Session Information
23 SES 11C, Policy Scholarship (Singh 2)
Symposium continued from 23 SES 10 C
Contribution
The paper focuses on Bernstein’s conceptualisation of symbolic control and its operation in the pedagogising processes of official and pedagogic recontextualising fields, the sites of identity formation (Bernstein, 1996; 2000). In the 2000s, the discourse of change in the Greek education system was taking hold, despite contestations regarding the ideological basis of the objectives of European education policies. It was articulated and legitimised by the idea of improvement and modernisation of the structures as well as the empowerment of academics, students, etc, promising equal and effective participation in global education and research communities and networks of practice. Crisis and the way it evolved at economic and political levels have interrupted the discourse of improvement, transforming the meanings and understandings of transnational relations within European and globalising policy spaces. Retrospective dynamics mobilised by inward-looking ideas and strategies and populism/ anti-populism debates (Stavrakakis & Katsambekis, 2014; Fraser, 2017), inform recent endeavours at state and local level to manage economic deprivation, social ambivalence and an identity crisis. Research-wise, this is a privileged context for us to reconsider the model that Bernstein’s oeuvre (Moore, 2013) offers to conceive and describe the oppositions and mutations in the playing out of the four positions of identity formation in the contemporary arenas of education policy and practice (Bernstein, 2000). Revisiting our previous work, on changes in university-based teacher education curricula (Sarakinioti, 2012, Sarakinioti & Tsatsaroni, 2015), and using data from follow-up research, we explore the discursive positions from which institutions manage their operation, activities of knowledge recontextualisation, and limits of autonomy. Economic suffocation and understaffing, due to cuts in state funding and limited external resources, as well as the increasingly centralised governmental control over the sector (HQA, 2016), are the main internal issues in the dispute between institutions and the state; repositioning them on the internationalisation agenda. The fact that youth unemployment remains very high in the country (OECD, 2016) and those qualified as teachers are without jobs, is the most challenging external condition for the institutions to negotiate and to cope with the pressures for trainability and employability. Our reading of Bernstein’s theory, drawing also on a Foucault-inspired perspective on regulation and subjectification (Foucault, 1988), aims to show its generative power and simultaneously to reflect on some residual issues of dichotomous thinking, such as descriptive accounts and normative statements, and on his metaphor of boundaries.
References
Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. Theory, research, critique Revised edition. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self In L. Martin, H. Gutman & P. Hutton (Eds) Technologies of the self. A seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock Publications, pp. 16-49. Fraser, N. (2017). The end of progressive Neoliberalism. Dissent, January 2, 2017. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser. HQA (2016) Report on Higher Education Quality Assurance 2015. Athens: HQA http://www.hqa.gr/data/HQA_report2015.pdf (in Greek) Moore, R. (2013). Basil Bernstein: The Thinker and the Field. London: Routledge OECD (2016) OECD Economic survey: Greece 2016. Paris: OECD publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/eco_surveys-grc-2016-en. Sarakinioti, A. (2012). Knowledge and Identities in the context of European Higher Education Policy: The case of teacher education curricula in Greece. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis. Department of Social and Education Policy, University of the Peloponnese (In Greek). Sarakinioti, A. & Tsatsaroni, A. (2015). European education policy initiatives and teacher education curriculum reforms in Greece. Education Inquiry (EDUI), 6(3):259-288, 28421, http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/edui.v6.28421 Stavrakakis, Y. & Katsambekis, G. (2014) Left-wing populism in the European periphery: the case of SYRIZA. Journal of Political Ideologies, 19:2, 119- 142, DOI: 10.1080/13569317.2014.909266
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