Disciplinarity: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives
Also available from Continuum Language and Literacy edited by Mick O’Donnell, Anne McCabe and Rachel Whittaker Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy, edited by J. R. Martin and Frances Christie
Disciplinarity: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives
Edited by Frances Christie and Karl Maton
Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Frances Christie, Karl Maton and contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-4411-0885-2 (hardcover) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
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Contents
Notes on Contributors 1. Why Disciplinarity? Frances Christie and Karl Maton
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Part I: Theorizing Disciplinarity 2. Through Others’ Eyes: The Fate of Disciplines Johan Muller 3. Bridging Troubled Waters: Interdisciplinarity and What Makes it Stick J. R. Martin 4. Theories and Things: The Semantics of Disciplinarity Karl Maton
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Part II: Building and Breaking with Disciplinarity 5. Making the Break: Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity Rob Moore
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6. Writing Discipline: Comparing Inscriptions of Knowledge and Knowers in Academic Writing Susan Hood
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7. Absenting Discipline: Constructivist Approaches in Online Learning Rainbow Tsai-Hung Chen, Karl Maton and Sue Bennett
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8. Discipline and Freedom in Early Childhood Education Susan Feez
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Part III: Disciplinarity in Subjects 9. Disciplinarity and School Subject English Frances Christie and Mary Macken-Horarik
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10. Supporting Disciplinary Learning through Language Analysis: Developing Historical Literacy Mary J. Schleppegrell
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11. The Semantic Hyperspace: Accumulating Mathematical Knowledge Across Semiotic Resources and Modalities Kay L. O’Halloran
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12. Social Studies Disciplinary Knowledge: Tensions between State Curriculum and National Assessment Requirements Beryl Exley and Parlo Singh
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Index
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Notes on Contributors
Sue Bennett is an Associate Professor in the University of Wollongong’s Faculty of Education. Her research draws on sociological and psychological theories to investigate how people interact with and interpret technology in their everyday lives and in educational settings. The aim of this work is to develop a more holistic understanding of people’s technology practices to advance knowledge in this area, and to inform practice and policy. Her work into the role of technology in education across school, university and workplace settings has attracted national competitive grant funding, including for a major study of Living and Learning in a Knowledge Society, and resulted in a significant body of publications. Rainbow Tsai-Hung Chen obtained her PhD degree from the Faculty of Education at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Social Sciences Research Center at National Science Council in Taiwan. Her research interests include theory and practice of online education, cross-cultural learning, the sociology of education, and second language education. Frances Christie is Emeritus Professor of Language and Literacy Education, the University of Melbourne and Honorary Professor of Education and Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Her major research and teaching interests are in English language and literacy education, pedagogic grammar and writing development, while she has developed a strong interest in Bernsteinian sociology. Relevant publications include (1999) (ed.) Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness Linguistic and Social Processes. London: Cassell Academic/ Continuum, and (with J. R. Martin, eds) (2007), Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy. Functional Linguistics and Sociological Perspectives. London and New York: Continuum, and (with B. Derewianka) (2008), School Discourse: Writing Development across the Years of Schooling. London and New York: Continuum. Beryl Exley is a Senior Lecturer in language and literacy within the Faculty of Education at the Queensland University of Technology. Her research interests include the sociology of pedagogy, pedagogic identities, teachers’ professional knowledge bases, curriculum literacies and applications of Systemic Functional
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Linguistics in the primary and middle years classroom. Her 2005 doctoral thesis on teachers’ professional knowledge bases in cross-cultural contexts of teaching and learning was awarded an outstanding thesis citation by the Centre for Learning Innovation at QUT. Her most recent publication (co-authored with Professor Allan Luke) appears in an edited collection by David Cole and Darren Pullen, Multiliteracies in Motion: Current Theories and Practice. This work drew on Bernsteinian notions of classification and framing to analyse the forms of knowledge made available in primary school science. She is currently a chief investigator on an Australian Research Council Linkage project led by Dr Annette Woods and Professor Allan Luke. Susan Feez is a Lecturer in English and Literacies Education at the University of New England, Armidale NSW. Susan has worked as a classroom teacher of language, literacy and ESL across the primary, secondary and adult education sectors. She also holds two diplomas in Montessori education from the Association Montessori Internationale and has worked in a range of Montessori classrooms. Her research interests include the role of knowledge about language in language and literacy pedagogy, as well as the multimodal analysis of Montessori pedagogy from a social semiotic perspective. Her most recent publication is Montessori and Early Childhood (Sage 2010). Susan Hood is an Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics and TESOL at the University of Technology, Sydney where she teachers and researches in discourse analysis and language teaching pedagogy. A key focus of her research is in academic literacy. Her publications in this field include the monograph, Appraising Research: Evaluation in Academic Writing (Palgrave). Mary Macken-Horarik is Associate Professor of English and Multiliteracies Education in the School of Education at the University of New England in Armidale, NSW. She worked for several years as a teacher of school English and later as a curriculum developer and educational linguist. Since 2001, she has been involved in the pre-service education of primary and secondary English teachers. She has a special expertise in educational applications of systemic functional linguistics and a keen interest in the dialogue between Bersteinian work on code and systemic functional linguistics. Some recent papers include: (2006a) Hierarchies in Diversities: What Students’ Examined Responses Tell Us about Literacy Practices in Contemporary School English. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 29(1): 52–78; (2006b), Recognizing and Realizing ‘what counts’ in Examination English: Perspectives from Systemic Functional Linguistics and Code Theory. Functions of Language 13(1): 1–35; (with F. Christie 2007) Building verticality in subject English, in F. Christie and J. R. Martin (eds.), Knowledge Structure: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives. London: Continuum, 156–183.
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Karl Maton is Senior Lecturer in sociology at the University of Sydney, having previously taught at the University of Cambridge, the Open University (UK), Keele University and Wollongong University. Karl has published extensively in sociology, cultural studies, education, linguistics and philosophy and his ‘Legitimation Code Theory’ is now being internationally used by researchers in sociology, education, linguistics and philosophy (see http://www.legitimationcodetheory.com). Karl recently co-edited Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education: Coalitions of the Mind (2010, Continuum), a collection of key papers in social realist sociology of education, with Rob Moore. Karl’s book, Knowledge and Knowers: Towards a Realist Sociology of Education, is to be published by Routledge. J. R. Martin is Professor of Linguistics (Personal Chair) at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focusing on English and Tagalog – with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics, forensic linguistics and social semiotics. Recent publications include The Language of Evaluation (with Peter White) Palgrave 2005; Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy (Edited with Fran Christie) Continuum 2007; and with David Rose, a second edition of Working with Discourse (Continuum 2007) and a book on genre (Genre Relations: Mapping Culture, Equinox 2008). He has recently completed a 2nd edition of the 1997 functional grammar workbook, with Clare Painter and Christian Matthiessen, Deploying Functional Grammar (in press with Commercial Press, Beijing) and an edited collection (with Monika Bednarek), New Discourse on Language (in press with Continuum). Professor Martin was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998, and awarded a Centenary Medal for his services to Linguistics and Philology in 2003. Rob Moore is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Education in the Faculty of Education, Fellow of Homerton College and College Reader in Sociology of Education, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Rob is a leading thinker in social realism, which builds on the sociology of knowledge of Bernstein and others. His publications include the books: Education and Society: Issues and Explanations in the Sociology of Education (2004, Polity), Sociology of Knowledge and Education (2007, Continuum) and Towards The Sociology of Truth (2009, Continuum). Johan Muller is Professor of Curriculum, Deputy Dean of Research and Postgraduate Affairs and Director of the Graduate School in Humanities at the University of Cape Town. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education at the University of London. He has written extensively on the relations between knowledge, curriculum and qualifications.
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Kay L. O’Halloran is Director of the Multimodal Analysis Lab in the Interactive & Digital Media Institute (IDMI) and Associate Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature at the National University of Singapore. Kay O’Halloran’s research fields include multimodal discourse analysis, with a specific interest in multimodal approaches to mathematics and the development of interactive digital technology for multimodal analysis of multimodal phenomena. Kay O’Halloran is Principal Investigator for several large projects in the Multimodal Analysis Lab IDMI (http://multimodal-analysis-lab.org/.). Mary J. Schleppegrell is Professor of Education at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a linguist with research interests in the linguistic challenges of learning across the school years in different school subjects, with special focus on students for whom English is a second language. Her publications include: The Language of Schooling (Erlbaum 2004), Developing Advanced Literacy in First and Second Languages: Meaning with Power (edited with Cecilia Colombi; Erlbaum 2002) and Reading in Secondary Content Areas: A Language-based Pedagogy (with Zhihui Fang, University of Michigan Press 2008). She has collaborated for several years with leaders of the California History Project to support teachers in using functional grammar strategies to support students’ development of literacy in history. Parlo Singh is a Professor of Education at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia and currently Dean of the Griffith Graduate Research School. Her research interests are in the sociology of education, focusing specifically on issues of educational equality. She was fortunate to work with the late Professor Basil Bernstein for over 10 years on various research projects dealing with issues of cultural identity and educational inequality for schools located in low socioeconomic contexts. She has published widely building on Bernstein’s work in the areas of the pedagogic device, pedagogic discourse and pedagogic identity. Her latest book, edited with Alan Sadovnik and Susan Semel, titled Toolkits, Translation Devices and Conceptual Accounts on Bernsteinian sociology of knowledge, was published by Peter Lang in 2010.
Chapter 1
Why Disciplinarity? Frances Christie and Karl Maton
Disciplinarity is dead! Such is the thrust of pronouncements often heard across the humanities and social sciences. The notion of academic disciplines is said to belong to an earlier age and a simpler world. Accelerating rates of scientific and technological innovation, increasingly globalized flows of knowledge, people and capital, evermore hybridized cultures, proliferation of new information and communication technologies and growing fluidity in employment are among many changes portrayed as harbingers of fundamental transformations in the social landscape. This new age is then held to require new ways of structuring the intellectual and educational landscapes. Disciplinarity was, so the commonly heard story goes, suited to past social forms but is now outmoded and quickly becoming supplanted by ‘inter-’, ‘cross-’, ‘multi-’, ‘trans-’ or ‘postdisciplinarity’. The spread of new technologies, for example, is said to be democratizing the creation of knowledge, undermining traditional notions of scholarly authority and thereby dissolving boundaries between disciplines and the world beyond academia. As well as being described as outdated, ‘disciplinarity’ is typically constructed as reactionary and conservative, while ‘interdisciplinarity’ is viewed as progressive and egalitarian (see Chapter 4, this volume). Why, then, engage with disciplinarity? Are attempts to explore disciplinarity not outdated before they have begun? Is this not simply a hankering for the past? Far from it. For disciplinarity is far from dead, although the nature of disciplinarity – what it means to be ‘disciplinary’, ‘interdisciplinary’ or even ‘postdisciplinary’ – remains largely undertheorized. Alongside calls to abandon disciplines, a more measured reconsideration of disciplinarity is gathering pace that highlights its continuing relevance. A series of essays collected in Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Anderson and Valente 2002b), for example, focuses on intellectual fields during the late Victorian era, a formative period for the emergence of academic disciplines. These essays challenge the idea that disciplinary formation involves merely constraint and ideological support for the status quo and undermine the ‘comfortable
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pessimism of Foucauldian scholars’ (Anderson and Valente 2000a: 9) who reduce disciplines to mere technologies of control; as the editors summarize: if the tendency is now to associate interdisciplinarity with freedom, and disciplinarity with constraint, a closer look at the history of these disciplines shows that the dialectic of agency and determinism, currently distributed across the disciplinarity/interdisciplinarity divide, was at the heart of disciplinary formation itself . . . It becomes evident, then, that disciplinarity was always interdisciplinarity. (Anderson and Valente 2000a: 2, 4) Similarly, McArthur (2010) argues that the tradition of ‘critical pedagogy’, exemplified by the work of thinkers such as Henry Giroux, unfairly portrays disciplines as closed, limiting and elitist while valorizing interdisciplinarity as complex, permeable and contested. From a different perspective, papers collected in Kreber (2009) explore teaching and learning practices ‘within and beyond disciplinary boundaries’ in the contemporary university. They highlight the need for these practices to take account of the specificities of disciplines and the value of students becoming participants in disciplinary discourse communities so as to be better prepared to grasp the complexities of current social change. These collections, by diverse groups of scholars, illustrate that reports of the death of disciplinarity have been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, in terms of ‘disciplines and the future’, Abbott (2002: 205) summarizes an emerging opinion ‘that there is little new about current interdisciplinary ferment and that, absent major change in the social structure of the university, there is little likelihood that the disciplinary system will change much’. To Abbott’s conclusion we would add that there is still much to learn about that disciplinary system. For ‘disciplinarity’ is more often heard as a term (frequently of abuse) than explored as a phenomenon. Rather than analyse the basis of different forms of disciplinarity, the aim of much writing on the subject is, as the introduction to one collection declares, ‘to deprivilege some traditional notions of knowledge’ where ‘what matters more than the concepts one employs or the particular disciplines one looks at is the critical attitude one employs’ (Messer-Davidow et al. 1993: 3). This is not to say features of different forms of disciplinarity are never described. Gibbons et al. (1994), for example, describe a transdisciplinary ‘Mode II’ of knowledge production they influentially claim has emerged in terms of such features as ‘reflexivity’ and ‘heterogeneity’. However, such accounts remain at a surface level of description, are often based more on assertion than research and lack a means of systematically being able to describe whether some forms of knowledge practices are more or less ‘reflexive’ or ‘heterogeneous’ (or whatever other defining features are described) than other forms. In short, the underlying structural principles of disciplinarity, which disciplines may realize in different ways at different times for different practices, are rarely excavated in depth.
Why Disciplinarity?
