Session Information
23 SES 11C, Policy Scholarship (Singh 2)
Symposium continued from 23 SES 10 C
Contribution
While globally, education systems and institutions are being reformed along business lines, and are increasingly inundated with data, including international and national standardised testing data, diagnostic test data, parent satisfaction surveys, and teacher performance reviews, there is considerable variation in how this is playing out across the four jurisdiction of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Bernstein’s (2000) sociology of pedagogy enables comparison’s to be made across the jurisdictions that point to differences in symbolic control and kind of spaces are opened up (or closed down) for teachers to take account of student differences (author et al., in progress). While England has a highly prescriptive curriculum, and Wales is developing a curriculum with the teaching profession (Donaldson Review 2015), Scotland does not have a national curriculum so much as guidance to teachers. Thus teachers in Scotland can, within limits of the guidance, undertake a form of curricular-making, an example of which is explored in this paper. The paper brings together three specific interests: my continuing work on reimagining Bernstein’s Restricted Codes enlivened by new material feminist scholarship (author, forthcoming); the intergenerational transmission of knowledge in communities, and specifically research into community survival in ex-industrial places and my recent ethnographic work in an ancient Scottish fisher village where the local primary school teachers and pupils (aged 9-11 years of age) undertook a school project with the local maritime museum. This paper draws on a two year long ethnographic study undertaken in a Scottish fisher village marked by de-industrialisation and mounting levels of poverty. It suggests how teachers were able to work within the layers of symbolic control (at the level of national policy and local authority contexts and at school level) to create a highly meaningful curriculum and pedagogy for year 6-7 pupils in the village. An innovative school project undertaken with the local, volunteer run, maritime museum, was able to bridge between community (restricted) and academic (elaborated) codes. Previously I argued that in England, an academic curriculum (powerful knowledge) and performance pedagogy, was failing young people living in areas of high poverty (author, forthcoming). Here I explore further the affective and processual underbelly of so called Restricted Codes in a Scottish setting that enabled teachers to develop competence pedagogies, and how in this case, they used the regulative frameworks to legitimate ways of attuning to the affective dimensions of community codes as the starting point for learning.
References
Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. Theory, Research, Critique. Revised Edition. (2nd ed.). Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Donaldson, J. (2015). Successful Futures: Independent Review of Curriculum and Assessment Arrangements in Wales. Cardiff: Welsh Government Ivinson, G (under review) Re-imaging Bernstein’s Restricted Codes, for EERJ Ivinson, G. (2012) ‘Boys, skills and class: educational failure or community survival’ Insights from Vygotsky and Bernstein’ in H. Daniels Vygotsky and Sociology. London and New York: Routledge. Ivinson, G., Beckett, L., Thompson, I., Egan, D. and McKenny, S. (in progress)’Poverty and Schooling: Comparing policy regimes in four jurisdictions of the UK with implications for teachers’ professional practice’ for Education, for R. Boyask and C. Lubienski, (eds) Special Issue: From Critical Research to Policy, Journal of Policy Futures in Education
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.