Within a ‘totally pedagogized society’, it could be seen as logical that also non-educational actors step into the field of education. For instance, the cross-disciplinary arena labelled “neuro-education” represents a global policy trend implying the belief that education should be based on brain knowledge/activities. The discursive power not only moves into classrooms, but also emerges in statements from politicians, in new demands on teacher education, in certain funding priorities and in a continuing professional development (CPD) marketplace. Powerful new ideas of what teaching and learning are about, require that critical tools are (re-)tried in order to explore their potential in new contexts. Thus, the presentation will shed light on the importance of sociology of education in the current scenario. The question is asked: “How can Bernstein’s analytical tools contribute to understandings of a neuro-educational discursive power and its effects?: Examples of how different sets of Bernstein’s analytical tools have been used to investigate a variety of neuro-educationally framed educational projects are presented. Empirical data ranges from three 3-year-long municipal projects to individual articles from teacher union journals. Included are interviews with students (photo elicitation interviews), teacher teams and student health teams. Theoretical tools applied in order to explore this material embrace the Bernsteinian concepts of: recontextualization, regulative and instructional discourse, classification and framing, and the four-field model of pedagogic discourses (Bernstein, 1990). The presentation also considers how these elements from Bernstein’s vast repository have been fruitfully used in combination with other theories and approaches, such as discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995; 2003), transitivity analysis (Halliday, 1994), and the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al. 2014). To provide one example, four interviews with neuro-educationalists in teacher union journals were first analyzed in a fine-grained way by using a transitivity analytical method. Secondly, their views on teaching and learning were analyzed by identifying elements of the instructional discourse and how these were embedded in the regulative discourse. The results show that 1) the recommendations made fall into a narrow instructional discourse category promoting the study of technical skills, and 2) that these elements are embedded in a regulative discourse indicating an ideal student with grit and motivation. Referring to the conference theme on risk, the neuro-educationally oriented discourse focuses on individual risks of students who do not care about their needs for sleep and exercise. This fact ignores risks of a societal character and thereby also aims at addressing the network theme.

Bernstein, B. (1990). Class, codes and control. Vol. 4, The structuring of pedagogic discourse. London: Routledge. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: theory, research, critique. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis. London: Longman Fairclough, N. (2003). Analyzing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge. Halliday, M. (1994). An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edition, London: Edward Arnold. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P. & Bristol, L. (2014): Changing Practices, Changing Education. Springer Verlag, Singapore.