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The Rise of Debates over Disciplinarity The lack of exploration into the bases of disciplinarity should be surprising, as they have been a preoccupation of intellectual debate for some time. As mentioned, the formation of modern disciplines during the late nineteenth century was accompanied by intense discussion over how the intellectual map should be drawn. More recently, the post-war period has been characterized by recurrent debates over disciplinarity. At this time several factors came together, at least in the Anglophone world, to create an environment in which existing ways of organizing the intellectual map came under increasing scrutiny. One such factor has been the massive expansion of education. Successive waves of growth resulting from recurrent raising of the school-leaving age and the creation of new tertiary institutions, have brought with them the prospect, if not always the reality, of new social groups entering higher levels of education. Each such expansion has seen debates over what Hickox and Moore (1995) term the ‘expansion / accommodation’ problem: what to do with the new kinds of students who are expected to be staying on at school or entering higher education. These debates have typically involved calls for the restructuring of the institutional and intellectual maps of education in order to provide new forms of education that, proponents claim, will better speak to the experiences and desires of these new students (cf. Maton 2004). Alongside these social and demographic pressures, the intellectual map has been characterized by a recurrent loss of confidence in humanist disciplines over their status, social role and purpose. The rise of the natural sciences helped engender a ‘crisis in the humanities’ during the early 1960s (e.g. Plumb 1964) that, alongside the ‘two cultures’ debate between science and the humanities sparked off by Snow’s famous lecture (1959), has been echoed in debates over the disciplinary landscape ever since. The resulting default setting in many subject areas in the humanities and social sciences has been that disciplinary boundaries based on delimited objects of study and specialized procedures are a form of scientistic positivism that does injustice to the multifaceted, meaning-making activities of actors in the human and social world. What then is required, it is argued, are forms of knowledge that aim to capture the richness of lived experience in all its contradictory complexity. This false dichotomy between positivism and hermeneutics has placed disciplinary knowledge on the side of scientism, and thence nostalgic, if not reactionary, conservatism. Disciplinarity has thereby come to be equated with a kind of intellectual straitjacket and with elite forms of thought and education that exclude the experiences of many groups in society. One result of the confluence of these social, demographic and intellectual factors has been recurrent calls to cast off the constraints of ‘traditional’ disciplines in favour of the greater ‘freedom’ and ‘relevance’ purportedly enabled by new practices. In higher education this helped provide conditions for the emergence of non-disciplinary
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‘studies’, such as cultural studies and gender studies, during the 1960s and 1970s. In schooling, educational theory and curriculum planning had by this time come to embrace ‘progressivist’, later ‘constructivist’, notions of ‘inquiry learning’, ‘process approaches’ to teaching and learning and ‘studentcentredness’, all of which were claimed to provide more ‘relevant’ experiences for students than existing forms of education. Their effect was to undermine the discipline base of school subjects, creating confusion and uncertainty about goals and compromising the notion of teacher authority (Christie 2004). More recently, these calls to more ‘relevant’ forms of knowledge have been joined, in a partnership few proponents of anti-disciplinarity readily admit, by pressures created by economic rationality and increasingly utilitarian educational policies. For example, moves to make universities more responsive to economic needs are typically accompanied by calls to flexibilize the intellectual workforce by reducing the external boundaries of the academy and internal boundaries between disciplines. According to some commentators this ‘Mode II’ of knowledge production has already arrived; Limoges, for example, states: We now speak of ‘context-driven’ research, meaning ‘research carried out in a context of application, arising from the very work of problem solving and not governed by the paradigms of traditional disciplines of knowledge’. (1996: 14–15) Whether at university or at school level, the most notable feature of these developments is that disciplinarity has regularly been the subject of intense focus in academic and policy thinking, yet it remains undertheorized. This volume aims to open up for discussion the character of disciplinarity, broadly understood as referring to the organization of knowledge and of intellectual and educational practices for its creation, teaching and learning. It does so from both disciplinary and interdisciplinary directions, drawing on one or both of two traditions that aim to make the forms taken by knowledge practices visible as objects of study: systemic functional linguistics and social realist sociology of education.1 Crucially, the chapters also explore what is at stake in disciplinarity: what disciplinary knowledge, theorizing and teaching and learning involve.
What’s at Stake in Disciplinarity? Writing in another, if related context, about ‘democracy and pedagogic rights’, Basil Bernstein (2000: xx) declared that the first condition for an ‘effective democracy’ is ‘that people must feel they have a stake in society’, where a ‘stake’ involves having something to give as well as to receive. There is a sense in which what’s at stake in disciplinarity similarly involves people having something to, something to give and something to receive. Membership in a disciplinary
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community offers shared, intersubjective bases for determining ends and means, approaches and procedures, ways to judge disciplinary findings, the bases on which to agree or disagree, and problems apprehended (if not always solved, since many require hard work and are at times intractable), as well as providing shared pleasures in intellectual pursuits and the excitements of possible new understandings emerging from jointly constructed knowledge of many kinds. This is to say, such communities offer not certainty of knowledge, as debate is a constant feature of disciplines, but rather the shared bases for debate, as well as for interdisciplinary dialogue. Participants in a community of scholars thus recognize the discipline which they also maintain and change, for they use it to build and shape knowledge: in this sense they both give and receive, in the many books, papers, face-to-face and email conversations, conferences and website connections they engage in as measures of their participation. At times participants even manage in their activities to build new knowledge and think the hitherto ‘unthinkable’ (Bernstein 2000: 29). Thus disciplinarity can provide the basis for creativity, disruption of the known and change in our thinking. To explore disciplinarity, we have organized this volume into three main sections. Part I theorizes disciplinarity, exploring the different ways the disciplinary map has been mapped in the past (Chapter 2), what enables interdisciplinary dialogue between approaches from different disciplines (Chapter 3) and the forms of theorizing that enable or constrain cumulative knowledge-building (Chapter 4). Part II addresses how disciplinarity is built and broken with, specifically how interdisciplinary work is in fact a routine aspect of, rather than a break with disciplinarity (Chapter 5), how different disciplines create different bases for their knowledge claims (Chapter 6), the effects of withdrawing disciplinary knowledge and pedagogy from students (Chapter 7) and how induction into knowledge can be fostered in schooling (Chapter 8). Finally, Part III explores various aspects of disciplinarity in a range of subject areas: English (Chapter 9), history (Chapter 10), mathematics (Chapter 11) and social studies (Chapter 12). In exploring what’s at stake in disciplinarity, the scholars collected in this volume highlight four key themes that resonate through all these chapters. First, a central dimension to disciplinarity is the capacity to build knowledge over time, both in terms of intellectual production and in terms of fostering and promoting the understanding of students. As Hood (Chapter 6) demonstrates when comparing two fields from the humanities and social sciences, and as Maton (Chapter 4) shows in an analysis of the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein in the sociology of education, different subject areas and approaches build their knowledge in different ways, some more effectively than others. In terms of school curriculum, Christie and Macken-Horarik (Chapter 9) explore the basis for subject English to integrate different approaches, so that students can build their understanding over time rather than experience
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a series of segmented knowledges, as is the common experience in schools. They argue the importance of a subject that teaches a functional understanding of the language, its texts and contexts, systems and registers, all of which help develop capacities to critique, interpret, argue and appraise in ways valued in an English-speaking culture. In terms of teaching and learning, as Feez (Chapter 8) argues, an apprenticeship into the various disciplines can start very early. Feez discusses the work of Montessori, who developed a pedagogy for early childhood, introducing children to practices associated with all the major disciplines: mathematics, science, language study, history, music and art. Hers was a principled pedagogy intended to apprentice the young into their cultures and contribute to a growing sense of self as participant. Schleppegrell for history (Chapter 10) and O’Halloran for mathematics (Chapter 11), also discuss how the learning of their respective subjects involves learning intellectual practices and ways of valuing that are fundamental to the nature of disciplines. In contrast, Chen et al. (Chapter 7) discuss what happens when the notion of discipline is absented, leaving students without goals and directions in a study programme based on constructivist principles that deny the very notion of disciplinarity. In complementary fashion, Exley and Singh (Chapter 12) demonstrate the problems that emerge in educational programmes that espouse constructivist and/or ‘interdisciplinary’ principles, creating irreconcilable conflicts in the assessment procedures that are pursued. In short, what all these chapters highlight is the centrality of cumulative knowledge-building to any understanding of what is at stake in debates over disciplinarity. They reveal how this is not necessarily a constraint but rather a launchpad for creativity and show that past work is not necessarily a dead weight lying heavily on the minds of the living but can be the basis for innovation and change. A second theme is the significance of the interpersonal, in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavours. For example, the chapters by O’Halloran, Feez and Schleppegrell all show how the role of the teacher is critical in fostering and promoting the learning of students through focused discussion of methods, procedures and ideas. Here too the study by Chen et al. reveals the problems that occur when this relation between teacher and student is removed because the teacher is largely absent, not because of the use of online media in the example discussed in the chapter, but because of the non-directive and non-guiding role the constructivist teachers assume in their teaching. These chapters all highlight how good pedagogy involves a dialogue that creates a sense of a socially rewarding involvement in an enterprise of mutual interest. This dialogue is also crucial in the creation of ‘new’ knowledge; as Randall Collins (2000: 7) argues, intellectual coalitions are ‘motivated by the energies of social interactions’. In a reflexive account of relations between the two principal approaches brought together in this volume, Martin (Chapter 3) not only explores the characteristics of systemic functional linguistics and social realist sociology of education that have enabled such fruitful interdisciplinary
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engagement over several decades, but also highlights how interpersonal interactions among their protagonists have decisively influenced these intellectual developments. A third and related theme concerns the sense of personal belonging that involvement with a discipline can bring. In universities we need the advantages of disciplinary and institutional identity as Moore (Chapter 5) argues in this volume, though the issue is equally important in the various professions beyond the universities, as Muller notes in his discussion of different ways disciplinarity has been accounted for (Chapter 2). We would argue that identification with a discipline is closely connected to one’s sense of personal identity. One’s subjectivity is in part bound up with one’s discipline(s) – they help shape one’s way of seeing the world through providing what Maton (Chapter 4) describes as a ‘trained gaze’ or a ‘cultivated gaze’, depending on the form taken by the discipline. Furthermore, a sense of one’s own discipline can enable one to make sense of others’ disciplines, making judgements about those with whom one might most productively seek alliances. For the purposes of schooling in particular, learning these things is part of the apprenticeship to be afforded students as they take even their earliest steps in learning disciplines. A final major theme of the book concerns the interdisciplinary nature of much disciplinary work. Moore (Chapter 5) critically discusses claims that interdisciplinarity is new and involves fundamental changes to the organization of knowledge, distinguishing between what he terms ‘hyper-interdisciplinarity’ and the ‘routine-interdisciplinarity’ that already characterizes research in the disciplines. Disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are, as the chapters in this volume show, not opposed but rather two sides of the same coin, two dimensions of knowledge formations that together enrich intellectual and educational practices. The autonomous, inward-looking face provides possibilities for cumulative knowledge-building, the generation of shared grounds for judgements and collective identities. The heteronomous, outward-looking face broadens intellectual coalitions and enables ideas recontextualized from other perspectives to refresh the ways of viewing and thinking about problems circulating within the discipline. Both these dimensions are well illustrated by Martin’s account of the longstanding interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration between the two approaches that others such as Hood, Christie and Macken-Horarik and Schleppegrell exemplify in their discussions. The volume is itself part of this interdisciplinary endeavour, one that builds on an established and ongoing conversation between linguistics and sociology (e.g. Christie and Martin 2007). What enables such dialogue is, as Bernstein put it, allegiance to a problem and not just to an approach. As Martin, Muller and Moore all argue in various ways, this kind of interdisciplinarity, one that is an integral part of disciplinarity, is not only possible but desirable. Declarations of the death of disciplinarity are thus not only premature but also based on serious confusions about the nature of knowledge. This volume not only explores but also illustrates what it means to be both disciplinary and interdisciplinary.
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Note 1
For key social realist texts see the papers collected in Maton and Moore (2010), as well as Maton (2010), Moore (2009), Muller (2000) and Wheelahan (2010); see also Christie and Martin (2007).
References Abbott, A. (2002), The disciplines and the future, in S. Brint (ed.), The Future of the City of Intellect. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anderson, A. and Valente, J. (2002a), Discipline and freedom, in A. Anderson and J. Valente (eds), Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press. — (eds) (2002b), Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bernstein, B. (2000), Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique (revised edn). Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Christie, F. (2004), Authority and its role in the pedagogic relationship of schooling, in L. Young and C. Harrison (eds), Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. Studies in Social Change. London: Continuum. Christie, F. and Martin, J. (eds) (2007), Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives. London: Continuum. Collins, R. (2000), The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994), The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Hickox, M. and Moore, R. (1995), Liberal-humanist education: The vocationalist challenge. Curriculum Studies 3(1): 45–59. Kreber, C. (ed.) (2009), The University and its Disciplines: Teaching and Learning Within and Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries. Abingdon: Routledge. Limoges, C. (1996), L’université à la croisée des chemins: Une mission à affirmer, une gestion à réformer, Colloque Le lien formation-recherche à l’université: Les pratiques aujourd’hui. Quebec: Association canadienne-français pour l’avancement des sciences et le Conseil de la science et de la technologie et le Conseil supérieur de l’education, 7–32. McArthur, J. (2010), Time to look anew: Critical pedagogy and disciplines within higher education. Studies in Higher Education 35(3): 301–315. Maton, K. (2004), The wrong kind of knower: Education, expansion and the epistemic device, in J. Muller, B. Davies and A. Morais (eds), Reading Bernstein, Researching Bernstein. London: Routledge. — (2010), Knowledge and Knowers: Towards a Realist Sociology of Education. London: Routledge. Maton, K. and Moore, R. (eds) (2010), Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education: Coalitions of the Mind. London: Continuum.
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Messer-Davidow, E., Shumway, D. and Sylvan, D. (1993), Introduction: Disciplinary ways of knowing, in E. Messer-Davidow, D. Shumway and D. Sylvan, (eds), Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Moore, R. (2009), Towards the Sociology of Truth. London: Continuum. Muller, J. (2000), Reclaiming Knowledge. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Plumb, J. H. (ed.) (1964), Crisis in the Humanities. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Snow, C. P. (1959), The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheelahan, L. (2010), Why Knowledge Matters in Curriculum: A Social Realist Argument. London: Routledge.
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Part I
Theorizing Disciplinarity
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Chapter 2
Through Others’ Eyes: The Fate of Disciplines Johan Muller
What is Disciplinarity? ‘Disciplinarity’ is a term with a spectral half-life. According to the 5th edition of the OED it doesn’t exist, though there are adjectival cousins – ‘disciplinal’ (‘belonging to or of the nature of discipline’) and ‘discipular’ (‘of, belonging to, or of the nature of a discipline’) (ibid. p. 693). Which doesn’t tell us very much. What is it then that the new nominalization ‘disciplinarity’ signifies? James Chandler (2009) suggests that the word entered the lexicon in the heady wake of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things in 1965, not to name a quality of discipline-being, but rather to open a semantic space for its opposite, to name ‘the space of the interdisciplinary’1 (Chandler 2009: 738), duly so named in the OED. With this new term, and for the first time in the modern Humanities and the social sciences, the boundedness and rigour of conventional disciplined scholarly work were considered suspect, somehow limited and limiting, jejune. Freedom and innovativeness lay in border crossing: under the cobblestones of disciplinarity lay the beach of interdisciplinarity.2 A host of what Chandler calls ‘shadow disciplines’ (op. cit. p. 737), like ‘cultural studies’, moved to occupy the space thus opened up by the negational label, and together with the rush of ‘studies’ there was a brief vogue for Humanities Institutes, interdisciplinary spaces of supposed freedom and creative possibility. The momentum of negational interdisciplinarity was always going to be hard to sustain; as Chandler (2009: 739) comments, ‘[E]ven casual observers of debates about the state of the Humanities and social sciences will be aware that in recent years some reaction had already been registered against the regime of post-1960s interdisciplinarity’. A new appreciation for the virtues of disciplinarity has made its way into print (e.g. Hunt 1994). The reaction of philosophers like Boghossian (2006) and Norris (2000, 2006) to constructivist science studies, the standard bearer of interdisciplinarity, helped to check the enthusiasm.
