Description: This paper explores the development of the pedagogic discourse in selected Icelandic schools in the light of two areas of emphasis in the revised national curriculum for compulsory schools from 1999 (Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, 1999). The first area of emphasis (intervention) involves the use of ICT in teaching and learning and the second meeting the needs of individual students. These interventions have been promoted at national, local and school level, to varying degrees, and constitute an important part of the official recontextualising field. We will consider the instructional and the regulative discourse in selected schools with regard to the interventions and explore ways of describing the pedagogic discourse. Methodology: The study builds largely on transcripts of focus group interviews with teachers in selected urban and rural schools as well as on field notes and earlier interviews with principals and information technology specialists in the same schools. We pick up the challenge put forward by Daniels (2004) of the need for a language of description to study the circumstances in which discourses are produced, the modalities of their production and the implications for the shaping of learning and development. Like Daniels, we see the advantage of linking activity theory (Engeström, 1999) and ideas put forward by Bernstein (1996, 2000) in order to describe and understand the mediating relationships between contexts and products, settings and practices, the production of and the use of artefacts, classification and framing, and structure and interactions. In particular we will explore descriptions evoked by notions of 'power' and 'control', where nuances of meaning become important. For example, on what grounds is 'power' ascribed to actors in the regulative and instructional discourse - do they have professional strength, curriculum expertise or legal authority? How do actors 'control' interactions within the arrangements arising from those who have the 'power' to classify and categorise aspects of the instructional and regulative discourse? Conclusions: The introduction of the interventions into the instructional discourse of individual schools is considered in terms of activity theory. The interventions are mediated by the regulative discourse as constituted by the community of professionals, the rules by which schools are managed and the division of labour between teachers and learners and within the staff. Our preliminary findings are that the two interventions involve several values of classification and framing. Notions of 'power' and 'control' invoke a range of emotions from vulnerability to security. We suggest that sometimes the two interventions may have different orientations in the instructional discourse and that the regulative discourse varies between schools. The pedagogic discourse can be construed as composite or fractured i.e. teachers find practical ways of accommodating differing discourses in their instructional practice but in doing so fracture the discourse. Bernstein's analytical framework helps us to describe how teachers unintentionally recontextualise official discourse in order to maintain relations of power and control.