Plenary Abstracts
Disciplinarity and the case of school subject English
Frances Christie, University of Sydney and Mary Macken-Horarik (University of New England)
At our conference in 2004, devoted to Reclaiming knowledge: registers of discourse in the community and school, it was noted that school subject English has ‘horizontal knowledge structures with ‘ “weak grammars” ‘, and that it is ‘constructed in a series of specialized languages (which are) segmentally organized’ (Christie and Macken-Horarik 2007: 157). The various languages have their own histories, drawn as they generally have been from university studies of English, including English literature, though school English has traditionally valued the teaching of writing as well. About the languages of horizontal knowledge structures Bernstein argued that each has a distinctive ‘gaze’, acquisition of which enables the acquirer to ‘recognise, regard, realize and evaluate legitimately the phenomena of concern’ (Bernstein 2000: 171). He also noted that, contrary to hierarchical knowledge structures, horizontal knowledge structures tend to be learned tacitly, so that acquirers are not always aware that they adopt the ‘gazes’ involved. At least for school purposes, this observation helps explain the sometimes intractable problems of school children learning English: if the ‘gaze’ eludes them they tend to founder, and nowhere is this more evident than in their writing, whether they write stories or ‘response’ genres (Rothery 1994).
In fact, it is clear that a number of models of English jostle for recognition in contemporary statements of English curricula, and it is sometimes difficult to see what the subject represents, or whether indeed it can be said to have any coherent knowledge structure, such that it is sustained and expanded across the years of schooling. This is the more unfortunate, since English remains one of the most significant subjects in the school curriculum, success in which is a necessary passport to many life choices beyond school. For this reason alone, its character merits serious attention, and some attempt must be made to develop a coherent model of English, not least because of the current moves in Australia, as in England, to arrive at a national curriculum for English.
This paper will draw on research in the SFL tradition (e.g. Rothery 1994; Macken-Horarik 2006, 2008; Christie and Derewianka 2008) in order to trace the ontogenesis of writing development from early childhood to late adolescence, with particular reference to development in school subject English. Using the insights provided by SFL theory, it will be proposed that we can (i) analyse and hence explain features of the ‘gazes’ associated with particular ‘languages’ of English, and (ii) propose a coherent developmental model of the English curriculum for the years of primary and secondary schooling.
References
Christie, F. and Derewianka, B. (in press for December 2008) School Discourse: Learning to Write across the Years of Schooling. Continuum: London and New York.
Christie F and Macken-Horarik, M. (2007) ‘Building verticality on subject English’, in F. Christie and J.R. Martin (eds.) Language Knowledge and Pedagogy. Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives. Continuum: London and New York, pages 156-183.
Macken-Horarik, M. (2006) ‘Recognizing and realizing “what counts” in examination English: perspectives from systemic functional linguistics and code theory’, in Functions of Language, 13, 1, pp.1-35.
Macken-Horarik, M. (2008) A ‘good enough’ grammatics: developing an effective metalanguage for school English in an era of multiliteracies’. A paper given at the 35th International Systemic Functional Linguistics Congress on Voices around the World, held Macquarie University July 2008. (Published in the Conference Proceedings, pages 43-8.
Rothery, J. (1994) Exploring Literacy in School English. Write it Right Resources for Literacy and Learning. Disadvantaged Schools Program, NSW Department of Education: Sydney.
Liberty, discipline and pedagogy: mapping pathways towards social and cultural independence through the regulation of activity and attention in a Montessori classroom
Susan Feez, University of New England
The term discipline weaves together, through its etymology and use, both learning and regulation, suggesting that one cannot be achieved without the other. It is in this sense, that Dr Maria Montessori applied the term as she designed her distinctive pedagogy during the first half of the twentieth century. Her aim was for children to regulate their activity and their attention through interaction with meticulously designed objects combined with precise language, including the language of educational disciplines. What distinguishes Montessori pedagogy is that children’s liberty is identified as both the means and the end of this regulation.
Liberty and discipline were considered by Dr Montessori (1998 [1939], p. 41) to be ‘two faces of the same coin, two faces of the same action’. Montessori’s emphasis on liberty locates her pedagogy in the Enlightenment tradition, but her simultaneous emphasis on discipline, in both senses, reveals an orientation out of step with the tradition of Rousseau, the tradition which remains in the foreground whenever pedagogy is linked with the legacy of the Enlightenment.
