Parlo Singh

Pedagogising Knowledge: Bernstein's theory of the pedagogic device

This paper explores one component of Basil Bernsteins complex theoretical framework dealing with the conversion or translation of knowledge into pedagogic communication. The pedagogic device is described by Bernstein as the ensemble of rules or procedures via which knowledge is converted into classroom talk, curricula and online communication. It is argued that Bernsteins theory of the pedagogic device provides researchers with explicit criteria/rules to describe the macro and micro structuring of knowledge, and in particular the generative relations of power and control constituting knowledge. The paper elaborates on the components of the pedagogic device and provides examples of empirical studies utilising this theoretical framework.

How the West is done: simulating Western pedagogy in a curriculum for Asian international students

Imagination is now understood to be playing a more prominent role in the production of cultural identities in ‘new times’, as groups seek to build and shore up collective identities in the shifting flows and conditions of globalization. This paper documents the institutional work of cultural imagination in the preparatory curricula designed to manage the cultural difference of international students studying on-campus in Australian universities. These Foundation and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) curricula construct an idealised version of the ‘Western student’, ‘Western lecturer’ and of the social code governing the relationship between lecturers, students, and disciplinary knowledge in the Western academy. This paper analyses the versions of imagined, ‘authentic’ Western pedagogy constructed in teacher interviews, and produced in videotaped classroom activities in these courses. In particular, the analysis focuses on forms of student oral participation in this imagined pedagogy of the West, and teachers’ attempts to simulate the ‘real’ Western university for their students. These ‘authentic’ versions are theorised as nostalgic in that they fail to acknowledge the transformation of Australian universities in globalizing times and globalized markets, and work to re-centre pedagogic identities in slippery conditions.

Recontextualising Policy Discourses: A Bernsteinian Perspective on Policy Interpretation, Translation, Enactment

This paper contributes to critical policy research by theorising one aspect of policy enactment, the meaning making work of a cohort of mid-level policy actors. Specifically, we propose that Basil Bernstein’s work on the structuring of pedagogic discourse, in particular, the concept of recontextualisation, may add to understandings of the policy work of interpretation and translation. Recontextualisation refers to the relational processes of selecting and moving knowledge from one context to another, as well as to the distinctive re-organisation of knowledge as an instructional and regulative or moral discourse. Processes of recontextualisation necessitate an analysis of power and control relations, and therefore add to the Foucauldian theorisations of power that currently dominate the critical policy literature. A process of code elaboration (decoding and recoding) takes place in various recontextualising agencies, responsible for the production of professional development materials, teaching guidelines and curriculum resources. We propose that mid-level policy actors are crucial to the work of policy interpretation and translation because they are engaged in elaborating the condensed codes of policy texts to an imagined logic of teachers’ practical work. To illustrate our theoretical points we draw on data; collected for an Australian research project on the accounts of mid-level policy actors responsible for the interpretation of child protection and safety policies for staff in Queensland schools.

Performativity and Pedagogising Knowledge: Globalising Educational Policy Formation, Dissemination and Enactment.

Critical policy scholars have increasingly turned their attention to: (1) the work of policy actors engaged in globalised and globalising processes of policy formation, (2) the global flows or movements of education policies across multifaceted, hybrid networks of public–private agencies, and (3) the complex politics of global–national policy translation and enactment in local school contexts. Scholars have emphasised firstly, the economic turn in education reform policies, a shift from a social democratic education orientation and secondly, policy convergence towards a dominant neoliberal political agenda. This paper suggests that Bernstein’s concepts of the totally pedagogised society (TPS) and the pedagogic device, as the ensemble of rules for the production, recontextualisation and evaluation of pedagogic discourses may add to this corpus of critical policy scholarship. It does this by firstly reviewing the take up of Bernstein’s concept of the TPS in the critical policy sociology literature, arguing that this interpretation presents a largely dystopian account of globalising educational policies. In contrast, the paper argues for and presents an alternative open-ended reading and projection of Bernstein’s concept of the TPS and pedagogic device for thinking about globalised processes and devices of the pedagogic communication of knowledge(s).

Policy enactment, context and performativity: ontological politics and researching Australian National Partnership policies

Recently, critical policy scholars have used the concepts of enactment, context and performativity as an analytic toolkit to illuminate the complex processes of the policy cycle, in particular, the ways in which a multitude of official education reform policies are taken up, challenged and/or resisted by actors in local, situation-specific practices. This set of theoretical tools are usually deployed to analyse interview data collected from a single school or cluster of schools to draw findings or conclusions about the complex processes of policy enactment. We aim to build on this critical policy studies work by, firstly, highlighting key aspects of these theoretical/methodological constructs, secondly, exploring the performative role of research in the materiality of specific contexts and, thirdly, theorising education policy research in terms of ontological politics. We ground this work in a recent collaborative enquiry research project undertaken in Queensland, Australia. This research project emerged in the Australian policy context of National Partnership Agreement policies which were designed to reform public or government-funded schools servicing low socio-economic communities, in order to improve student learning outcomes, specifically in literacy and numeracy as measured by high-stakes national testing.

The logic of equity practice in Queensland state education - 2010

This paper reports on an interview‐based study which explored the implementation of a major policy initiative in Queensland, Australia, with particular attention to social justice issues. Interviews were conducted with key policy actors in three sections of the bureaucracy: strategic directions, performance and measurement; curriculum and assessment; workforce and professional development. We were interested in the ways in which the tensions between redistributive and recognitive approaches to social justice were being managed in the bureaucracy. We drew on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, logic of practice, political discourse, habitus, capital, and symbolic power struggles to theorize the politics of discourse associated with such policy implementation processes within bureaucracies. The interview data revealed differences in approach to equity issues and in the language used in the three sections of the bureaucracy. We argue that these differences, associated with the different priorities of the three sections and their differing roles in the implementation processes, reflect the different logics of practice operating within the different sections. The final section of the paper discusses the implications of the analysis for theorizing equity and difference in education policy in new times and considers the value of Bourdieu’s concepts for theorizing policy implementation processes.

