This paper examines three conceptual contributions to educational theory: Shulman’s pedagogical content knowledge; Bernstein’s visible pedagogy, and the German notion of Bildung-centred Didaktik (revisited by Deng Zongai). All three subscribe to the triangle of content (discipline, subject matter), teacher (curriculum, pedagogy) and student (needs and milieu) and present themselves as a theory, not another perspective. We unpack the specific contribution of each of the theories, their similarities and differences, and their disciplinary roots, with a view to exploring the possibility of the generation of theories with greater explanatory power. This is in contrast to the dominant pattern in education today: sociology of education courses that a decade ago followed the foundational disciplines of education turned into courses on curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, inclusion, school management, leadership, and similar topics. Curriculum theory itself is fragmented, and policy driven technicists push for standards and outcomes as the bases of curriculum design. Proponents of decolonisation call for feminisation, indigenization, and Africanisation of knowledge and such notions. Pedagogy theory is similarly segmented: notions such as feminist pedagogy, ethno-pedagogy, anti-racist pedagogy, queer pedagogy, decolonized pedagogy and several others dominate. Common to all these notions is a social justice principle - incorporating the knowledge of the subjugated is a social imperative. This imperative of social justice buzzes behind the field of knowledge production. With the rising education inequalities, education for social identity formation and such like perspectivism takes a front seat.

 In some way the proliferation of perspectivism should not be a surprise, if we consider the analysis of Basil Bernstein. Structured as a region consisting of horizonal knowledge structures one would expect this kind of development in educational theory. It is such kind of proliferation that social realists, whose starting point is Bernstein’s work and the constitution of knowledge, and whose educational aim is to bring knowledge back, are trying to halt. They argue that knowledge which is evidence-based, generalizable, and revisable is powerful and worthwhile. This means alignment between disciplinarity, coherently sequenced and paced subject-based curriculum, and pedagogy which makes concepts explicit and clear to learners. The aim of our paper is to explore whether the three educational theories form yet another three perspectives or whether they are contenders for a more vertical mode of knowledge production? Which of the three consist of the strongest general propositions which can be used to make explicit the underlying uniformities hidden from view in the proliferation presented above, whereby a perspective is presented as unique and specialized idea of curriculum and or pedagogy. If the goals of educational research are to develop verticality, in Bernstein’s terms, the three should be able to contribute to a single theory by engaging with each other. The paper aims to explore these theories to understand, firstly, whether or not this is an instance of the development of knowledge with greater explanatory power, and secondly, if this is the case, how social sciences can restore aiming for greater explanation and power, and move away from fragmentation.

This is a conceptual paper which is based on Basil Bernstein theory of knowledge. According to Bernstein Sociology is structured as a horizontal Language of description which characterised by proliferation of theories and perspectives, each presents itself as a better theory of the phenomena. In this paper we examine the three theories with the view to understand the differences and similarities between them in terms of the grammar they produced to describe different aspects of pedagogy. We ask which of the three consist of the strongest general propositions which can be used to make explicit the underlying uniformities hidden from view in the proliferation of theories of pedagogies.

Sociology of Education has become topic driven, and the disciplines are either absent or equally weak, possibly with psychology as one exception. Educational theorists select citations from a key founder ( Dewey, Shulman, Bernstein etc) within a discipline or from various ones from multiple disciplines (an interdisciplinary modality), leading to endless contestations on what counts as a valid use of disciplinary sources and what counts as a more coherent and accurate explanation of a social object. Academics find the interlocuters they are keen to work with (communities of practice) and work within these silos; topics continue to proliferate and the field continues to fragment.

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