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Contemporary reviews of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity tend to be sympathetic to the aims of interdisciplinarity but end up affirming the value of disciplinarity on grounds that bear closer inspection (Krishnan 2009). Chandler feels in retrospect that Foucault had been misinterpreted, and points to his inaugural lecture, The Order of Discourse, as evidence of a more nuanced approach to disciplinary authority (op. cit. p. 742). This is indeed the case. Foucault (1981) is there concerned to outline two approaches to the analysis of ‘discourses’, one he calls critique – which analyses the moments of ‘restraint’ of a discourse – ‘sanctioning, exclusion and scarcity’ (ibid. p. 73), the other he calls genealogy – which analyses the moments of creativity, transgression and ‘affirmation’ (ibid.). Akin to Freud’s ego and id, as Foucault (1981: 49) points out in his introduction to the published lecture, these two necessarily work in tandem: in Foucault’s words, ‘the critical and the genealogical descriptions must alternate, and complement each other, each supporting the other by turns’ (op. cit. p. 73). He continues, ‘Scarcity and affirmation; ultimately scarcity of affirmation, and not the continuous generosity of meaning . . .’ (ibid.). A little earlier, Kuhn (1970) was making a very similar distinction between the necessary complementarity of normal and revolutionary science, though a distinction with more far-reaching relativizing implications than Foucault’s. George Steiner (1971) in his commentary on The Order of Things reproached Foucault for not citing Kuhn. Foucault (1971) replied icily that he had instead cited Canguilhem, a thinker who had anticipated and superseded Kuhn. As I will show below, this is of more than passing interest, and provides a vital clue to the way that Bernstein, firmly in the French tradition on this, frames the regulation of symbolic forms. In retrospect it is rather strange that the epigones of interdisciplinarity could, in Foucault’s name, with such confidence split apart scarcity and affirmation, disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, and allocate restraint to disciplinarity, affirmation to interdisciplinarity (Messer-Davidow 1993). Foucault’s way with technical terms may have had something to do with it. It is only towards the end of the Archaeology of Knowledge that it becomes clear that ‘knowledge’ (‘savoir’) is defined in opposition to ‘science’ or scientific knowledge (‘connaissance’). ‘Only propositions that obey certain laws of construction belong to a domain of scientificity’ (Foucault 1972: 183). ‘Knowledge’ for Foucault is thus everything that does not make it into connaissance, into the stock of knowledge of a discipline.3 Perhaps it is not so strange after all that the remissive traducing of the disciplines has so frequently been done in his name. If the critical tide has turned somewhat against interdisciplinarity as an ideological opposite to disciplinarity, the general practical sense of needing and being able to draw on more than one mode of inquiry or body of knowledge has an enduring appeal. It is only appropriate, after all, not to lose sight of the fact that the rationale for our common endeavour in this volume is to see how a
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fruitful interdisciplinary intercourse can be maintained between a Bernsteinianinspired sociology of knowledge and a Halliday-inspired systemic-functional linguistics (SFL). Such a mode of interdisciplinarity is to be distinguished from the wholesale flattening of disciplinary boundaries as in the phase of ‘institute interdisciplinarity’ and ‘-studies interdisciplinarity’ referred to above. It should also be distinguished from ‘trading zones’, the term historian of microphysics Peter Galison (1997) borrowed from anthropology to account for how theoretical physicists, experimental physicists and instrument makers evolved a common form of technical pidgin or creole in which to communicate in the development of radar and particle detectors. Here, a common problem drives the technical intercourse. This is the kind of interdisciplinarity found in advanced research laboratories where research problems require the resources of more than one intellectual tradition (Shapin 2008). Ruqaiya Hasan (2005: 51) has usefully distinguished between endotropic theories – those that are ‘centred on their own object of study, isolating it from all else’, and exotropic theories, which are able to reflect on their object of study in ‘interaction with other universes of experience’. Such ‘cosmoramic’ theories are ‘open’ and able to ‘dialogue with theories of (these) phenomena provided their mode of engaging with their problematic is not in contradiction to their own’ (ibid.). There are for Hasan two conditions for dialogical success. First, the conceptual language must be sufficiently ‘well developed’ (ibid.) to avert a ‘threat of chaos’ (ibid.); more crucially, ‘The necessary and sufficient condition for an exotropic theory’s potential for metadialogism is met when its conceptual syntax is so developed that not only does the theory distinguish the different orders of relevant phenomena but it is also able to specify the nature of this relevance’ (ibid.). A quarrelsome Bernsteinian may well object that the more developed a conceptual syntax, the stronger the classification or boundary between that syntax and another syntax, making dialogism less, not more, likely. But we will gag our quarrelsome colleague for the moment and admit that, quite evidently, Bernstein was dialogically in tune with Halliday. But how could that have happened? Did it happen in volumes like this one, in casual conversation over a drink in the pub, or some other way, seeping somehow into the conceptual syntax in a more sub-conscious way? These are some of the questions that I will explore further below. Fixing on a common object is to face only the first of many hurdles. I will take the object to be disciplinarity, although to my knowledge Bernstein never used the word.4 What is meant by this nominalization? All nominalizations condense constituent elements into an abstract noun, denoting quality. The original object, the discipline, is presumed and endowed with qualities, and the agents are morphed into a process. Yet for sociologists, it is precisely the delimitation of disciplines and the relations between their agents that matter, as we will see. I will start by recalling the three forays Bernstein makes into distinguishing
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between the internal relations of disciplines, each drawn with a particular purpose in mind. These are: z the distinction between disciplines of the inner, the Humanities, and those
of the outer, the sciences; z the distinction between ‘singulars’, which are traditional disciplines, and
‘regions’, disciplinary formations that face both inward toward the knowledge base and outward toward a field of application. In this distinction, Bernstein is distinguishing between the sciences and the Humanities, on the one hand, and the professions on the other; z the third distinction is probably most familiar to the SFL community, between ‘horizontal knowledge structures’, the social sciences and more problematically the Humanities, and ‘hierarchical knowledge structures’, the natural sciences. The third distinction is thus one among singulars, the first two in different ways are about the disciplines and the professions, about which Bernstein clearly worried. I will discuss each in greater detail below before I go on to discuss the external social relations of disciplines, that is, disciplines and their communities.
Forms of Disciplinary Difference The Trivium and the Quadrivium Bernstein deals with this in at least two treatments, one in a 1988 lecture in Santiago (Bernstein 1990: 133–164) the other in an undated lecture given at the University of the Aegean (Bernstein 1996: 82–88). In the first he deals with the historical emergence of the disciplines following, he claims, the account given by Durkheim (1977). By Bernstein’s version, the medieval university was founded on a particular combination of abstract Greek thought with Christianity. Christianity represented the tutelage of the inner by the word; the outer was to be studied on the basis of an orientation conditioned by a prior moral shaping on the basis of the word. The word was God’s word. The account is never crystal clear, but that should not detain us here. The upshot is that some kind of necessary link, responsible for humanizing knowledge, was ensured by the particular form taken by the medieval curriculum: first the disciplines of the inner (the Trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric) were to be studied, only then could the disciplines of the outer (the Quadrivium: arithmetic (number), geometry (space), astronomy (motion) and music (time)) be studied. Word before world. In this way was the study of the profane world subordinated to a prior sacred or moral ordering.
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The religious foundation of official knowledge was gradually replaced by a ‘humanizing secular principle’ (Bernstein 1996: 86) over the next 500 years, until ‘the last decades of the twentieth century’ (Bernstein 1990: 155) when we are seeing a progressive weakening of the Trivium’s control, says Bernstein. This epistemological-moral balancing act has been upset by the displacement of the humanizing principle by a ‘dehumanizing’ principle, namely the market. The market severs the link between the inner and the outer, the knower and the known and ‘a new concept of knowledge’ (Bernstein 1996: 87), a truly secular and unleavenedly profane one, takes root and threatens the very basis of our civilization. Bernstein has never sounded so apocalyptic: ‘Knowledge, after nearly a thousand years, is divorced from inwardness and literally dehumanized. Once knowledge is separated from inwardness, from commitments, from personal dedication, from the deep structure of the self, then people may be moved about, substituted for each other and excluded from the market’ (ibid.). Bernstein in thunderous prophetic mode here sounds suspiciously like the outraged epigones of the Trivium upon their displacement by the Quadrivium, ranging from the old humanists, through the ‘mechanisation of the world’ critics after Heidegger, to the petulant constructivists of yesterday and today. How can that be? What is he really worrying about? It is as well to recognize that his account differs in certain essential respects from that of Durkheim on whom he is drawing. Durkheim (1977) asserts that the disciplines form when the sages of the Dark Ages in Europe begin to construct rules for linguistic forms, which by way of trying to capture forms of thought attempt at a second remove to capture the forms of things. It is natural perhaps that the first sages were grammarians, with luminaries like Priscian, Donatius and Virgil the Asiatic of Toulouse in the seventh century and other cultish figures. The ‘true spirit of scholarship’ (ibid. p. 56) breaks free from mysticism in the ninth century with the grammarian Alcuin, inaugurating the ‘age of grammar’ and the Carolingian Renaissance. Attempts to capture the rules of debate moved the focus from grammar to dialectical logic with the Scholastics in the Middle Ages, and from logic to literary form with the Humanists not much later. Their triumph was short lived, and in the seventeenth century the explosion of scientific knowledge moved the balance of power ever more firmly to the Quadrivium and to the study of the form of things. This was the moment when the idea of ‘knowledge progress’ was born, an idea Bernstein will go on to characterize in terms of ‘verticality’ (Muller 2007). However, Durkheim is far from lamenting this shift. He considers that science has finally thrown off the shackles of the humanists, and that the sacred has moved decisively into scientific discourse. Bernstein parts company with Durkheim when he places the sacred solely with the inner, the profane solely with the outer. Durkheim in fact celebrates the triumph of science, the disciplines of the outer. Could there be something else Prophet Bernstein is warning us against?
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One clue lies in the paragraph where Bernstein fast-forwards from the medieval curriculum and its two specializing discourses to the present. He first repeats the point: ‘The construction of the inner was the guarantee for the construction of the outer’ (Bernstein 1996: 86), going on to say, ‘In this we can find the origin of the professions’ (ibid.). What merits this late entry of the professions to the discussion? In the early medieval universities, alongside the Trivium and Quadrivium which were exclusively undergraduate courses of study, could be found faculties of law, medicine and theology, which alone were entitled to offer higher degrees, after the preparatory Trivium and Quadrivium, or liberal arts, had been covered in the Arts Faculty (Lloyd 2009: 178). This is depicted clearly in the frontispiece to Gregor Reisch’s (1503) Margarita Philosophia, which depicts Prudentia (or philosophy) and the seven liberal arts. See Figure 2.1.
Figure 2.1 Frontispiece to Gregor Reisch (1503) Margarita Philosophica. Freiburgi: Johann Schott
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It is plausible to infer from this that Bernstein was not in fact deploring the triumph of the sciences, but the triumph of an instrumental turn in the direction of vocational and professional education – these are effectively Bernstein’s ‘outer’, which in market-driven capitalism have become ‘divorced from inwardness’ (Bernstein 1996: 87), not the sciences per se. Indeed pitting the sciences against the Humanities would have been quite un-Durkheimian, for as we saw above, Durkheim believed just the opposite: ‘Far from its being the case that between the disciplines which deal with world of persons and those that deal with the world of things there is gulf fixed, the fact is they mutually imply one another and converge on the same end’ (Durkheim 1977: 337). And again: ‘As long as science is conceived of in this way, as directed exclusively towards the external world and to things which have nothing to do with us, it is impossible that the subject will be humanised and revitalised’ (ibid.). Presuming that Bernstein was staying true to Durkheim, it is not unreasonable to infer that he is thus worrying not about the sciences; he was worried about professional and vocational education, which ran the risk, as he presciently saw, of cutting off the necessary conceptual grounding, its necessary ‘inner’, in its scramble for relevance, usefulness, and direct applicability to a field of production. Which was precisely Durkheim’s fear in his critique of the pragmatists in general, and of Bergson and William James in particular (Durkheim 1983; Young and Muller 2007).
