrain cumulative learning, where students can transfer knowledge across contexts and build knowledge over time. It offers a means of overcoming dichotomies in Bernstein’s model by conceptualising knowledge in terms of legitimation codes (bases of achievement) and semantic gravity (context‐dependency of knowledge). This developed framework is used to analyse two contrasting examples of curriculum – from professional education at university and secondary school English – that aim to enable cumulative learning. Analyses of students’ work products show that both cases can constrain knowledge‐building by anchoring meaning within its context of acquisition. The basis for this potential is located in a mismatch between their aims of enabling students to learn higher‐order principles and their curricular means that focus on knowers’ dispositions rather than articulating principles of knowledge.

Reflexivity, Relationism, & Research Pierre Bourdieu and the Epistemic Conditions of Social Scientific Knowledge

Pierre Bourdieu’s “epistemic reflexivity” is the cornerstone of his intellectual enterprise, underpinning his claims to provide distinctive and scientific knowledge of the social world. This article considers what this notion offers for research and how it needs to be developed further to underpin progress in social science. Many reflexive research practices are sociological, individualistic, and narcissistic, and the article contrasts this to Bourdieu’s conception of reflexivity as epistemological, collective, and objective. The author then illustrates how, despite Bourdieu’s intentions, this conception when enacted tends toward the very pitfalls it is intended to avoid. Building on a developing conceptualization of the relations of knowledge, the author identifies this problem as intrinsic to Bourdieu’s framework, showing how it bypasses the significance of knowledge structures and so provides the social but not the epistemological conditions for social scientific knowledge. Bourdieu’s reflexivity objectifies objectification but needs development to help achieve objective knowledge. The article concludes by introducing the notion of “epistemic capital” as a first step toward developing a properly epistemic reflexivity and so realizing the potential of Bourdieu’s enterprise.

The adaptation of Chinese international students to online flexible learning: two case studies

The cross‐cultural experiences of Chinese international students in Western countries have been subject to intensive research, but only a very small number of studies have considered how these students adapt to learning in an online flexible delivery environment. Guided by Berry’s acculturation framework (1980, 2005), the investigation discussed in this article aimed to address this gap by exploring the adaptation processes of Chinese international students to online learning at an Australian university. This article reports on the challenges perceived by two students from Mainland China, their coping strategies, changes in their opinions of online learning, and their respective patterns of adaptation. By presenting two indicative case studies drawn from a wider study, this article aims to demonstrate the use of Berry’s concepts as a means to frame such studies.

Recovering Pedagogic Discourse: A Bernsteinian Approach to the Sociology of Educational Knowledge

Abstract This article aims to illustrate why and how the “voice” of pedagogic discourse should be recovered within the sociology of education, through an analysis of how cultural studies has been legitimated by its proponents. Building upon Basil Bernsteins work, a generative, empirically-applicable and original means of conceptualizing languages of legitimation is developed and two modes of legitimation—knowledge and knower modes—are defined. From this a narrative of the development of knower modes (exemplified by cultural studies) is elaborated. Dynamic processes of imaginary alliances, idealization, and proliferation and fragmentation are identified, illustrating how the intrinsic features of pedagogic discourse shape the subject areas development. In so doing, the article raises questions about the future directions of cultural studies and the sociology of education.

Building Powerful Knowledge: The Significance of Semantic Waves

What is ‘powerful knowledge’? Some social realists (Young, 2012a) and educationalists (Department for Education, 2011) argue that ‘powerful knowledge’ should be universally accessible, but what is this to call for? The term itself is powerful emotively, conjuring notions of something worth demanding for all. Yet, the idea is as yet less powerful intellectually — we are only beginning to explore what ‘powerful knowledge’ might comprise. Following Bernstein’s (2000) account of ‘knowledge structures’, one characteristic highlighted is a capacity for ideas or skills to extend and integrate existing ideas or skills. However, the nature of such cumulative knowledge-building and how it can be enabled in practice remain opaque. The notion of ‘powerful knowledge’ thereby raises a valuable series of theoretical and empirical questions for research. In this chapter I will explore how Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), a social realist framework that builds on the sociology of Basil Bernstein. is helping to shed light on these issues.

Recovering knowledge for science education research: Exploring the "Icarus effect" in student work

Science education research has built a strong body of work on students’ understandings but largely overlooked the nature of science knowledge itself. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), a rapidly growing approach to education, offers a way of analyzing the organizing principles of knowledge practices and their effects on science education. This article focuses on one specific concept from LCT—semantic gravity—that conceptualizes differences in context dependence. The article uses this concept to qualitatively analyze tertiary student responses to a thermal physics question. One result, that legitimate answers must reside within a specific range of context dependence, illustrates how a focus on the organizing principles of knowledge offers a way forward for science education.RésuméLa recherche en enseignement des sciences a produit de nombreuses études sur la compréhension des étudiants, mais a souvent ignoré la nature du savoir scientifique lui-même. La théorie de la légitimation du code (TLC), une approche de plus en plus importante en enseignement, propose une façon d’analyser les principes structurels des pratiques du savoir et leurs effets sur l’enseignement des sciences. Cet article est centré sur un concept en particulier tiré de la TLC—la gravité sémantique—qui conceptualise les différences comme étant dépendantes du contexte. L’article se sert de ce concept pour faire une analyse qualitative des réponses tertiaires des étudiants à une question de physique thermique. L’un des résultats, selon lequel les réponses légitimes doivent se situer dans un certain rayon de dépendance contextuelle, illustre comment le fait de mettre l’accent sur les principes structurels du savoir ouvre une avenue prometteuse pour l’enseignement des sciences.

Cultural Studies and Education: From Birmingham Origin to Glocal Presence

The relationship between cultural studies and the traditional humanities and social science disciplines is a perennial problematic of the field of cultural studies. Wariness bordering on hostility characterized the traditional disciplines’ (especially sociology and literature) reception of the inception of institutionalized cultural studies as an initially interdisciplinary, and soon strongly anti-disciplinary project at Birmingham University, England in the early 1960s. Since then, though its status has evolved, cultural studies has continued to wrestle with the issue of disciplinarity, scrambling to embrace any label (e.g., post-discipline, antidiscipline, etc.) rather than acknowledge that it may have indeed become a discipline (Maton 2002; Maton and Wright 2002a). The fact is that cultural studies has evolved, somewhat ironically, from being anti-disciplinary to becoming something of a discipline itself, albeit a ‘‘reluctant discipline’’ (Bennett 1998) or even a ‘‘hidden discipline’’ (McEwan 2002). The identification of cultural studies as a discipline does not in itself resolve the question of disciplinarity since what is important for cultural studies is not so much whether or not it is a discipline. As Alasuutari (1995, 15) has asserted, for cultural studies ‘‘what is important is the [ongoing] The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 26:73–89, 2004 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc. ISSN: 1071-4413 print DOI: 10.1080/10714410490480359