Research question

How does regionalization of knowledge appear in Danish professional education? And what implications does it have for the students?Research question

Theoretical framework

The overall theoretical approach to this issue is from the educational sociology represented by Bernstein and also from a more recent development of this tradition called social realism. The analytical framework Legitimation Code theory (LCT) by Maton is applied in the research which the paper is based on(Maton 2000, Maton 2008).

Main argument

A key term in this article isregionalization(Bernstein 2000) which expresses a new way of organizing knowledge in curriculum due to changes in which way the educational programmes relate to the external - both the academic and practical - world.

Based on two empirical cases from professional education in Denmark, the Constructing Architect and Nursing education, it is shown how students must navigate in this field of tension and produce ‘pedagogical discourses’ that can gain legitimacy. Especially constructivist pedagogies in alliance with New Public Management discourses have changed the orientation of the educational programs from an internal discipline orientation towards an external market orientation.

Such changes are more or less well-known in curricula worldwide and have been discussed by theorists such as Bernstein, Barnett, Lyotard, and Gibbons(Barnett 1994, Lyotard 1996)(Gibbons 1994). Our paper is presenting an analysis of the changes in forms of knowledge that appear and are experienced in professional education in Denmark, and is based on a recently completed Ph.D.-study(Larsen 2014). 

The results reveal how single disciplines in curriculum have lost power as ‘singulars’ over a period of decades. It means that there has been a movement from clear demarcated single subjects towards an increasing emphasis on inter-disciplinarity in the study work. Applying Matons specialization codes this can be conceptualized as a code change of curriculum from a ‘knowledge code’ towards a 'knower code’(Maton 2014).

Such a code change needs to be managed pedagogically which typically happens by means of a problem orientated framework(Savin-Baden 2007). Within this the curriculum subjects are clustered around a problem from the so called ‘real world’ whereby they play a different role.The problem oriented pedagogies imply that the single subjects are taught separately but not assessed as such. Each ‘single’ subject is seen as part of an interdisciplinary ‘whole’ in terms of the student’s work products which then constitute the ‘subject’ for review and assessment.  

This causes a dilemma: On the one hand single subjects do exist because they are scheduled and taught. On the other hand, they do not exist independently, because they are not valued in their own right in terms of assessment criteria, only by their ‘occurrence’ in the student’s interdisciplinary work where they blend in or are synthetized with the other subjects.

The consequence of this is that students are supposed to navigate in a mode, similar to what Bernstein termed as invisible pedagogy(Bernstein 2001). The pedagogical discourse produced by the problem based curriculum is left ‘open’ which means that the disciplinary knowledge to be learnt is secondary to the ‘contextual problem’ to be solved. The students should account for the value of their argumentation for which no exact criteria can be defined.

The paper discusses how students manage to become legitimate knowers within the framework of such invisible pedagogies in professional education. Focus will be on what kinds of knowledge is typically foregrounded and what kinds of students may be privileged or disadvantaged.

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