Singulars and Regions A second support for this interpretation is to be found in the distinction between ‘disciplines’ – later ‘singulars’ – and ‘regions’. Singulars refer to the distinctive form that knowledge came to take in the nineteenth-century university, which became a model for the school subjects of mass schooling, thus creating a taproot from school to university for the first time. Singulars – examples given are physics, chemistry, English – establish themselves in the field of the production of knowledge, they are only about knowledge and they refer only to themselves. They control the criteria for the production of privileged texts, the rules of field entry, standards for graduation, licence to teach or practise and distribute rewards or honours. They are Bernstein’s paradigm case of strong classification. Regionalization is a process of untethering singulars from their strongly classified mooring, weakening their classification and affiliating them into a looser or tighter federation. Regions face both inward towards the field of knowledge production and outward towards a field of practice or production. Classic examples given are the traditional professions – engineering, medicine, architecture – but Bernstein also mentions the newer generation of professions like tourism, business studies and media. He ends his first treatment of regions with an appendix examining teacher education as an aberrant form of professional
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education (Bernstein 1990: 161–163). At times the description is studiedly neutral. At others, the anxiety seeps through: whatever the recontextualizing principle regulating the region, it represents a ‘technologization’ of knowledge. Moreover, the advent of the outer is predatory: regionalization ‘necessarily weakens both the autonomous discursive base and the political base of singulars’ (Bernstein 1996: 66), drives towards ‘greater central administrative control’ (ibid.) and introduces greater ‘external regulation’ (ibid.). The primary instrument for doing this is the systematic weakening of the classification that constructs the coherence of its component singulars. Cuckoo-like it seeks a fundamental re-arrangement of the university. It is hard not to recognize described here the zealotry of the more aggressive programmes for interdisciplinarity characteristic of the seventies and eighties. The notion of regionalization is powerful yet over-inclusive. Where does it come from? There is no attribution but it is not without its precedents. Were one to glance over at the formalist/rationalist tradition of history of science in France, one would see an analogous train of thought represented there. Canguilhem and Bachelard, who Bernstein does not cite, are progenitors of the tradition celebrated by Althusser, Levi-Strauss, Foucault and Bourdieu who Bernstein does cite. It was Bachelard who made the distinction, in dissecting the disciplinary organization of knowledge, of ‘synthetic rationalisms’ and ‘regional rationalisms’ (cited by Canguilhem 1998: 18). It is not hard to recognize these as cousins to singulars and regions. This is not at all to suggest some kind of covert or illicit influence. On the contrary, it is an example of the phenomenon of multiples, the simultaneous discovery of a concept or a theory by one or more scholars at more or less the same time in widely different places (Merton 1992). This is not the only consilience Bernstein shares with his trans-channel cousins, and I will have reason to return to the French connection at greater length below. It remains to point to a distinct limitation of the account of regionalization given above. That is, all regions – let us say professions – are painted with the same brush. This cannot be the case, as Bernstein would have been the first to admit. The older professions, like engineering and medicine, have a very welldeveloped relation to strong singulars which are by no means de-classified into regional promiscuity, but retain a strong sense of specialized and specializing identity. These professions are strong because they have strong – that is, reasonably strongly classified – singulars which are however more beholden to the outside than their professionally unaffiliated singular colleagues, but no less accountable inwards to disciplinary good practice. This is in marked contrast to the newer professions, like tourism and management, that have not (yet), though to differing degrees, managed to corral a compliant robust set of singulars into a federation, instead depending upon de-classification of often already weak boundaries to bring putatively relevant weak or non-existent knowledge bases to heel. The weakness of the knowledge bases becomes apparent when the distributive rules are unable to select, with any stability, a coherent
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consensus curriculum to act for the weakly constituted professional field. Courses or diplomas at one site consequently display little resemblance to those at other sites, and the production field is as yet too weak to coordinate this into a stable licensing system (Muller 2009). Heritage and museum studies would be an example here. This makes visible another feature that differentiates professions from each other. Strong professions do not only have a strong knowledge base; they also have a strong, that is, a well-organized professional base able to take over the functions of criteria-setting and licensing formerly performed by the singulars, without any diminution of the power of the singulars, only of some of their symbolic control functions. To put that another way, strong professions have strong knowledge bases (disciplines) as well as strong professional communities. It is rare to find one without the other. As I will argue further below, in strong professional fields, the academic and professional communities are not only well integrated, but share epistemic norms that coordinate their judgements to both academic and practical best practice without putting them at odds with one another. So far then I have distinguished professions in terms of the strength, or classification, of their knowledge bases and their external communities. Both of these require further comment. In the third of his forays into knowledge types, Bernstein deals with the first.
Verticality and its Others Bernstein’s account of vertical and horizontal discourses is by now well enough known in the SFL community not to require rehearsal here. In Muller (2007) I discussed the principal way that disciplines differ in terms of their internal structure as ‘verticality’, that is, the way that the internal theoretical apparatus of the discipline progresses. I also raised there the question as to whether verticality applied to all the disciplines of the inner, the Humanities, since fields like history or literature did not advance vertically,5 either strongly or weakly, in any meaningful sense, even though others clearly did – like logic or linguistics. Bernstein’s second criterion, grammaticality or the way that internal theories of disciplines ‘read’ their domain of worldly objects, is only a help in some cases. History, for example, though possessing a discernible tradition of historiographical dispute, does not have theories on any widespread scale of consensus. Nevertheless, there are strong rules of grammaticality, in this case rules of evidence and grounds for demonstration, even though these might be periodically challenged. These rules generate strong epistemic norms, which bestow a high measure of self-control upon the internal community of historians, and allow them to police their own protocols of truth, despite strong current pressures to regionalize the singular into coalitions of relevance like ‘museum’ or ‘heritage studies’. This, as will be recalled, is the Bernsteinian apprehension, that in
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becoming disconnected and re-aggregated, they might lose the conceptualformative core of the discipline, their inner, leaving the resultant segmental ensemble conceptually, which is to say morally, rudderless. Grammaticality does not help elucidate the structure of other Humanities singulars like logic and linguistics, which are disciplines whose object domain is constituted by definition, and whose internal language is not subject to disconfirmation in the same way as it is in the empirical and experimental disciplines. As Fran Christie and Mary Macken-Horarik (2007; this volume) are beginning to show, ‘verticality’ can indeed help to characterize, and signpost, the ‘systemicfunctional verticality’ of subject English, but neither verticality nor grammaticality will be much help when it comes to the stylistic and aesthetic dimensions (see Moore 2010). As Christie and Macken-Horarik show, pressures for relevance in the English curriculum, be they for personal growth, cultural heritage and so on have the same flattening effect on the acquisition of the syntax that all but the smartest pupils get to master. As Bernstein showed, this kind of modularization of an incrementally more abstract system of meaning-making into sets of generic skills is precisely the school curriculum equivalent of regionalization in higher education (Bernstein 1996: 66), and, he might have added, of interdisciplinarity in its aggressive, de-classifying mode. All the neo-Durkheimians, including Merton (1992), Bourdieu (2004), Collins (1998) as well as Bernstein relate the form of organization of the symbolic system of a discipline to its form of internal social organization, its insulation from influence from outside and its consequent level of autonomy. The degree of this form of control is regulated by what Bernstein called verticality, what Merton called ‘codification’6 and what Bourdieu called their degree of ‘formalisation’ or ‘mathematisation’ (Bourdieu 2004: 58). These cognate concepts condition the internal division of labour of the discipline, the level of interdependence of the members, their ability to achieve ‘closure’ (Bourdieu) or strong insulation of their boundaries (Bernstein) and consequently the degree of autonomy from external interference they are able to achieve. It is at this point that our previously gagged Bernsteinian insists on having his say: ‘can we not see’, he asks, ‘that there is something of a non sequitur here in Bernstein’s accounts of knowledge insulation and hybridity?’ Let us take discipline X, which has over time developed a reasonable degree of verticality or its equivalent, has developed a certain set of internal epistemic norms adhered to by most disciplinary adepts and that has as a consequence developed an effective degree of autonomy and self-rule built on strong disciplinary identities. Why then would it suddenly become vulnerable to weakening from without? What in its make-up makes a once-impregnable disciplinary empire vulnerable to either regional or interdisciplinary external weakening? What boundary-dissolving trumps can suddenly be deployed? What is the enemy without that Bernstein so fears? The market – mere material reward – seems too cynical an answer. Or is it?
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It seems clear that we must distinguish between two kinds of interdisciplinarity. The first is predatory or negational interdisciplinarity, that seeks to undermine disciplinary boundaries as an end in itself, as a means to achieve some presumed pedagogical good (‘generic skills’, ‘modularity’) or seeks to re-federate them in the name of an external instrumental principle of relevance (‘relevant to the workplace’, or ‘community engagement’; see Chen et al. this volume for a discussion of such a programme). Bernstein seems to have worried about both these predatory movements. Empirical studies here have been scanty, but both the theory and those studies we do have would indicate that predatory interdisciplinarity would be resisted to the degree that the disciplines concerned are strong. Individual historians may have gone into ‘heritage studies’ but this has not weakened history itself, which continues to flourish in part to train the future ‘heritage’ workers, but also because it is a strong discipline in the sense of strong grammaticality, strong epistemic norms and strong internal self-regulation. Where interdisciplinary teaching programmes have been set up with such disciplines, and these strong disciplines feel threatened by the regionalizing thrust, it will either be resisted – the discipline may successfully refuse to participate – or the programme will become internally balkanized, with the disciplines retaining an identifiable shape and identity within the teaching activities of the programme7 (Ensor 2001). It is doubtful (though one cannot be categorical) whether strong disciplines that still have vibrant research programmes at the cutting edge can be completely undermined by predatory interdisciplinarity. By the same token, creative or productive interdisciplinarity occurs when it is driven by a bona fide intellectual problem which draws together a group of creative scholars who pool their disciplinary energies in one way or another. If this proves to be a stable basis for a new domain of problem solving, it will morph into a new region, which if it proves stable and productive over time will finally become a discipline in its own right. All of which helps to make clear that disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are not two different things. (See Moore this volume for related discussion.) This is probably why Bernstein never used the latter term. All knowledge formations, be they singular or regional, must have a certain quality of disciplinarity in order to qualify as a knowledge region. A next question then arises: what is it that all their members have in common, and how did they get it? What drives the common enterprise? What drives fertile disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity alike?
Social Life in Disciplines On the one hand, disciplinary sociality is an example of what Durkheim called organic solidarity, that is, it is characterized by a high degree of internal
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differentiation, many levels of hierarchy which are explicated in normal scholarly commerce by citation rates and more eventfully by the award of honours and prizes, a high degree of complexity and consequently autonomy, policed by what Durkheim calls formalistic and restitutive regulations (Durkheim 1973). I will probe these regulations a little further below. This is contrasted with mechanical solidarity, which has much less internal differentiation and emphasizes similarity and low autonomy. On the other hand, disciplinary sociality is not only organic. It is also punctuated by rituals of mechanical solidarity – conferences, meetings of peers and so on – which generate a sense of renewal and effervescence. In other words, disciplines are marked by both rituals of similarity and rituals of differentiation. This translates into the peculiar ambiguity of disciplinary membership, where everyone is a peer, but some peers are more equal than others. Scholars are necessarily driven by what Bourdieu calls the illusio of disinterest: ‘to be in a scientific field is to be placed in conditions in which one has an interest in disinterestedness’ (Bourdieu 2004: 52). This is not optional; to be a recognized scholar demands ‘unconstrained submission to the imperative of disinterestedness’ (ibid. p. 51). As Bernstein would have said, this is the inner connection to serious scholarly work, which is its constitutive bulwark against external manipulation. Merton (2001) has shown how Puritanism in seventeenth-century England acted as a powerful spur to science, by making its inner explicit. A virtuous marriage between experimental empiricism and veneration of God meant that science could be presented as simply revealing the glory of the works by His hand: as Robert Boyle said: ‘our utmost Science can but give us a juster veneration of his Omniscience’ (quoted in Merton 2001, p. 103), or as John Ray put it, science is simply making visible ‘divine Reason, running like a Golden Vein, through the whole Leaden Mine of Brutal Nature’ (ibid. p. 104). In Puritan England, thus, there was no conflict between science and religion; indeed, Puritanism both drove science, as an obligation to venerate His work, and provided an ironclad justification for its disinterested pursuit. Of course, the Puritan impulse has long since been secularized, but disinterest has remained a constitutive norm. This does not mean that scholars are not competitive, or that they don’t vie for personal glory. They do. Its principal form is the struggle for priority, to be first with a discovery or novelty. The norm of disinterest frequently leads scholars to disavow this thirst for priority, which somehow seems uncollegial, unscholarly, but the now-secularized obligation to be productive has led to many a tussle for priority, often quite bitter. Cavendish, Watt and Lavoisier argued over who had first discovered that water was not an element; Newton and Leibnitz argued over who invented the calculus; Janet contested Freud’s claim to have invented psychoanalysis. These are but a few of the disputes over priority that animate the histories of invention. The German language has a word for this commonplace phenomenon: Prioritätsstreit (Merton 1992: 289). There is a specific reason why disputes over priority are so frequent. Merton (1992) has distinguished between ‘singletons’ – individual discoveries that can
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unambiguously be ascribed to one person, and ‘multiples’ – discoveries that are either discovered at the same time, or are periodically discovered and ‘re-discovered’ by different people at different times and places. Some of these are poignant in the extreme, none more so than the case of Darwin and Wallace. It is well known that Darwin, though a humble man, prized what he calls in his autobiography ‘the bauble of fame’, and says in a letter to Lyell that ‘I shall certainly be vexed if anyone were to publish my doctrines before me’. Lyell tried unsuccessfully to hurry him up. In June 1858, Wallace sent Darwin a manuscript which he recognized would pip him to the post. Darwin felt crushed. The scientific community in the form of Lyell and Hooker then arranged for a joint presentation to the Linnean Society, prefacing the publication of a joint paper by ‘Messrs. C. Darwin and A. Wallace’. Subsequently each of them tried to outdo the other in attributing the greater credit to the other (Merton 1992: 289). The recurrence of multiples leads Merton to a bold hypothesis: ‘the hypothesis states that all scientific discoveries are in principle multiples, including those that on the surface appear to be singletons’ (ibid. p. 356). We can glibly say that this is the product of disciplinarity, that it is because all peers in a discipline share a disciplinary identity, that they ‘face the same way’, and ‘cover the same cognitive ground’. But that hardly explains it. After all, we are talking about radical novelty here, where the step into the unknown, or the next known, has still to be taken. Cole (1983, 1994) distinguishes between the core of a discipline, the repository of knowledge accepted by all disciplinary members, and the frontier, where researchers labour to produce something that will make it into the core. Very little of it ever will. Cole (1983) goes on to say that when people refer to disciplinary consensus they are referring to consensus in the core; and that here, there is larger consensus in what we would call the hierarchical disciplines than in the horizontal ones. However, Cole’s research also shows that at the frontier, the social sciences display as much consensus as do the natural sciences (ibid. p. 136), and that ‘consensus at the research frontier is created by social processes which tend to be similar in the various scientific fields’ (ibid.). Cole’s example was sociology. My own investigations have shown that peer judgements about the relative contributions of others in the fields of psychology, law and history are remarkably stable (Muller forthcoming). How is this possible? What is it that produces this common cast of creative thought such that different investigators arrive independently at the same intellectual terminus? To answer this brings us to one of the deepest theoretical fissures in the sociology of knowledge.