This paper presents Montessori’s pedagogy of liberty and discipline as one realisation of another, less visible, Enlightenment tradition. This tradition comes into clearer view when human development is perceived as socially, and therefore, semiotically, mediated (Vygotsky 1986 [1934]) and pedagogy is perceived as discipline knowledge embedded in a regulating social order (Bernstein 2000).
Bernstein, B. 2000. Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique (Revised edition). Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.
Montessori, M. (1998 [1939]) Creative development of the child: the Montessori approach Volume II. Edited by Rukmini Ramachandran. Madras, India: Kalakshetra Publications.
Vygotsky, L. S. 1986 [1934]. Thought and Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Why Knowledge Is Good For Education: Teaching, learning and knowledge-in-practice
Professor Peter Freebody, Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney
In many countries, the last thirty years or so have seen the institutions that traditionally provided initial teacher preparation reconfigured into university faculties of Education. The accompanying redirection of theorising, research, practice, and training gradually drew attention away from the distinctiveness of curricular domains, and from the tradition of sourcing teacher preparation largely from guild knowledge, mentoring, and supervision. The move was toward accounts of educational practice based on the ‘informing’ social sciences, with an evidence base drawn increasingly from social science research. These disciplines gradually reworked educational problems into topics amenable to their own conceptual and methodological métiers. Topics such as ‘learning’, ‘literacy’, ‘numeracy’, ‘comprehension’, ‘memory’, ‘motivation’ and ‘power relations’ came to sideline problems relating to disciplinary variations. ‘Knowledge’ came to be ignored.
However, knowledge, as a core problematic for educators, is making something of a mainstream comeback. Drawing on my recent experiences as a lead writer of the English curriculum for the National Curriculum Board in Australia, I discuss how knowledge and disciplinarity are coming back into view, making this conference so vital and timely. I also draw on recent classroom research to explore how disciplinary variations are acted out in educational settings. The aim is to further encourage educators to perceive the challenges facing teachers, teacher educators, curriculum developers, and educational policy-makers as elements of a broader set of problems arising from the lack of a common vocabulary for theorising the relationships between curriculum, pedagogy, knowledge and disciplinarity.
Bridging troubled waters: interdisciplinarity and what makes it stick
J.R. Martin, University of Sydney
Interdisciplinarity is a fashionable theme, especially for those managing disciplinarity (from both within and without academe) and also for those needing help with real world problems of various kinds - educational, medical, forensic, therapeutic etc. The vision driving this fashion argues for a research endeavour whose products are in some sense more than the sum of its disciplinary parts; the undermining reality may in fact involve a loss of disciplinarity as incommensurable knowledge structures collapse into horizontal discourse in order to achieve common ground (a problem besetting applied linguistics in many forms).
The dialogue between SFL and Bernstein’s sociology of education has, I believe, avoided such pitfalls over at leat three phases of dialogue: i. in relation to coding orientation and the enactment of meaning in relation to gender and class; ii. in relation to pedagogic discourse and the design of democratic literacy pedagogy and curriculum; and iii. in relation to knowledge structure and the semiotic resources underpinning vertical discourse. In this paper I’ll explore these three phases of interaction, with a view to understanding something about what makes interdisciplinarity a productive exercise in spite of the intellectual burden (and excitement) of learning to theorise in another discipline’s terms, and try to imagine how a fourth phase, around concerns with community and identity, might succeed.
Knowledge-Building: How can we create powerful and influential ideas?
Karl Maton, University of Sydney
Bernstein’s sociology of knowledge and systemic functional linguistics are united by a desire to create powerful knowledge - ideas that engage with the world and build over time. In short, they are intellectually serious. However, within their intellectual fields each represents but one theory among a number of competing, segmented and often highly antagonistic approaches. Indeed, in Education, both have been marginalised. In this paper I address two questions: what enables the building of knowledge over time within an approach; and how we might restructure our intellectual fields to be more focused on building powerful knowledge and less segmented across approaches. In other words: how can we build knowledge, and how can we win friends and influence people? How can we build disciplinarity into our disciplines?
