This paper revisits the genesis of Bernstein’s (2000) heuristic of pedagogic rights, first mentioned in his fifth volume on code theory. Drawing on the democratic imperatives of his research agenda, Bernstein identified particular biases in the power structures of educational systems and the control of transmissions and acquisitions as threats to democracy. According to Bernstein, three pedagogic rights are necessary if pedagogic encounters are to contribute to developing the minimal conditions of democracy: • ‘the right to individual enhancement – acquisition of the esoteric knowledge that is a means of critical understanding and new possibilities. This right is the condition of confidence to take democratic action; • the right to social inclusion – possibly through autonomy rather than integration. This right is the condition of the communitas of democratic society; and • the right to political participation – involvement in practice through which the social order is constructed, maintained or changed. This right is the condition of democratic civic discourse’ (Exley, Davis, Dooley, 2016). Where previous research focused on the pedagogic rights of school children (Reay & Arnot, 2004) and vocational education students (Wheelahan, 2010), the focus here is on an analysis of the democratic opportunities for participants in three different arenas: non-Indigenous teachers working as volunteer tutors in an Indigenous homework club for primary students; one young child’s sustained public interactions with his grandparents in a blogging site; and teacher aides working in a rural school community deemed to be at-risk. The presentation demonstrates the analytical process of moving the pedagogic rights heuristic to an analytical framework. Presenting these three case studies through the newly developed analytical lens renders visible the points of progression as well as hurdles as participants seek the minimal conditions of democracy. Another feature of the analysis is the strong dialectical relationship between the condition of confidence and the realisation of individual enhancement, the condition of communitas and the realisation of social inclusion, and the condition of civic discourse and the realisation of political participation. This latter point is particularly crucial. Bernstein’s legacy should not be reduced to ‘a toolbox, a mere set of theoretical props or a formalized technical language disconnected from major social, political, sociological and anthropological issues and other conceptualizations in the social sciences’ (Frandji & Vitale, 2016, p. 14). Findings must talk back to questions of justice and the struggles against inequality and the research processes that bring these into relief.

Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Exley, B., Davis, J. and Dooley, K. (2016) Empirical reference points for Bernstein’s model of pedagogic rights. In: Vitale P and Exley B (eds) Pedagogic rights and democratic education: Bernsteinian explorations of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. London: Routledge, pp. 33–46. Exley, B. and Willis, L-D. (2016) Children’s pedagogic rights in the web 2.0 era: A case study of a child’s open access interactive travel blog. Global Studies of Childhood, 6, 4, 400-413. Frandji, D. and Vitale, P. (2016). The enigma of Bernstein’s ‘pedagogic rights’. In: Vitale P and Exley B (eds) Pedagogic rights and democratic education: Bernsteinian explorations of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. London: Routledge, pp. 13–32. Reay, D. and Arnot, M. (2004). Participation and control in learning: A pedagogic democratic right? In Learning to read critically in teaching and learning, edited by L. Poulson and M. Walters. London: Sage. Wheelahan, L. (2010). The structure of pedagogic discourse as a relay for power. In P. Singh, A. Sadovnik and S. Semel (eds), Toolkits, translation devices and conceptual accounts: Essays on Basil Bernstein’s Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 47-64.