Conceptual/Theoretical Framework:

Over two decades ago, the British sociologist Basil Bernstein (1990: 144) argued that the central task of the new sociology of education (NSE) was ‘to relate the principles of selection and organisation that underline curricula to their institutional and interactional settings in schools and classrooms and to the wider social structure’.  His theoretical corpus was concerned with the pedagogising of knowledge to constitute the three message systems of schooling – curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation.

Bernstein’s objective was to develop a grand theory, connecting micro-level communication or interactional patterns with macro-level power and control relations as constituted in official state policy discourses. The conceptual resources within this sociological corpus were designed to analyse knowledge activities within schools, and between schools and other institutions. These resources were mobilised to: (1) generate delicate descriptions of the inner workings of schools, particularly the ways in which curriculum, pedagogy and assessment codes fail whole groups of students; and (2) design schooling codes that could potentially interrupt  educational inequalities.

Central to Bernstein’s (2000: xix) theoretical approach was the ‘relation between education and democracy’ (Bernstein, 2000: xix). Education, he proposed, is central to the ‘production and reproduction of distributive injustices’ (Bernstein, 2000: xix). Consequently, ‘biases in the form, content, access and opportunities of education’ … ‘can become, and often are, an economic and cultural threat to democracy’.

His work on the pedagogic device has been taken up to explore the ways in which international policies, often formulated by organisations such as the OECD and World Bank, are reshaping not only schooling systems, but also notions of teacher professionalism and student learning across the globe (Moss, 2018; Robertson, 2018, Singh, 2008).

At the end of his career, Bernstein (2001) shifted his focus from schooling systems to public pedagogy, specifically thinking through the ways in which knowledge is pedagogised in what he called a ‘totally pedagogised society’ (TPS). Knowledge transmission and acquisition moves increasingly to sites external to schools, and the loss of governmental power over curriculum and pedagogy is taken up by state control over evaluation and credentialing (Singh, 2015). The evolution of education systems to a totally pedagogised society has heralded an increase, rather than reduction of educational and social inequalities. 

Objective: The seven papers in this double symposium engage with Bernstein’s problematic, focussing specifically on changes to micro-level pedagogic interactions within and outside of schooling, and connecting these to macro-level international and national policies. Each of the papers deals with issues of educational inequality, social justice and democratic rights in a retuned sociology of education.

Methods: Bernstein (2000: 132) suggested that ‘the problem of description’ and ‘respect for the informants’ in qualitative research requires ‘something more than introspection, on the one hand, or telling quotations on the other’. However, the politics of the research economy has increasingly meant that the ‘complex, multi‐layered and extensive texts’ produced through qualitative methods are often reduced to more of ‘a moral position than data positioning’ (Bernstein, 2000: 132). Each of the papers makes use of Bernstein’s methodological work on analytic languages of description. A few papers read Bernstein’s methodological work diffractively through actor network theory and science and technology studies (Law, 2004), new feminist materialisms and post‐qualitative ideas (Lather, 2016).

Research Questions: This collection of papers asks: How are educational institutions across nation states such as Greece, Australia, Norway, England, Sweden and Germany responding to the global education reform movement? How are pedagogic rights being defined and institutionalised within national contexts? How can Bernstein’s sociological concepts be used to retune the NSE?

Bernstein, B. (1990/2003). 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. Bernstein, B. (2001). From Pedagogies to Knowledges. In A. Morais, I. Neves, B. Davies, & H. Daniels (Eds.), Towards A Sociology of Pedagogy. The Contribution of Basil Bernstein to Research (pp. 363-368). New York: Peter Lang. Lather, P. (2016). (Re)Thinking Ontology in (Post)Qualitative Research. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 1-7. doi:10.1177/1532708616634734 Law, J. (2004). After Method. Mess in social science research. London, New York: Routledge. Moss, G. (2018). Reframing the discourse: Ethnography, Bernstein and the distribution of reading attainment by gender. European Educational Research Journal, 17(4), 528-538. doi:10.1177/1474904117740112 Robertson, S. L., & Sorensen, T. (2018). Global transformations of the state, governance and teachers’ labour: Putting Bernstein’s conceptual grammar to work. European Educational Research Journal, 17(4), 470-488. doi:10.1177/1474904117724573 Singh, P. (2015). Performativity and pedagogising knowledge: globalising educational policy formation, dissemination and enactment. Journal of Education Policy, 30(3), 363-384. doi:10.1080/02680939.2014.961968 Singh, P. (2018). Performativity, affectivity and pedagogic identities. European Educational Research Journal, 17(4), 489-506. doi:10.1177/1474904117726181