To address these questions, I focus primarily on my own discipline of sociology and draw on Legitimation Code Theory, an approach building on the work of Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu. First, I explore the principles underlying two modes of theorising that enjoy contrasting profiles in the field, illustrated by the work of Bernstein and Bourdieu. I analyse their internal languages (how concepts relate to each other) and external languages (how they relate to the world) in terms of semantic gravity or degree of context-dependence and abstraction, and semantic density or degree of condensation of meaning. Using these concepts shows how Bernstein’s mode of theorising provides greater impetuses to cumulative knowledge-building than the mode illustrated by Bourdieu - it highlights the form theory must take. Secondly, I address why sociology and education are dominated by theories with lower potential for building cumulative knowledge. I use the concepts to show how the logic of their knowledge-knower structures works to allocate theories to particular poles of each field’s cosmology on the basis of ideological positioning. In short, these intellectual fields are based on a different legitimation code to knowledge-building theories, making it difficult to ‘spread the word’. I conclude by discussing what this means for propagating such approaches, and what systemics and the sociology of knowledge needs to address to transform the intellectual field of education.
Behind Breaks with Discipline: Why intellectual fields move from perspectives to paradigms
Rob Moore, University of Cambridge
Drawing on the sociological approach of Basil Bernstein, this paper engages with critiques of disciplinary-based knowledge. The aims are to explore the reasons behind the emergence and influence of these critiques, and help to move current debate over disciplinarity from an ideological to a more empirical basis.
The most radical form of critique argues that disciplines are no more than arbitrary socio-historical constructs without intrinsic justification. This approach adopts a generally relativistic stance towards knowledge and is frequently associated with forms of standpoint analysis that link knowledge with power and the interests of dominant social groups. Typically, they legitimate themselves by claiming they are both deconstructing an oppressive, hegemonic discourse, and advancing the interests of marginalised groups. Such arguments have a history of influence and have underpinned a variety of approaches in education and sociology. These have included: the ‘New Sociology of Education’ (NSOE) of the early 1970s; feminist critiques of disciplinary-based knowledge as ‘andocentric’; multicultural critiques of ‘Eurocentrism’; and vocationalist claims of an ‘elitist’ academic curriculum. Though such approaches often position themselves very differently ideologically, they can be seen as a recurrent phenomenon and as sharing hostility to discipline-based knowledge structures in education.
Such critiques of disciplinarity have been engaged with by sociologists such as Bernstein, Maton, Moore and Muller, on several levels, by: philosophically exploring the contradictions of their relativism, mapping the implications of their knowledge structures, and revealing the effects of their legitimation codes. Here I focus instead on a complementary issue by asking: under what types of conditions do such approaches emerge and become entrenched? I do so by exploring perhaps the most influential of these approaches, the NSOE. The key issue is: why was the NSOE presented as a paradigm change rather than simply a new perspective or extension of the range of concerns in the field and adoption of new methods? Why did this approach wish to create a break in the discipline and with disciplinarity?
I explore changes in the institutional location of sociology of education (from mainstream university sociology departments into teacher education in University Institutes of Education and Colleges of Education) and the backgrounds of its practitioners (often ‘converts’ from other disciplines, including school teachers). A cohort of researchers weakly socialised into the sociological disciplinary canon were thereby faced with a different audience (the teaching profession). I argue that such institutional and professional changes were reflected in the field’s intellectual agenda, predisposing the NSOE to selectively appropriate some kinds of intellectual resources from sociology rather than others and to ‘speak’ the language of paradigm change rather than that of perspective. Finally, the consequences of this case for wider debates over disciplinarity are shown by relation to the ways other periods of expansion in the education system have been accompanied by similar moves in the social sciences. By revealing some of the causes behind breaks with disciplinarity, the paper aims to help clear away obstacles to a properly intellectual engagement with building knowledge.
Qualifications, Curriculum, and the Disciplines
Johan Muller, University of Capetown
This paper traces the roots of two enduring rifts in university disciplines that are still operating today, between ‘hard’ and ’soft’ disciplines, and between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ disciplines and disciplinary fields. By relating these to occupational fields, the paper goes on to derive a set of qualification routes for further and higher education.
Accumulating Mathematical Knowledge across Semiotic Resources and Modes
Kay O’Halloran, National University of Singapore
Mathematical knowledge is accumulated across semiotic resources (language, images and mathematical symbolism, and other resources such as gaze, gesture, action, 3-D objects and architectural features of the room) and modes (oral, visual and somatic) in the classroom (Lemke, 2003; O’Halloran, 2000, 2005, 2007a, 2007b, 2008). This paper examines mathematical discourse itself, the written texts which students read, learn and reproduce at school, and the metaphorical expressions of meaning which surround these texts as mathematical knowledge is constructed in classroom activities. The areas of interest are (a) intra-semiotic, the functionalities of language, mathematical images, and mathematical symbolism, and (b) inter-semiotic, the meaning arising from the integration of linguistic, symbolic and visual elements in mathematics texts and classroom discourse. The aims are to theorize mathematical knowledge as the product of linguistic, visual and symbolic choices and to examine the co-contextualising and re-contextualising relations which function across scales to create the semantic space of mathematics. This investigation is undertaken with the aim of deepening our understanding of mathematical knowledge and how it differs from other forms of knowledge.