Speaking about Cultural Difference and School Disadvantage. An Interview study of 'Samoan' Paraprofessionals in Designated Disadvantaged Secondary Schools in Australia

This paper uses Bernsteins theory of pedagogic discourse to examine interview accounts of educational disadvantage provided by Samoan community members engaged as paraprofessionals in secondary schools in the Australian state of Queensland. While the interview participants were asked a range of questions for an Australian Research Council funded project on the construction of Australian identities through language and literacy practices, the data extracted in this paper focuses only on those accounts that referred explicitly to pedagogic discourses and practices. In these accounts, the Samoan paraprofessionals attributed educational disadvantage to: (a) the arbitrary organisation of students, knowledge and spaces in schooling institutions, and (b) differences between school and Samoan institutions. The principles of power and control generating the unequal selection, organisation and distribution of school knowledge are discussed in the light of empirical research utilising Bernsteins theoretical work on the social re/production of disadvantage in and through schooling discourses and practices.

A new equity deal for schools : a case study of policy-making in Queensland, Australia

In this paper we draw on concepts from policy sociology to analyse the new equity deal for schools in Queensland, Australia. We examine this ‘new deal’ through an analysis of the language of ‘inclusion’ and ‘educational risk’ in key policy documents associated with a major reform of public education in Queensland. In addition, we analyse the interview talk of key policy actors involved in policy framing, carriage and monitoring. We note that globalism has increased rather than reduced social inequity. At the same time, good quality accessible education can play a crucial role in challenging the inequalities produced by global informationalism. In Queensland, Australia, equity is still on the agenda, but in radically new neo‐liberal economic ways. The focus is individualistic—each individual needs to be tracked because they are potentially ‘at‐risk’ of ‘school failure’. Identification of ‘at‐risk’ students has been devolved to the level of the school and district, and intervention strategies have to be devised at the local level. Stories of success are then to be shared/networked with other schools. We suggest that while ‘target group equity’ strategies were limited in terms of addressing issues of social exclusion and inequity, the new deal on equity, a market‐individualistic approach is an inadequate alternative. In tough times you stick together. … This was Labor’s ‘inclusive’ society: a social democracy sustained by the wealth‐generating power of free markets and economic integration with the world economy, and made strong by a practical ethic of social cooperation and fair distribution. (Watson, 2002, p. 316)

Negotiating Pedagogic Dilemmas in Non-traditional Educational Contexts : An Australian Case Study of Teachers’ Work

This chapter draws on the work of Vygotsky (see Daniels, 2001; van der Veer and Valsiner, 1991) and Bernstein (2000) to examine the pedagogic dilemmas in teachers’ work as they attempt to re-engage learners with school knowledge in non-traditional education contexts. Mainstream schooling has failed the students who attend these educational contexts. Consequently, the emphasis on relevant curriculum, fl exible implementation, inter-agency collaboration, life-skills development and readiness for work aims to provide an alternative or nontraditional context designed specifi cally to meet the needs of these students (de Jong, 2005; de Jong and Griffi ths, 2006).Recent policy promotes systemic reform in education through devolving responsibility to those who work within schools and promoting school-to-school relationships as a means of fundamentally shifting the organisation of schooling and the administration of the school. This chapter argues that devolution has introduced a new phase in the institution of schooling in which ever more articulated, complex and differentiated forms of administration accompany increasing complexity, but not necessarily transformation, of the instructional core. The chapter explores the connections between modalities of professional authority in the school as organization and schooling as a societal institution. The explanatory framework put forward takes relations of power and control as central to the construction of a pedagogic relationship operating between schools, establishing one organisation in the role of transmitter and another in the role of acquirer. This is a novel elaboration of the work of Basil Bernstein which has hitherto been constrained to analyses of pedagogic formation within schools rather than between them. The conceptualisation of these developmental relationships between schools as pedagogic relationships is also novel and opens a pathway to generalisable explanation rather than local description.

Towards a Research Training Curriculum: What, why, how, who

Our purpose in this paper is to investigate the ways in which the work of research higher degree supervision is being reshaped from within and outside universities. Our interest is in the means by which new ‘content’ and ‘process’ knowledge — and thus a new set of pedagogical tasks and relationships — are being configured in the field of higher degree research. The outcomes of research training have traditionally been products of a one-on-one supervisory relationship, that is, academic apprentice-to-disciplinary mentor. This is especially the case in the fields of arts/humanities. Any ‘curriculum’ necessary to such a model has been both implicit and at the discretion of the disciplinary ‘master’.The paper maps the reasons that this model is being challenged, the policy and other mechanisms that are representing this challenge, the new modes of conduct and the new knowledge being produced by these policies and mechanisms, and the new pedagogical identities being forged as a result. We argue that the know-how of the academic supervisor is no longer coterminous with research training as ‘expert’ work. While disciplinary knowledge will continue to be important, and while one-on-one supervisory relationships will remain, they are unlikely to dominate the new higher degree research training landscape. New modes of knowledge production and new organisational arrangements are demanding different knowledge — less certain, less discipline specific — and different work — more team-based, more trans-disciplinary, and more accountable.