Consensus or Epistemic Norms? The French Connection Karl Maton and Rob Moore (2010) sub-title their recent collection ‘coalitions of the mind’, after Randall Collins’ (1998) slightly different ‘coalitions in the mind’. Collins develops a theory of intellectual centres that are linked together
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by ‘interaction ritual chains’ into networks of connections. Collins’ definition of an interaction ritual is that it depends on face-to-face interaction. Consensus depends on it: ‘Intellectual life hinges on face-to-face situations because interaction ritual can only take place on this level’ (ibid. p. 26). Nevertheless, Collins elsewhere is less emphatic, and by the end of his introductory chapter he is referring to ‘interaction rituals inside their head’ and ‘imaginary rituals’ (ibid. p. 52), and to the ‘vicarious community of the mind’ (ibid. p. 34), hence the coalitions ‘in’ the mind. By the end of the book, the ‘community’ has become ‘invisible’ (ibid. p. 790). The same ambivalence can be seen in the literature around the more commonly used term in the sociology of science, the ‘invisible college’. This term was originally coined in the seventeenth century by members of the newly formed Royal Society to refer to their loosely affiliated status outside the formal educational establishment. It was taken up by Price (1971) to denote elite mutually interacting groups, what Collins and Evans (2002) refer to as the discipline’s ‘core set’, who combine to exchange information. The upper limit for such an invisible college for Price was 100 members. Other writers have taken up the concept, and the definition of the invisible college has become rather loose (Zuccala 2006). Nevertheless, the central question remains: what produces the meeting of minds, from the consensus in the core, to the tighter consensus at the frontier, to the recurrent and steady appearance of multiples? It is instructive to return to Kuhn. He may well be remembered best for the epic meeting at Bedford Hall at the University of London in July 1965 where he matched wits with Popper, Lakatos and Feyerabend. Did Bernstein attend? Certainly he never refers to Kuhn. The reason may become clearer below. Perhaps Kuhn’s most controversial claim was that paradigms were incommensurable, which means that there is no rational way for choosing between rival paradigms. This means in turn that choice of paradigm is a subjective decision. If there is no rational way to choose between paradigms, disciplinary consensus is just a collective subjective decision, what Lakatos (1970: 78) derisively called ‘mob psychology’. Why the best epistemic judgement cannot be decided simply by consensual aggregation can be illustrated by the old philosophical problem of Socrates and the Athenians: just because the Athenians voted against Socrates does not make Socrates wrong and the Athenians right. As Gutting (2003: 63) says, this is like making truth dependent on ‘the majority vote at the next epistemic town meeting’. Foucault’s teacher Canguilhem was similarly dismissive about Kuhn’s position which he too said was ‘social psychology’ rather than ‘epistemology’. A social psychological account (e.g. consensual choice of paradigm) is unable to explain ‘how the truth of a theory is to be understood’ (Canguilhem 1998: 13) or to account for scientific advance. Kuhn’s social psychological solution is mimicked in the micro-sociology of knowledge through the insistence that
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scholarly agreement must depend on consensus, and that this consensus must be produced in face-to-face interaction. This is well exemplified by Michelle Lamont’s (2009) recent account of the generation of scholarly agreement in peer review panels reviewing interdisciplinary grant applications. Her explanation of consensus reached is that this can only happen if peers are given opportunity to forge a consensus in face-to-face argument. This is ‘epistemic townhallism’. What then is the alternative? Bachelard and Canguilhem make their point of departure the need to re-capture rationality from the strictures of mere shared opinion. Their recourse is to social norms, not consensus, as the ultimate epistemological category (Canguilhem 1998, 1991). But what is a norm? A norm is a regulative principle that produces continuity for grounds of judgement. All disciplines operate by virtue of a set of internal norms. These render a framework that provides grounds for judging veracity. Veracity is embedded in concepts which must be distinguished from theories. ‘Organization’ and ‘adaptation’ are concepts; ‘evolution’ is a theory. ‘Code’ is a concept: ‘systemicfunctional linguistics’ is a theory. The same concepts can function in different theories, and they can embed improvements on knowledge independently of theories: ‘Concepts bridge the discontinuity between successive paradigms and allow us to speak of truths persisting from theory to theory and of progress in the sense of the increase of persisting truths over time’ (Gutting 2003: 57). Norms thus regulate progressive refinement for a particular community. It is, as Collins said, literally like having a conversation not only with an ‘imaginary audience’ (Collins 1998: 52), but indeed an imaginary conversation with friends and comrades, no matter how competitive you may be with them. A consequence follows from this view. Disciplinary members do not have to meet face-to-face in order to judge from the same norm set: the reality of multiples in far-flung times and places illustrates this clearly enough. With access to the same concept set, it should not be surprising that Darwin and Wallace converged on the theory of evolution at almost exactly the same time. The luckless Kuhn (1970) tried belatedly in his Postscript to change the term paradigm to ‘disciplinary matrix’, a term closer to norms, but it never stuck.8 Pace the micro-sociological tradition in science studies, the intellectual home of aspirational interdisciplinarity, patterns of rational construction depend on impersonal norms that are the regulative basis of organic, not mechanical solidarity. Which is not to say that the effervescent rituals of mechanical solidarity aren’t refreshing and inspiring; they are just not where the norms come from. In a study of academic judgement in anonymous peer panels in law, psychology and history, I have shown that local and international peers rate in substantially similar ways within the ‘disciplinary matrix’ (Muller, forthcoming). They had never had the opportunity to get together to forge the basis for this common judgement. It is a prior institution of regularity constitutive of their disciplinary identity.
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Hanging Together Where does this leave interdisciplinarity? Let us go back to SFL and the Bernsteinians. I wondered idly at the beginning of the chapter whether Bernstein and Halliday had talked themselves onto the same wavelength over coffee or something more convivial. If the answer provided in this chapter has any merit, the answer would be no; they ‘got’ it at a deeper level of intellectual consilience. In the idiom of the paper, they shared certain epistemic norms, which meant that they worked with concepts that had an elective affinity, even if these did different work in their respective explanatory frameworks. What might these be? I assume a background normative consilience – call it critical rationalism for want of a better term – which produces a mutual intellectual sympathy, but I will discuss the consilience here mainly at the level of concepts. Let us take Bernstein’s concept of ‘code’, which models social contexts as semiotic clusters that evoke and require interactional recognition and realization practices across a cline of less specialized and more specialized. The concept of ‘code’ was probably adapted from the Hallidayan concept of ‘text in context’ (Bernstein 1996: 57). The ‘Sydney School’ concept of ‘genre types’ is in turn a schematic structure of recognition/realization practices elaborating and modeling the Bernsteinian code cline (Martin and Rose 2008: 16). Each genre type, therefore, in terms of a ‘generalised structure of abstractions’ it evokes (ibid. p. 228) varies from less to more abstract. So far so good. There are points of incongruence, though. The Bernstein concept of code sketched a single cline from commonsense to uncommonsense. ‘Sydney School’ genre adapts this by describing the cline within both time-structured genres (from personal recounts to narratives and histories and non-time-structured genres (such as reports and explanations, ibid. p. 167)). This means that there are degrees of abstraction within each macrogenre, in both history and science, for example. But where does that leave Bernsteinian knowledge structure? It would not add to the SFL description to label the one ‘vertical’ and the other ‘horizontal’, as Bernstein would do. Why not? Because knowledge structure is describing variations of theoretical subsumptability within the context of knowledge production, not variations of context specificity requiring variations of code/genre modality in the field of knowledge reproduction and acquisition. In other words, codes and genres are designed to elucidate the acquisition of the core of a knowledge field; knowledge structures are designed to elucidate the addition of new knowledge to the knowledge field at its periphery (Cole 1983, 1994). They are both about disciplinarity, just different levels of it. The two different starting points become wonderfully blurred in work in both traditions describing qualification ladders. Let me briefly take my own work and that of Jim Martin and David Rose. Consider my Table 2.1 below (Muller 2009: 218) compared to Figure 2.2, from the work of Martin and Rose (2008: 227).
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Table 2.1 Occupational fields and knowledge, adapted from Muller, 2009: 218. Particular occupations
General occupations
Professions
Research-based work
E.g. Travel agents, hospitality workers
E.g. Engineering trades (fitters, boilermakers), HR operators
E.g. Engineers, lawyers, architects, HR managers, doctors, teachers, social workers
Academics, researchers, new white collar welfare and service workers
Knowledge Largely practical Knowledge
Practical knowledge plus some applied theory
Applied theory plus practical experience
Largely theoretical progression of the discipline
Induction
Apprenticeship
External internship (e.g. pupilage, housemanship)
Internal internship (e.g. postdoctoral work, tenure)
Moderate sectoral regulation (e.g. trade test)
Strong sectoral regulation (e.g. board exams)
Moderate to strong disciplinary regulation (peer review)
Labour market
On-the-jobtraining, some apprenticeship
Regulation Moderate to weak sectoral regulation (e.g. hairdresser’s practical test)
EDUCATION
ECONOMIC PRODUCTION
translating science into industrial production
translating experience of reality into science Post-graduate research
leading to the production of new knowledge
leading to matriculation into ternary science faculties
leading to senior science subjects: biology, chemistry, physics, geology
leading to acquisition of basic scientific knowledge
Undergraduate training
Senior secondary (& TAFE certificate) Years 9--10 (elite)
Years 7--8 (general)
professional training
science subjects
themes of science
supply of research scientists
supply of applied scientists & engineers
supply of qualified technicians & paraprofessionals
supply of skilled operators
designing & managing technology
constructing & maintaining technology
learning to do science supply of de-skilled process workers
leading from commonsense learnt in the home & primary school
developing new scientific processes
operating technology
translating science into curriculum
Figure 2.2 Stages in science education and levels in industry, from J. R. Martin and D. Rose (2008) Genre Relations. Mapping Culture. Equinox, p. 227
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Rose and Martin are extrapolating their abstraction cline into respectively a knowledge hierarchy, a school and university curriculum hierarchy, linked in turn to a hierarchy of the division of labour. Mine, extrapolating from an analysis of knowledge structures, carves the knowledge domain up into four different kinds of common/uncommonsense combinations which translate into four different curriculum and qualification pathways. The important thing about this variant is that the pathways are only partly articulable (see also Gamble 2009). As curriculum, they do not form a single continuum of variation. It seems that Martin and Rose’s does. These extrapolations are clearly affiliated to one another, and we will undoubtedly be able to bring them into alignment with some work. Putting them up here is not to emphasize their differences. Rather, it is to illustrate some features of interdisciplinarity. The first is that we are clearly extrapolating off a common parent stem, namely Bernstein. But while Martin and Rose interleave their adaptation with SFL and discourse semantics, for example, I am extrapolating from a later version of the conceptual family. No wonder we end up in slightly different places. The second is that the more sophisticated the concept, the more it has to be worked on – adapted, extrapolated and recontextualized – to become fecund in a different disciplinary context. Most usually it can’t just be borrowed across ‘as is’. A direct borrowing can have helpful resonances, as in Christie and Macken-Horarik’s (2007) use of systemic-functional ‘verticality’, used, it seems to me, in the sense of a ‘generalised structure of abstraction’ (Rose and Martin 2008: 228). Without careful recontextualization, I suspect borrowing will mostly be explanatorily barren. I would speculate that, in the end, conceptual consilience goes only so far, and that their embedding theories must also eventually be properly understood for continued fruitful intercourse. The SFL community is probably far better versed in Bernsteinian sociology than vice versa. I speak now mainly for the sociologists: without dedicated reading groups to master the rich canopy of SFL, we are not going to go much further with SFL in future beyond the occasional reporting on conceptual consiliences as they arise, as they surely will. It will require dedicated tilling to make them productive. Interdisciplinarity by this account is premised on the prior consilience of epistemological approach between the two traditions, one sociological the other systemic-functional linguistic. It is also premised on a prior epistemic understanding about how the social world, its institutions and agents are regulated and ordered. In other words, though some of the methods will differ, as will the theories, there are several concepts which quilt the two disciplines together. After that, it will take some dedicated recontextualizing work to make them explanatorily productive in their adoptive disciplinary home. This is the labour of interdisciplinarity. I have no doubt
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whatever that there is much to be gained from cultivating this enduring consilience.
Notes 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Much the same happened in the domain of pedagogy: education, hitherto the ‘one best system’ (Tyack 1974), was only named ‘traditional’ in the early twentieth century with Dewey in order to open the discursive space for ‘progressive’ pedagogy, another spectral construct living more in dreams and wishes than in their realization (Muller 2001). This refers to the revolutionary slogan of the radical students in Paris in 1968. It is meant to denote that under the thin veneer of civilization lies untrammelled nature. This odd way with knowledge is to be found also in another milestone text, that of Bloom et al. (1956). Here, in Bloom’s taxonomy, ‘knowledge’ refers to rote facts, and sits at the lowest rung of Bloom’s cognitive hierarchy, below ‘comprehension’, ‘application’, ‘analysis’, ‘synthesis’ and ‘evaluation’. In the only reference to ‘discipline’ in his last book, Bernstein revealingly says: ‘It may be of interest here to contrast Durkheim and Foucault’s concept of discipline. In Foucault discipline equals the death of the subject through the annihilation of transgression in whose act the subject lives. In Durkheim discipline equals life for without it there is no social, no coordination of time, space and purpose. Transgression through its punishment revivifies the social . . . My work follows this approach’ (Bernstein 2000: 206). A strong ‘disciplinary’ lobby in history teaching has mounted a challenge to this assumption: ‘People often assume that history is a “common-sense” subject that lacks the “progression” of ideas to be found in science or maths. This may be a mistake. Research over the past 30 years suggests both that history may be counterintuitive, and that we may be able to talk seriously about progression in key ideas about the discipline’ (Lee and Howson 2009: 219). They are pointing here neither to facts nor skills, but to something they call ‘historical consciousness’. They might do well to refer to genre theory (Martin and Rose 2008). ‘Codification refers to the consolidation of empirical knowledge into succinct and interdependent theoretical formulations. The different sciences and the various specialities within them differ in the extent to which they are codified’ (Merton 1992: 507). ‘We have an example in my university of the kind of thing that can result from top-down interdisciplinary pressures from the administration, a course in “poetry and math”. It is the darling of the deans et al., who love to cite it when the topic of interdisciplinarity comes up. What goes on in this course? One half of each class is taken up by an English prof discussing a poem and the other half by a math prof discussing a mathematical concept; despite the possibilities one can think of, no interchange between the two halves takes place’. From a weblog on ‘Disciplinarity’, posted by Mel Wiebe,
[email protected], posted 7 August 2001. In his Foreword to Ludwig Fleck’s (1979) late published classic, Kuhn draws attention to the difference between what he called ‘scientific networks’ and what
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Fleck in the continental rationalist manner called ‘thought collectives’. Kuhn calls these rather disparagingly ‘hypostatised fictions’.