References
Lemke, J. L. (2003). Mathematics in the Middle: Measure, Picture, Gesture, Sign, and Word. In M. Anderson, A. Sáenz-Ludlow, S. Zellweger & V. V. Cifarelli (Eds.), Educational Perspectives on Mathematics as Semiosis: From Thinking to Interpreting to Knowing. (pp. 215-234). Ottawa: Legas.
O’Halloran, K. L. (2000). Classroom Discourse in Mathematics: A Multisemiotic Analysis. Linguistics and Education, 10(3), 359-388.
O’Halloran, K. L. (2005). Mathematical Discourse: Language, Symbolism and Visual Images. London and New York: Continuum.
O’Halloran, K. L. (2007a). Mathematical and Scientific Forms of Knowledge: A Systemic Functional Multimodal Grammatical Approach. In F. Christie & J. R. Martin (Eds.), Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives (pp. 205-236). London & New York: Continuum.
O’Halloran, K. L. (2007b). Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) Approach to Mathematics, Grammar and Literacy. In A. McCabe, M. O’Donnell & R. Whittaker (Eds.), Advances in Language and Education (pp. 75-100). London & New York: Continuum.
O’Halloran, K. L. (2008). Inter-Semiotic Expansion of Experiential Meaning: Hierarchical Scales and Metaphor in Mathematics Discourse. In C. Jones & E. Ventola (Eds.), New Developments in the Study of Ideational Meaning: From Language to Multimodality. London: Equinox.
Teachers, Curriculum Work, and Pedagogic Identities
Parlo Singh, Griffith University
The national curriculum, teacher professional identity, and high quality – high equity educational outcomes, are the hot educational topics of the day. Basil Bernstein’s research projects often focused on questions of educational disadvantage - which groups of students acquired what types of knowledge and with what consequences. During this time of exponential knowledge growth and escalating costs in terms of accessing and acquiring complex forms of symbolic knowledge, Bernstein’s research questions and theoretical tools seem more pertinent that ever.
My focus in this paper is on analyzing teachers’ curriculum work, particularly as this relates to designing curriculum aimed at improving educational outcomes for students attending schools in disadvantaged socio-economic communities. Teachers as informed professionals need a conceptual language for understanding and analyzing their day-to-day curriculum work. I propose that Bernstein’s theoretical concepts, while not readily accessible to teachers, maybe translated into a useful toolkit for designing, enacting, evaluating and improving classroom curriculum practices. Bernstein uses the concept of the translation device to examine the relation between theoretical language and the analytic networks that are data-near devices for reading and recognizing empirical data. The same concept of the translation device could be used to translate theoretical concepts into a professional language or toolkit to assist teachers with the work of designing, enacting and evaluating classroom curriculum practices.
I focus specifically on Bernstein’s concepts of knowledge structures, cumulative knowledge, pedagogic device, pedagogic discourse and pedagogic identities as tools for curriculum work. Bernstein also makes distinctions between curriculum types and the pedagogic positions that these generate. In developing the argument for the paper, I draw on classroom lesson and lesson planning data collected from various schools in Queensland, Australia.
References:
Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. Theory, Research, Critique. (Revised Edition ed.). New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Bernstein, B. (2001b). Symbolic Control: issues of empirical description of agencies and agents. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 4(1), 21-33.
Moore, R., & Muller, J. (2002). The Growth of Knowledge and the Discursive Gap. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 23(4), 627-637.
Nash, R. (2003). Progress at School: Pedagogy and the Care for Knowledge. Teaching and Teacher Education, 19, 755-767.
Singh, P. (2002) Pedagogising Knowledge: Bernstein’s Theory of the Pedagogic Device. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 23, 4, 571-582.
Whatman, Susan (2004). “Wis Wei Youpla Health?” A Case Study of the Nature and Extent of Community Participation in Health Education Decision-Making for Torres Strait Islander Girls at Bluewater High, Centre for Learning Innovation, QUT, Brisbane, Australia. http://www.library.qut.edu.au/find/theses.jsp