Session Information
23 SES 10C, Policy Scholarship (Singh 1)
Symposium to be continued in 23 SES 11 C
Contribution
The purpose of this conference paper is to discuss Bernstein’s theory of recontextualisation (Bernstein 1990; 2000), as well as concepts related to this theoretical framework, notably classification and framing, and their contribution in understanding governance in higher education. The paper seeks to highlight the interaction between empirical data and theoretical concepts, as well as to the developments to which they lead. It builds on empirical research on policy discourses and accountability mechanisms aimed at implementing a performance model in higher education, oriented towards the production of market-centred pedagogic identities. This policy discourse is progressively developed at supranational level by the EU, as well as the OECD, especially since the 1980s, as part of active labour market policies and more broadly a new economic and social model of ‘knowledge society’. Policy implementation in France and Cyprus shows that this supranational policy discourse and its instruments have a significant impact on national systems, transforming the practices of universities and of their agents, but this does not impact only in a linear top-down way. The theory of ‘recontextualisation’ enables to describe how power and control relations operate in policy transfer from supranational policy discourses to national and local practices, through pedagogising mechanisms (Author 2016), thus leading to an efficient ‘policy technology’ (Ball 2008). The concept opens to a theory of description of the ‘generative operations which norm the social’ (Ramognino 2008), showing how specific principles of categorization and classification are stabilized and intervene in the activity. At the same time, by putting the focus on the level of social activities, the concept of recontextualisation also enables to discern the dynamic of the process, that is, how both semantic and social classifications, as well as framing on local communication are challenged, produce resistances and the potential of change. This can be observed within the agents’ activity (i.e. curriculum elaboration, curriculum assessment, teaching). Especially when agents enter into a reflective relation to their activity, subjective normativities of action come into conflict with official institutional forms of normativity. ‘Identity dimorphism’, that is the ambivalence between different professional identities, results to tensions between and within groups of agents, including within the same agent’s activity, which can produce local translations and alternative solutions to the official discourse. This is where the Bernsteinian concepts challenge classical accounts in critical sociology and contribute to renew the latter, opening to a new role for research in educational reform.
References
Ball, S (2008). The Education Debate: Policy and Politics in the Twenty-First Century. Bristol: Polity Press. Bernstein, B. (1990). Class, Codes and Control: Volume 4. The structuring of pedagogic discourse. London, New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. Theory, Research, Critique. Revised Edition. (2nd ed.). Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Ramognino, N. (2011). Reading Basil Bernstein. A socio-epistemological point of View. In P. Vitale and D. Frandji (Eds.). Knowledge, Pedagogy and Society. International perspectives on Basil Bernstein’s sociology of education. London & New-York: Routledge, 224-240. Stavrou, S. (2016). Pedagogising the university: on higher education policy implementation and its effects on social relations. Journal of Education Policy, 1-16.
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