References Abbott, A. (2001), Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Bernstein, B. (1990), The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse, vol 4, Class, Codes & Control. London: Routledge. — (1996), Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. London: Taylor & Francis. — (2000), Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity (revised edn). Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Bloom, B., Engelhart, M., Furst, E., Hill, W. and Krathwohl, D. (1956), Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, vol 1, The Cognitive Domain. New York: McKay Publishers. Boghossian, P. (2006), Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bourdieu, P. (2004), Science of Science and Reflexivity (trans. R. Nice). Cambridge: Polity Press. Canguilhem, G. (1991), The Normal and the Pathological (intro. M. Foucault). New York: Zone Books. — (1998), Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Chandler, J. (2009), Introduction: Doctrines, disciplines, discourse, departments. Critical Inquiry 35: 729–746. Christie, F. and Macken-Horarik (2007), Building verticality in subject English, in F. Christie and J. R. Martin (eds), Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives. London: Continuum. Cole, S. (1983), The hierarchy of the sciences? American Journal of Sociology 89(1): 111–139. — (1994), Why sociology doesn’t make progress like the natural sciences. Sociological Forum 9(2): 133–154. Collins, H. and Evans, R. (2002), The third wave of science studies: Studies of expertise and experience. Social Studies of Science 32(2): 235–296. Collins, R. (1998), The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Durkheim, E. (1973), On Morality and Society: Selected Writings. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. — (1977), The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and Development of Secondary Education in France. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. — (1983; 1955), Pragmatism and Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ensor, P. (2001), Education programme planning in South Africa: Three institutional case studies, in M. Breier (ed.), Curriculum Restructuring in Higher Education in Post-apartheid South Africa. Pretoria: Centre for Science Development. Fleck, L. (1979), Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (trans. T. Trenn and R. Merton, foreword T. Kuhn). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1971), Foucault responds/ 2. Diacritics 1(2): 60. — (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock Publications.
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— (1981), The order of discourse, in R. Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Galison, P. (1997), Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: The Chicago University Press. Gamble, J. (2009), Knowledge and practice in curriculum and assessment, Pretoria: UMALUSI. Gutting, G. (2003), Thomas Kuhn and French philosophy of science, in T. Nickles (ed.), Thomas Kuhn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliday, M. and Martin, J. (1993), Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. London: The Falmer Press. Hasan, R. (2005), Language, Society and Consciousness: The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan. London: Equinox. Hunt, L. (1994), The virtues of disciplinarity. Eighteenth Century Studies 28(1): 1–7. Krishnan, A. (2009), What are academic disciplines? Some observations on the disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity debate. National Centre for Research Methods Working Paper, University of Southampton. Kuhn, T. S. (1970; 1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (revised edn). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lakatos, I. (1970), The methodology of scientific research programmes, in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lamont, M. (2009), How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lee, P. and Howson, J. (2009), ‘Two out of five did not know that Henry V111 had five wives’: History education, historical literacy and historical consciousness, in L. Symcox and A. Wilschut (eds), History Standards: The Problem of the Canon and the Future of Teaching History. Charlotte: Information Age Publishers, Inc. Lloyd, G. (2009), Disciplines in the Making: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning and Innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, J. (2007), Construing knowledge, in F. Christie and J. Martin (eds), Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives. London: Continuum. Martin, J. and Rose, D. (2008), Genre Relations: The Mapping of Culture. London: Equinox. Maton, K. and Moore, R. (2010) (eds), Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education: Coalitions of the Mind. London: Continuum. Merton, R. K. (1992), The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. — (2001; 1970), Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (revised edn). New York: Howard Fertig. Messer-Davidow, E., Shumway, D. and Sylvan, D. (1993) (eds), Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Moore, R. (2010), Knowledge structures and the canon; a preference for judgments, in K. Maton and R. Moore (eds), Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education: Coalitions of the Mind. London: Continuum. Moran, T. (2001), Interdisciplinarity: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge.
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Muller, J. (2001), Progressivism redux: Ethos, policy, pathos, in A. Kraak and M. Young (eds), Education in Retrospect: Policy and Implementation since 1990. Pretoria: HSRC Press. — (2007), On splitting hairs: Hierarchy, knowledge and the school curriculum, in F. Christie and J. Martin (eds), Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives. London: Continuum. — (2008), La tension essentielle: essai sur la sociology du savoir, in D. Frandji and P. Vitale (eds), Actualité de Basil Bernstein: Savoir, Pédagogie et Société. Rennes: University of Rennes Press, 182–191. — (2009), Forms of knowledge and curriculum coherence. Journal of Education and Work, 22(3): 203–224. — (forthcoming), Social life in disciplines. Norris, C. (2000), Minding the Gap: Epistemology & Philosophy of Science in the Two Traditions. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. — (2006), On Truth & Meaning: Language, Logic & the Grounds of Belief. London: Continuum. Price, D. de Solla (1971), Some remarks on elitism in information and the invisible college phenomenon in science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 22: 74–75. — (1986), Little Science, Big Science and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press. Shapin, S. (2008), The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. Chicago: The Chicago University Press. Steiner, G. (1971), Steiner responds to Foucault. Diacritics 1(2): 59. Tyack, D. (1974), The One Best System. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Young, M. and Muller, J. (2007), Truth and truthfulness in the sociology of educational knowledge. Theory & Research in Education 5(2): 173–201. Zuccala, A. (2006), Modeling the invisible college. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 57(2): 152–168.
Chapter 3
Bridging Troubled Waters: Interdisciplinarity and What Makes it Stick J. R. Martin
Until my association with Halliday in the 1960s, and especially, until I had the possibility of holding discussions with Ruqaiya Hasan . . . I was unable to find a means for describing the texts which were indicators of codes. This . . . required a theory whose descriptors . . . placed language in the context of a social semiotic. As Halliday points out . . . there is no dichotomy between langue and parole. There is system potential and textual actualisation: one not two different orders. It became possible for me to think about linguistics in sociological terms and sociology in linguistic terms. Although the code theory developed towards the understanding of the pedagogising of symbolic control, Halliday’s liberation of the study of language continued to provide a point of creative dialogue and tension. Bernstein (1995: 398)
Interdisciplinarity For some time now interdisciplinarity has been a fashionable theme, especially for those managing disciplinarity (from both within and without academe) and also for those needing help with real-world problems of various kinds – educational, clinical, forensic, therapeutic etc. The vision driving this fashion argues for research endeavours whose products are in some sense more than the sum of their disciplinary parts; the undermining reality may in fact entail a loss of disciplinarity as incommensurable knowledge structures in vertical1 discourse collapse into horizontal discourse in order to achieve common ground – a problem besetting applied linguistics in many forms (Martin 2000). The dialogue between systemic functional linguistics (hereafter SFL) and Bernstein’s sociology of education (hereafter social realism2) has, I believe, avoided such pitfalls over at least three phases of dialogue – in relation to coding orientation and the enactment of meaning in relation to gender and class; in relation to pedagogic discourse and the design of democratic literacy pedagogy and curriculum; and in relation to knowledge structure and the
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semiotic resources underpinning vertical discourse. In this chapter I’ll touch on the first of these and then briefly explore the second and third phases of interaction, with a view to understanding something about what makes interdisciplinarity a productive exercise in spite of the intellectual burden (and excitement) of learning to theorize in another discipline’s terms. Finally I imagine how a recently developing phase, around concerns with community and identity, might proceed.
Disciplinarity Before proceeding further it is necessary to clarify how, following Bernstein, disciplinarity will be conceived here. First his distinction between singulars and regions: A discourse as a singular is a discourse which has appropriated a space to give itself a unique name . . . for example physics, chemistry, sociology, psychology . . . these singulars produced a discourse which was about only themselves . . . had very few external references other than in terms of themselves . . . created the field of the production of knowledge . . . in the twentieth century, particularly in the last five decades . . . the very strong classification of singulars has undergone a change, and what we have now . . . is a regionalisation of knowledge . . . a recontextualising of singulars . . . for example, in medicine, architecture, engineering, information science . . . any regionalisation of knowledge implies a recontextualising principle: which singulars are to be selected, what knowledge within the singular is to be introduced and related? . . . Regions are the interface between the field of the production of knowledge and any field of practice . . . (Bernstein 1996: 23) I’ll use the term discipline to refer to singulars below. This means that we need to be wary of singulars with hybrid, perhaps even hyphenated, names such as those proliferating in the discipline of linguistics: sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, text-linguistics etc. In Labovian sociolinguistics for example there is no sociology. What we find is simply the recognition of phonological and morphological variation (different ways of saying the ‘same’ thing) depending on common sense notions of style (formal/informal) and dialect (mainly generation, ethnicity). In linguistics the hybrid names and hyphens simply reflect the need to weaken the classification of what counts as language for linguists positioning themselves in relation to the narrow confines of the formalist hegemony within the discipline; the naming does not usually indicate an interdisciplinary exercise. In this regard we need as well to be wary of disciplines whose singularity rests on shaky ground. Is it the case for example that formal and functional linguistics constitute a single discipline, or, as Muller has suggested (in Christie et al. 2007), are there two singulars, one taking native speaker judgements of grammaticality as data, to be explained in relation to
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neurobiological constraints resulting from a putative genetic mutation, and the other focusing on naturally occurring texts, to be explained in relation to the social system they enact? For purposes of this chapter I’ll maintain linguistics as a disciplinary singular, but gaze at interdisciplinarity from a functional linguistic perspective. (See Muller this volume for related discussion.) What then might we mean in terms of productive interdisciplinary dialogue across singulars, taking the SFL/social realism dialogue as an exemplar? As noted above there are several phases to consider: – – – –
semantic variation & coding orientation (60s; 80s) genre-based literacy & pedagogic discourse (80s–90s . . .) field & knowledge structure (00s . . .) individuation/affiliation & identity (00s . . .)
What happens when singulars enter into dialogue, and start talking, almost certainly from disciplinary margins – since disciplinary centres don’t need to bother (they can afford to talk to themselves)? Judging from the SFL/social realism experience, conversation is fostered by having a problem with which both disciplines are concerned, the ability to trespass on each other’s domain by providing complementary perspectives on comparable phenomena, and possession of a discursive technology which can make visible things the other discipline wants to know. As the Bernstein quote with which I opened this chapter indicates, the semantic variation/coding orientation phase in this dialogue has been very well documented (Bernstein 1995; Halliday 1973, 1995; Hasan3 2005, 2009) and for reasons of space, and because I was not myself directly involved, I’ll pass over it here. As Bernstein writes therein, ‘It became possible for me to think about linguistics in sociological terms and sociology in linguistic terms.’ Note in passing what is not implied here, namely, the establishment of a common metalanguage above and beyond linguistics and sociology (an interlanguage or ‘pidgin’ if you will). Rather what is at stake is provocation – the generative tension of rethinking one’s own discipline in alter-disciplinary terms. Productive interdisciplinarity in other words enriches disciplinarity; it doesn’t water knowledge down.
Genre-based Literacy and Pedagogic Discourse My own first close encounter with disciplinarity of the Bernstein kind grew out of my work in educational linguistics, specifically the genre-based literacy initiatives of what has come to be known as the Sydney School (for general reviews of this action research see Christie 1992; Martin 1993a, 1998b, 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2009a; Rothery 1996). During the 1980s, we were developing a pedagogy for teaching writing in which teachers assumed an authoritative role and interacted in various ways with students at various stages of the teaching/ learning cycle (a canonical version of which is outlined in Figure 3. 1).
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Figure 3.1 Sydney School teaching/learning cycle
Bernstein’s notions of visible and invisible pedagogy, together with his concepts of strong and weak classification and framing, gave us the conceptual tools we needed to reflect on the various stages in this cycle – in order to better ‘theorise a model of teaching and learning which uses explicit knowledge about language as the basis for double classification and double framing and to propose this as the basis for post-progressive developments in educational theory and practice’ (Martin and Rothery 1988). This pedagogy has continued to develop in relation to different sectors of education (Martin 2006a; Martin and Rose 2007b), with classification and framing providing useful tools for fine-tuning each recontextualization (Martin 1998a). As our work became better known I continued to be puzzled by the vehement reactions it produced and as a linguist I could not see the class basis of the confrontations. We knew as an issue of social justice that we were attempting to redistribute the literacy resources of the culture, so that working class, migrant and indigenous learners excluded by traditional pedagogies and further marginalized by progressive ones could access the powerful forms of discourse they needed to renegotiate their position in society. But until studying Bernstein we did not understand the traditional and progressive debate as a struggle over education between factions of the middle class, and our own ‘othered’ position in relation to these debates. Bernstein’s topology of pedagogies immeasurably
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clarified our stance and the friction we caused and heartened us greatly in our determination to make our political project succeed. His topology, Figure 3.2 below, has a vertical dimension indicating ‘whether the theory of instruction privileged relations internal to the individual, where the focus would be intraindividual, or . . . relations between social groups (inter-group)’ and a horizontal dimension indicating ‘whether the theory articulated a pedagogic practice emphasising a logic of acquisition or . . . a logic of transmission’ (Bernstein 1990: 213–214). Although unaware at the time of our work, Bernstein’s characterization of the lower right hand quadrant as ‘a radical realization of an apparently conservative pedagogic practice’ and his comment that the ‘top right-hand quadrant is regarded as conservative but has often produced very innovative and radical acquirers’ (Bernstein 1990: 73) imagined our observations and experiences perfectly. Over time we adapted his diagram along the lines of the topology in Figure 3.2, christening our quadrant as ‘subversive’ because of its attempt to challenge social order by giving away the keys to knowledge then almost exclusively appropriated by agents of symbolic control. Bernstein’s work on pedagogic discourse also provided us with a model for re-interpreting the interplay of regulative and instructional discourse in our teaching/learning cycle. Drawing on Christie’s work (e.g. Christie 2002) Martin 2008a notes that regulative discourse was in fact projecting or giving voice to two instructional discourses, one recontextualizing linguistics (knowledge about language) and the other recontextualizing disciplines as subject
change Intra-individual invisible pedagogy
visible pedagogy
Progressive pedagogy (e.g. Rousseau, Piaget, Chomsky, Goodman)
Behaviourist pedagogy (e.g. Skinner, phonics, basal readers)
Acquisition
liberal
conservative
[competence]
radical
subversive
Critical pedagogic theories (e.g. Freire, Illich, Giroux)
Transmission [performance]
Social/psychological pedagogic theories (e.g. Vygotsky, Bruner, Rothery, Martin, Rose)
Inter-group
Figure 3.2 Sydney School adaptation of Bernstein’s topology of pedagogies
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Disciplinarity
areas (math, science, history etc.). Rose in press further develops this dialogue in relation to SFL register theory. As far as this phase of interdisciplinarity was concerned I have no doubt that linguists were learning to think sociologically about educational linguistics. But the dialogue was pretty much a one-way street since social realists were apparently not aware of our Sydney School work until at least 1996 when Christie organized the symposium in Melbourne which gave rise to the collection of papers in Christie 1999.
