New Developments, new possibilities; thinking outside the frame

1. New Developments, new possibilities; thinking outside the frame Gabrielle Ivinson Cardiff School of Social Sciences

2. What we have been doing: • Theory building • Translating L2 – L1 • Refining concepts • Applying concepts • Asking research questions • Revitalising the community of Bernstein scholars

3. Theory building • What theory are we building? • A theory of knowledge – the sociology of education • A theory of pedagogy – the sociology of pedagogy • Verticality or organic growth?

4. A theory • Verticality • Concepts relate to different levels of analysis • Higher order concepts work at the most abstract level • Allow generalisations • Allows the researchers to ‘see a long way’ • Intermediate concepts • Connect the higher order categories to contexts and research problems • Relationship between concepts and data • Requires subsystems in order to connect data to intermediate concepts • Often employs – taxonomies, grids, tables

5. Not vertical – but organic? • Where the development of concepts follows pertinent social problems, proving a need to define, elaborate and create new conceptual tools to do the job • Concepts are developed because of social, economic and political concerns • E.g. Growth in research on disciplinary knowledge- e.g. on relationship between subject content and generic skills and competencies reflects wider social struggles • Approx 12/27 papers were about curricula, knowledge and teacher education at HE level, and only approx. 3 or 4 papers on middle and secondary schools – compare this to research using Bernstein’s theory in the 80s and 90s.

6. HE, FE, singulars and regionals • Epistemic Device • The regionalisation of knowledge • The reconceptualising of singulars • - new work on e.g. journalism, engineering , design, e learning and speculations about the emergence of a new ‘region’ Educational technology • What is pedagogy? • In 2000 Basil asked whether or not technologies were replacing pedagogy • Compare pedagogy when working with Basil, to on line learning experiences • Anxieties whether knowledge is being divorced from the knower • Or is it just the relay, the media that are changing • Raises issues not just of epistemology but of representation

7. By referring to Bernstein’s concept of the pedagogic device, Kress et al. (2000) suggests that we may need to rethink the relationships between instructional and regulative discourse given contemporary changes in representation and communication. • Their analysis of children’s TV and in other places website design act as rulers of consciousness launching children into different forms of literacy acquired outside school (Kress, 1997). • Kress et al. (2002) draw attention to the way communication operated in e.g. children’s TV programmes in which the body-in-action is foregrounded and language-as-text as a form of communication becomes secondary. • These modes of representation have profound effects for the shaping of knowledge. …This suggests where some of the work on shifts in young people’s lifeworlds needs to be considered in endeavours to develop meaningful pedagogic practices that can indeed induct them into the kind of knowledge that will allow them to participate in the public realm (Young, 2008).

8. Developments on social semiotics • Multi modality • The typologies used to map the social ground of e.g. the classrooms in terms of • Space, place, time intervals, material culture, activities, • Instead of reducing them to F -, F+. C-, C+ • Maybe we need to thing of meanings arising through hybrid semiotic assemblages (Valsiner, 2006) • The overwhelming world • Sometimes when we fix, indeed deaden, social life into neat categories some of the really salient meanings felt by some young people are left out • We have been asking questions about the invisible, the residuals the superfluity of meaning that are escaping capture using Cs and Fs • Corporeal Device

9. Corporal Device • Jill Bourne (2002) Re-embody the knower • The book Fat Fabrications – moves between concepts at different levels of analysis – concrete to abstract • It re-invokes the bodied person as the knower in which knowledge can’t be easily settled inside, outside, in the mind, in the hand or in the somatic system • It has a creative, if indeed uncomfortable with any other L2s, - so allowing a dialogue between Bernstein’s and other theories that raises new questions and challenges • I think it reflects some of the shifts in the structuring of dominant relays that children and young people have access to – virtual and e media

10. Re-imaging – beyond the thinkable to the unthinkable • Using theory to go beyond diagnosing • To reveal the hidden • To make visible the unspoken • To provide alternative languages • E.g. schools as places of regeneration, revitalisation – even it these look as if they are not realisable in present times