Session Information
23 SES 11C, Policy Scholarship (Singh 2)
Symposium continued from 23 SES 10 C
Contribution
This paper sets out to explore the space between theory and empirical data by on the one hand considering Bernstein’s formulation of languages of description; and on the other linking research practice in ethnography to a re-description of the construction and use of literacy attainment data in PISA. In the process the paper will consider how re-descriptions become possible, under what terms. By re-reading Bernstein through the practice of ethnography, this paper treats Bernstein’s theory as an exercise in category-making, and category-mapping, trained on the salient boundaries established within social practice at particular moments in time and space (Bernstein 1996; 2000). I will argue that such boundaries in practice create dislocations as well as coherence and it is the tension points between categories that lead to change. The paper will demonstrate this approach by considering how an ethnography of children’s reading in primary school classrooms in England (Author) has led to an alternative explanation for gender differences in literacy attainment and indeed boys’ interests in reading that make school, not home, central to the argument. The paper will consider how far PISA data can be used to interrogate the relationship between gender and literacy attainment on these terms, by re-framing the central questions posed of the dataset. By taking this example as the telling case, the paper will reconsider the central role that the formulation of languages of description played in Bernstein’s own work. This systematically tracked and re-mapped the shifting boundaries in pedagogic discourse that function at different scales to create new places from which to speak and act, their positionalities and identities. By focusing on the tension points and dislocations that surround the making of PISA data and the re-orientation of knowledge-making communities in education of which they have become part, the paper will raise some new questions about how we can decide in a rapidly changing knowledge landscape where to focus our attention to bring out the distinctions which matter most. The paper draws on a sequence of research projects funded by the ESRC and which included multi-site classroom-based ethnographies of primary school practice, (1995-2003); a study of literacy policymaking in England in a range of government agencies, (1997- 2004), and a Mid-Career Fellowship exploring the construction and use of quantitative data in the English education system in three contrasting historical periods, the 1860s, 1950s and 2000s (2011- 13).
References
Bernstein, B. (1996). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. Theory, Research, Critique. London, New York: Taylor Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. Theory, Research, Critique. Revised Edition. (2nd ed.). Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.and Francis.
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