Field and Knowledge Structure For two-way dialogue we need to turn to a further phase of SFL/social realism interdisciplinarity, which brought scholars from the two traditions together in symposia at the University of Sydney in 2004 and 2008. Christie and Martin 2007 reflects discussion from the first of these meetings (see especially the contributions by Maton and Muller, Martin, Muller and the ‘Taking stock’ discussion involving Christie, Martin, Maton and Muller at the end of the book), and this volume arises from the second. Significantly Maton’s emigration to Australia in 2005 brought Sydney School scholars into ongoing first-hand contact with social realism for the first time. The dialogue we are focusing on here has to do with SFL’s conception of field (after Martin 1992, 1993b, 2007a, 2007b) as a set of activity sequences oriented to some global institutional purpose (including the taxonomies of participants involved in these activities) and social realism’s conception of knowledge structure, evolving out of Bernstein’s ongoing concern with the complementarity of common sense and uncommon sense discourse (Bernstein 1996/2000; Maton and Muller 2007). Muller 2007 in fact notes the similarity between Martin’s 1992 provisional taxonomy of fields (reproduced as Figure 3.3 below) and Bernstein’s work on horizontal and vertical discourse. There I was attempting to scaffold SFL research on school and workplace discourse (Christie and Martin 1997; see also the references in Martin 2009b), foregrounding context dependency, especially in relation to apprenticeship, and within decontextualized discourse, foregrounding the pragmatic purpose of the discourse (proposals for action or propositions about the world) and the degree of technicality used to construe uncommon sense (Halliday and Martin 1993; Martin and Veel 1998; Martin and Wodak 2003). Bernstein makes comparable distinctions between horizontal and vertical discourse, and within vertical discourse between hierarchical and horizontal knowledge structures (outlined in Figure 3.4). His characterizations of these discourses are reprised below, and have stimulated considerable re-articulation in SFL as far as the social semiotic description of disciplines is concerned
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domestic (guidance)
sport
oral transmission (doing)
recreational ('coaching)
hobby
specialised (participation) trades (apprenticing) administration (co-operation written transmission (studying)
humanities exploration (instruction)
social science science Uncommon sense
Figure 3.3 Martin’s 1992 taxonomy of fields
hierarchical knowledge structure
horizontal discourse
vertical discourse horizontal knowledge structure
L1 L2 L3 L4 L5... Ln
Figure 3.4 Bernstein’s 1996/2000 reformulation of common and uncommon sense
(compare for example the monologically SFL papers in Christie and Martin 1997 with the more dialogic stance of those in Christie and Martin 2007): A Horizontal discourse entails a set of strategies which are local, segmentally organised, context specific and dependent, for maximising encounters
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Disciplinarity with persons and habitats. . . . This form has a group of well-known features: it is likely to be oral, local, context dependent and specific, tacit, multi-layered and contradictory across but not within contexts. (Bernstein 2000: 157) . . . a Vertical discourse takes the form of a coherent, explicit and systematically principled structure, hierarchically organised as in the sciences, or it takes the form of a series of specialised languages with specialised modes of interrogation and specialised criteria for the production and circulation of texts as in the social sciences and humanities. (Bernstein 2000: 157) . . . A hierarchical knowledge structure is ‘a coherent, explicit and systematically principled structure, hierarchically organised’ which ‘attempts to create very general propositions and theories, which integrate knowledge at lower levels, and in this way shows underlying uniformities across an expanding range of apparently different phenomena’ (Bernstein 1999: 161–162) . . . A horizontal knowledge structure is defined as ‘a series of specialised languages with specialised modes of interrogation and criteria for the construction and circulation of texts’. (Bernstein 1999: 162)
To these distinctions Bernstein adds his conception of strong or weak, internal or external grammars. With reference to internal grammar, Muller 2007 proposes the term verticality to describe how theories progress – via ever more integrative or general propositions or via the introduction of a new language which constructs a ‘fresh perspective, a new set of questions, a new set of connections, and an apparently new problematic, and most importantly a new set of speakers’ (Bernstein 1996: 162). Borrowing Bernstein’s image of the triangle for hierarchical knowledge structures and iterating languages for horizontal ones, Muller’s conception of verticality is schematized in Figure 3.5 below. With reference to Bernstein’s external grammar Muller proposes the term grammaticality4 to describe how theoretical statements deal with their empirical predicates (cf. Bernstein’s strong/weak external grammar). The stronger the grammaticality of a language, the more stably it is able to generate empirical correlates and the more unambiguous because more restricted the field of referents. Hierarchical knowledge structures in other words test theories against data; horizontal knowledge structures use theory to interpret texts. See Figure 3.6.
L1 L 2 L 3 L 4 L5 L 6
L6+1
Figure 3.5 Verticality in relation to progress for hierarchical vs horizontal knowledge structures
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data
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texts
Figure 3.6 Grammaticality in relation to empirical correlates for hierarchical vs horizontal knowledge structures (testing vs interpreting)
hierarchical knowledge structure physics
biology
science
horizontal knowledge structure linguistics
sociology
social science
history
literary studies
humanities
L L L L L L L...
Figure 3.7 Vertical discourse as complementarity and cline
Wignell, in his presentation at the 2004 symposium, (but not in Wignell 2007) suggested that the social sciences might best be conceived as warring triangles since they tend to model themselves on science rather than humanities (where the drive to integration via ever more general models and propositions is much less strong). Although the warring triangles battle institutionally and epistemologically for hegemony, and often single theories become dominant, successfully marginalizing rivals, no one theory ever manages to take over the whole discipline and reigning theories come and go. It appears that in social science verticality and grammaticality are simply not strong enough to enable theoretical integration in relation to the complex social phenomena being described. Rather the social sciences ‘progress’ like the horizontal knowledge structures they are, by adding new triangles with new sets of speakers (e.g. various functional theories such as SFL, Role and Reference Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Functional Grammar in linguistics, or various gazes on the past we might denominate as Traditional, Marxist, Feminist, Queer, Postcolonial in history). Wignell’s construal of vertical discourse as more of a cline than an opposition or complementarity is outlined in Figure 3.7 above, filling in some exemplary singulars ranged along the scale. Muller 2007 discusses the continuity vs. complementarity issue in relation to the question of whether one is emphasizing semiotic convergence (continuity) or social distribution (complementarity).
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To date one of SFL’s main concerns in this dialogue has been to identify grammatical metaphor as the critical linguistic resource used to construe vertical discourse (Halliday 1998, 2004, 2008; Halliday and Matthiessen 1999; Martin 1989, 1993b, c; Simon-Vandenbergen et al. 2003), with respect to both taxonomy (uncommon sense classification) and explanation (reasoning inside the clause). Dialogue around grammatical metaphor, the ways different knowledge structures use it to construe hierarchical and horizontal discourse and the challenge of explaining it to non-linguists has inspired recent work by Maton (Chapter 3 of this volume) on theory building by Bernstein and Bourdieu (as part of a sociological interpretation of how knowledge structures come to be valued within and across disciplines). So let’s glance briefly here at SFL’s account of grammatical metaphor and then Maton’s sociological recontextualization of comparable phenomena. Bernstein, discussing his reservoir/repertoire perspective on the allocation of semiotic resources exemplifies, then interprets sociologically (beginning Now . . .) as follows: Consider a situation where a small holder meets another and complains that what he/she had done every year with great success, this year failed completely. The other says that when this happened he/she finds that this ‘works’. He/she then outlines the successful strategy. /// Now any restriction to circulation and exchange reduces effectiveness. Any restriction specialises, classifies and privatises knowledge. Stratification procedures produce distributive rules which control the flow of procedures from reservoir to repertoire. Thus both Vertical and Horizontal discourses are likely to operate with distributive rules which set up positions of defence and challenge. (Bernstein 2000: 158) His example consists of three sentences, which can be broken down into 9 ranking5 clauses (including 1 embedded clause, enclosed in double square brackets); so on average the sentences involve 3 clauses containing just over 2 content words (i.e. lexical items committing specific experiential meaning), underlined below. Consider a situation [2] where a small holder meets another [3] and complains [1] that [[what he/she had done every year with great success]], this year failed completely. [7] The other says [1] that when this happened [1] he/she finds [1] that this ‘works’. [1] He/she then outlines the successful strategy. [3]
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His interpretation consists of 4 sentences, each consisting of one ranking clause (including 2 embedded clauses); on average these contain 7.5 content words. Now any restriction [to circulation and exchange] reduces effectiveness. [5] Any restriction specializes, classifies and privatizes knowledge. [5] Stratification procedures produce distributive rules [[which control the flow of procedures from reservoir to repertoire]]. [10] This both Vertical and Horizontal discourses are likely to operate with distributive rules [[which set up positions of defence and challenge]]. [10] In Halliday’s terms (e.g. 2008) the example reflects the complexity of spoken language – relatively intricate clause combinations with sparse lexical commitment; conversely the interpretation reflects the complexity of written language – relatively simple sentences with dense lexicalization. Every reader feels the change of gears, from easy to follow everyday discourse to the challenging verticality of horizontal knowledge structure. Density and intricacy however are but symptoms of a deeper qualitative contrast between the example and interpretation, namely the relation between lexicogrammar and discourse semantics. In the example, processes are for the most part realized verbally (underlined below); and logical connections between processes are realized conjunctively (italics below). Consider a situation where a small holder meets another and complains that what he/she had done every year with great success, this year failed completely. The other says that when this happened he/she finds that this ‘works’. He/she then outlines the successful strategy. The exception has to do with achieving expected outcomes (the process ‘succeed’), which is twice realized nominally (in the service of evaluation it would appear): great success, successful strategy. Setting these aside, nominals in the example are fairly concrete, including 6 realizations of the holder (a small holder, another, he/she, The other, he/she, He/she), 2 temporal locations (every year, this year), 2 fairly general abstractions (situation, strategy), the two underspecified instances of text reference (this, this). Rhetorically speaking Bernstein has constructed an example accessible to a wide range of English readers (including linguists unschooled in his sociological discourse). Bernstein’s interpretation on the other hand is likely to stop unacculturated linguists in their tracks. None of his nominal groups refer to entities from horizontal discourse one might hope to touch, taste, feel, hear or see (embedded phrases enclosed in single square brackets below): any restriction [to circulation and exchange] circulation exchange
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Disciplinarity effectiveness any restriction knowledge stratification procedures distributive rules [[which control the flow of procedures from reservoir to repertoire]] the flow [of procedures] [from reservoir to repertoire] procedures reservoir repertoire both Vertical and Horizontal discourses distributive rules [[which set up positions of defence and challenge]] positions [of defence and challenge] defence challenge
There are 10 nominal groups realizing processes (restriction, circulation, exchange, restriction, flow, defence, challenge; stratification procedures, distributive rules, distributive rules6) and 1 realizing a quality (effectiveness). In addition there are 4 nominal groups realizing technical terms (reservoir, repertoire, Vertical and Horizontal discourses) and 3 realizing abstractions (knowledge, procedures, positions). So what was an exception in Bernstein’s example (the realization of ‘succeed’ as success/ successful and the abstractions situation and strategy) becomes the norm in his interpretation where most of his nominal groups are realizing processes and qualities not participants – and the 7 participants that are present are nonsensory ones rather than concrete people, places or things (i.e. technical terms and abstractions). Neither can the verbal groups in Bernstein’s interpretation be taken at face value. All relate process, qualities and technical terms and abstractions to one another; there are no concrete people or things affecting one another: Now any restriction to circulation and exchange reduces effectiveness. Any restriction specializes, classifies and privatizes knowledge. Stratification procedures produce distributive rules which control the flow of procedures from reservoir to repertoire. Thus both Vertical and Horizontal discourses are likely to operate with distributive rules which set up positions of defence and challenge. Rather the verbal groups (underlined below) realize agentive relationships between processes, qualities, abstractions and technical terms. Their function is to fine-tune cause-and-effect relationships relating sociological entities to one another – Agent affecting Medium in Halliday’s terms. And the nominal groups realizing Agent and Medium enable Bernstein to compile semantic processes, qualities and technical and abstract participants into precisely the cause and
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effect he wants to relate precisely to one another – via iteration (e.g. circulation and exchange) and embedding (e.g. the flow [of procedures] [from reservoir to repertoire]). With cause realized inside the clause the only work left for conjunctions to do is to realize rhetorical connections (technically internal conjunctive relations) between the stages of Bernstein’s explanation (between his example and interpretation – Now, and to signal his culminative move to a deeper level of theorization – Thus). Now any restriction to circulation and exchange [Agent] reduces effectiveness [Medium] Any restriction [Agent] specializes, classifies and privatizes knowledge [Medium] Stratification procedures [Agent] produce distributive rules which control the flow of procedures from reservoir to repertoire. [Medium] (distributive rules) which [Agent] control the flow of procedures from reservoir to repertoire [Medium] Thus both Vertical and Horizontal discourses [Agent] are likely to operate with distributive rules which set up positions of defence and challenge. [Medium] (distributive rules) which set up positions of defence and challenge What we see then is the familiar logogenetic drift from congruent exemplificatory discourse in which processes are realized verbally, participants nominally, qualities adjectivally and logical relations conjunctively to grammatically metaphorical interpretative discourse in which processes, technical and abstract participants and qualities are realized nominally and logical relations are realized verbally in Agent Process Medium structures. An outline of the shift in the relationships between discourse semantics and lexicogrammar from example to interpretation is provided in Figure 3. 8. The pay-off as far as construing vertical discourse is concerned is two-fold. On the one hand it enables uncommon sense explanation, via cause in the clause and flexibly assembled causes and effects, as just illustrated. On the other it
Disciplinarity
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quality
quality relator
participant
relator participant
adjectival
adjectival conjunctive
process
nominal
verbal
conjunctive process
nominal
verbal
Figure 3.8 Rhetorical drift from congruence to grammatical metaphor in Bernstein’s explanation
enables the construal of uncommon sense technical concepts (via definitions) which can then be arranged into specialized classification or compositional taxonomies (e.g. Figure 3.3 above) and theoretical superstructure of other kinds (Figures 3.1–2, 3.4–7 above), and re-deployed in explanations (as were ‘Vertical and Horizontal discourses’ in the explanation just reviewed). Bernstein’s definitions of horizontal and vertical discourse were introduced above. Like all definitions they relate one nominal group to another (typically7 a Token to a Value in an identifying relational clause in Halliday’s terms). Just as grammatical metaphor enables just the right consolidation of meaning as Agent and Medium for explanations, so too for Token and Value in definitions: . . . a Vertical discourse (Token) takes the form of (=) a coherent, explicit and systematically principled structure, hierarchically organized as in the sciences, (Value) or it (Token) takes the form of (=) a series of specialized languages with specialized modes of interrogation and specialized criteria for the production and circulation of texts as in the social sciences and humanities. (Value) A Horizontal discourse (Token) entails (=) a set of strategies which are local, segmentally organized, context specific and dependent, for maximizing encounters with persons and habitats. (Value) Note how grammatical metaphor is appropriated in these examples to condense meaning as technical Tokens (a word or two long) and to accumulate relevant meanings in Values (which can be very complex, including considerable
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embedding and grammatical metaphor, and additional already familiar technicality). One important function of technicality is to kill off grammatical metaphor, distilling metaphorical discourse as compact entities for purposes of theory building. Seen in these terms technicality is an important linguistic reflex of Muller’s verticality. The more vertical the knowledge structure, the more it will tend to deploy technicality to construe additional technicality. Note how the following definition of English Subject in SFL distils relationships among 11 additional technical terms, familiarity with which is assumed in a definition of this kind (cf. Bernstein’s less technical Values above): The Subject (Token) is the interpersonal clause function which changes sequence with the Finite to change mood between declarative and interrogative and is referred to by an anaphoric pronoun in mood tags. (Value) Dialogue around grammatical metaphor and technicality and the ways different knowledge structures use one or both to construe hierarchical and horizontal discourse, and the challenge of explaining these phenomena to non-linguists has inspired recent work by Maton (Chapter 3, this volume) on theory building in the work of Bernstein and Bourdieu (as part of a sociological interpretation of how knowledge structures come to be valued within and across disciplines). As part of his Legitimation Code Theory he proposes a number of principles, one of which concerns semantics and involves with social/symbolic referent relations. His technicalizing distillations are: Semantic gravity (SG) refers to the degree to which meaning is dependent on its context. Semantic gravity may be relatively stronger (+) or weaker (–). When semantic gravity is stronger (SG+), meaning is more closely related to its context; when weaker, meaning is less dependent on its context. Semantic density (SD) refers to the degree to which meaning is condensed within symbols (a term, concept, phrase, expression, gesture, etc). Where semantic density is stronger (SD+), the symbol has more meaning condensed within it; where semantic density is weaker (SD–), the symbol condenses less meaning. (As I discuss later, what has been condensed is not necessarily an empirical description – it can be, for example, a feeling). (Maton, this volume) Concerned that his model be applied to unfolding discourse and action, Maton also adopts a logogenetic perspective with respect to processes of strengthening or weakening semantic gravity and density: One may also talk of processes of weakening semantic gravity, as one’s understanding is lifted above the concrete particulars of a specific context or case,
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Disciplinarity and strengthening semantic gravity, as abstract or generalised ideas are made more concrete; and of strengthening semantic density, such as when a lengthy description is ‘packaged up or condensed into a term or brief expression, and weakening semantic density, when an abstract idea is fleshed out with empirical detail.’ (Maton, this volume)
Comparing degrees of verticality in Bernstein and Bourdieu, he then comments on the relative depth of Bernstein’s theorizing (as schematized by Maton in Figure 3.2, this volume): For example, Bernstein’s analysis of progressive pedagogy (1977, chapter 6) begins with an empirical description of what he argues are the six fundamental characteristics of a progressive classroom (see Figure 1). The structuring features are then theorised in terms of relations between different forms of ‘criteria’, ‘hierarchy’, and ‘sequencing rules’, which are condensed into a distinction between ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ pedagogies (see Moore 2006). Their underlying principles are in turn abstracted and condensed in terms of classification and framing (-C, -F) . . . (Maton, this volume) If we turn this analysis back on the Bernstein explanation of reservoir and repertoire analysed above, we arrive at an analysis in which semantic gravity weakens and semantic density strengthens from example to interpretation (Figure 3.9 below). This of course resonates strongly with the SFL grammatical metaphor and technicality analysis presented above, which was itself in part responsible for Maton’s extension of his Legitimation Code Theory subsequent to his first-hand encounters with the Sydney school.
Figure 3.9 Unfolding semantic gravity and density from example to interpretation
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Significantly however, Maton’s perspective provokes reconsideration by linguists of the semiotics of vertical discourse, since there is no simple mapping of gravity and density to grammatical metaphor and technicality. There are various ways for example in which meaning can be more or less closely related to context. Exophoric reference to the material situation setting may bind phoric8 items whose meaning has to be resolved through sensory access (visual access in the example below): A small holder met another and complained that what she had successfully done every year, this year failed completely. She met him and complained that she’d used this variety successfully in that field, but this year that variety failed completely in that one. Alternatively, the resolution of phoric items may depend on shared information based on membership in a specific community (e.g. recognizing names of people, agencies and specific places below): A small holder met another and complained that what she had successfully done every year, this year failed completely. Barbara Marshall met Barnaby Jones and complained that Monsanto variety approved by Co-Extra had failed completely in the back paddock. We can also decontextualize a message by changing its nominal and verbal deixis from specific participants and events to generic ones: A small holder met another and complained that what she had successfully done every year, this year failed completely. Small holders often meet one another and complain that what they do successfully every year, some years fails completely. Experiential grammatical metaphor can have a comparable decontextualizing effect as processes lose their temporality as they are reformulated as generic nominal groups: Small holders often meet one another and complain that what he/she does successfully every year with great success, some years fails completely. Small holders often meet and exchange complaints about success and failure.
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This effect may be compounded, further deflating contextual dependency, when logical metaphors are deployed to relate two nominalized processes to one another through ‘habitual’ verbalizations: Small holders often meet one another and complain that what he/she does every year with great success, some years fails completely. Farmers’ successful strategies in some years do not result in the same success every year. Turning from gravity to density, we can vary the amount of meaning committed, specifying for example the kind of holder involved and the particular strategy under review: A small holder met another and complained that what she had done every year with great success, this year failed completely. A small wheat farmer met another and complained that planting genetically modified varieties had increased yield every year, but this year had not. And we can push the density up still further by technicalizing the genetic modification deployed: A small wheat farmer met another and complained that planting new genetically modified varieties had increased yield every year, but this year had not. Our results are in agreement with the hypothesis that the transgenes we used to increase wheat defence to fungal pathogens do not interfere with the flavonoid biosynthesis pathway.9 Finally, as Maton (2008, to appear), indicates, we need to keep in mind the axiological loading with which even apparently experiential meanings are charged. The political ramifications of the difference between the specification of new genetically modified varieties and new disease resistant varieties below alert us to the semantic condensation of evaluation in discourse: A small holder met another and complained that what she had successfully done every year, this year failed completely. A small wheat farmer met another and complained that planting new genetically modified varieties had increased yield every year, but this year had not. A small wheat farmer met another and complained that planting new disease resistant varieties had increased yield every year, but this year had not. As we can see Maton’s categories involve a number of linguistic variables, not all of them well understood. Certain dimensions have been relatively well explored
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in linguistics – specific vs. generic reference, punctual vs habitual behaviour and technicalization for example; but for others, such as the amount of meaning committed in a text, and the iconization processes whereby axiological meaning is charged and experiential meaning discharged, research is barely underway (Martin 2008a, 2010). And the issue of how exactly to quantify shifts in density or gravity in linguistic terms is an extremely challenging issue. In a sense Maton has tossed back the gauntlet which SFL perhaps considered it had thrown down social realism way. And that of course is what interdisciplinarity at its best is supposed to do – make each discipline rethink what it thought it knew, so that new knowledge can be born. Compared with phase 2 of the SFL/social realism dialogue, phase 3 gives us a stronger sense of two-way traffic (see Figure 3.10). Social realism’s mapping of types of knowledge structure and the ways they progress stimulated renewed interest in social semiotic construal of disciplines in SFL. SFL’s concern with the discursive construction of knowledge rebounded on social realism’s concern with the legitimation of discourse and knowers’ positioning by them, leading to work on semantic gravity and semantic density – which has in turn challenged SFL’s modelling of contextual dependency in relation to mode, as well as commitment and iconization in relation to instantiation. Throughout, this phase of negotiation has I believe featured bilingualism rather than pidginization. It has not in other words given rise to an inter-language (or supra-theory), above and beyond social realism and SFL; rather it has challenged sociologists and linguists to learn something of each other’s codes – to think linguistically about sociology and sociologically about linguistics, and to renovate and expand the respective knowledge structures, the refreshing perspective of learning to talk a new discourse requires.
-two-way traffic...
SFL
verticality grammaticality gravity density
BBology
causality technicality information flow instantiation grammatical metaphor
Figure 3.10 Parameters of third phase field/knowledge structure negotiation
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Disciplinarity 1 semantic variation/ coding orientation 4 individuation/ identity
2 genre-based literacy/ pedagogic discourse
3 field of discourse/ knowledge structure
Figure 3.11 Four phases of SFL/Social realism interdisciplinary dialogue
Currently this dialogue has entered a fourth phase around questions of identity and community, drawing on SFL’s concern with individuation/ affiliation (Martin 2006b, 2008b, 2010) and Maton’s (2008, to appear) work on cosmology and constellations in relation to why theories become popular. Martin 2009c introduces some preliminary negotiation in relation to mapping the identities performed by young offenders in youth justice conferencing inspired by Maton’s work on ‘knower structure’. This work in effect brings the dialogue between social realism and SFL full circle, focusing as it does on users of language, and the social distribution of repertoires of meaning in social stratified communities – as outlined in Figure 3.11.
Complementarity In closing I’d like to reflect on some of the conditions that facilitate supplementary singulars becoming complementary ones, fostering the kind of interdisciplinary dialogue reviewed and alluded to above. I’m not the only SFL linguist or social realist to reflect on these concerns and will be drawing on a number of observations by Hasan, the key linguist involved in the semantic variation/ coding orientation dialogue, and Maton, one of the key sociologists involved in later phases concerned with knowledge structure and identity. i. exotropicity – Hasan considers exotropicity to be one key ingredient, which she characterizes as follows. ‘Endotropic theories are centred onto their own object of study, isolating it from all else. The phenomena they attempt to describe are viewed as if they were self-generating, self-fertilizing, self-renewing;
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they are thus autonomous with respect to their central problematic . . . By contrast, an exotropic theory is not confined within the bounds of its object of study. Rather, it is cosmoramic, typically embedding its central problematic in a context, where the processes of its maintenance and change originate in its interaction with other universes of experience’ (Hasan 2005: 51). In her terms, both SFL and social realism are exotropic theories par excellence. ii. reciprocity of concern – To this Hasan adds her notion of a reciprocity of concern: ‘A metadialogue, much like an object dialogue, presupposes reciprocity of a positive kind and a necessary condition for theories to engage in dialogue is a reciprocity of concern . . . this does not reside in simply sharing the same problematic, otherwise all linguistic theories would be in dialogue, which is patently not the case. What I mean . . . is that one’s theory’s mode of addressing its problematic – the conceptual syntax . . . in terms of which its theoretical goal is interpreted – complements the conceptual syntax of the other reciprocating theories’ (Hasan 2005: 50–51). iii. conceptual resonance – Hasan’s concern with complementary conceptual syntax aligns with Maton’s comment that both SFL and social realism ‘. . . attempt to generate strong external languages of description [strong grammaticality in Muller’s terms: JRM], concepts that get to grips with problems in empirical research. This gives them the possibility of a shared purchase on the world, enabling dialogue . . .’ (Maton in Christie et al. 2007: 240). Another point Maton has made to me is that both are relational theories, drawing heavily on typological and topological categorizations (as exemplified in Figures 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.7 above). iv. a problem – Maton comments further that dialogue has been facilitated because ‘. . . both SFL and Bernstein sociology share an allegiance to a problem rather than to an approach. Intellectuals in both traditions are willing to look beyond the confines of their knowledge structures for conceptual tools that enable them to explain better the part of the world they focus on . . .’ (Maton in Christie et al. 2007: 240). To this I would add the notion of a shared commitment to change the things they don’t like about the world, a point taken up by Maton and Moore 2010 in their introductory manifesto for social realism, in a section entitled ‘Social realism for social justice’ (Maton and Moore 2010: 8–10). v. readiness – Having one’s conceptual syntax in order at the right time is also crucial. Halliday for example notes some ways in which SFL was ill-prepared for productive dialogue during initial discussions in the 1960s: ‘But there were problems with this [= Bernstein’s: JRM] very demanding program of research, with its focus directed primarily on language. One was that the linguistic theory was not yet really able to cope with the cryptotypic features of grammar that were now beginning to be recognised as critical. My work on transitivity and theme had been published . . . and the essential metafunctional principle
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behind the grammar was in place and being worked out . . . but only a partial study of cohesion was available . . . and there was little or no work in the key areas of the clause complex, and other “complex” structures, or grammatical metaphor . . .’ (Halliday 1995: 135). vi. space/time – Needing to be ready of course depends on opportunities to collaborate, and this depends on securing funding and on the appointment of the right people to the right position in the right place at the right time (variables which are very hard to control). Halliday and Hasan’s departure from London in the late 1960s arguably stalled dialogue for over a decade, pending the resurgence of SFL work on coding orientation, directed by Hasan, once she got established in Sydney. vii. independence – One corollary of successful dialogue of course is breathing room: time to stop talking, take stock and develop knowledge on one’s own terms. As Bernstein comments in relation to the collaborative SFL/social realism work in the Sociological Research Unit at the University of London: ‘. . . this question about the development of the theory . . . I started the Sociological Research Unit in 1963, and it continued with about 15 to 16 people, sociologists, psychologists, linguists . . . [to] round about 1970-ish . . . I was really fed up, not so much with the Unit but with the whole empirical research scene . . . I went to Scandinavia . . . I left Brian [Davies: JRM] and another member of the Unit to coordinate efforts to produce a new plan and a new direction . . . when I got back, to my great relief no new direction was forthcoming so it was then I made the decision to disband the Unit . . . being involved in the daily necessities of empirical research on a vast program I had no time to think . . . so really, I think it was the fact that I was basically disappointed with the inability to properly conceptualise the code theory that made me move on’ (Bernstein 2001: 370–371). We need in other words to be careful of those prescribing perpetual interdisciplinarity, as if too much dialogue was barely enough. viii. power – To these points I would add the comment that dialogue is far more likely across the margins of disciplines than between centres, especially in horizontal knowledge structures (warring triangles), for the simple reason that hegemonic triangles command attention whereas researchers in marginalized triangles need colleagues to talk to. There is obviously no easy way to distil these and other relevant parameters. Perhaps the best we can do is invoke Halliday’s 2008 notion of complementarity, which he develops in re-consideration of the relation of grammars to lexis, of system to text and of speaking to writing, with a view to achieving a more coherent account of language as appliable linguistics: ‘Complementarity means having things both ways – that you eat your cake and have it . . . (Halliday 2008: 184) . . . [complementarities: JRM] provide the surplus energy, the flexibility that enables a language to flourish in its
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eco-social environment’ . . . (Halliday 2008: 83) . . . complementarity is a special form of complexity: one can think of it as the management of contradiction . . . (Halliday 2008: 84) Complementarity is what turns ‘either/or’ into ‘both/and’. Light is either particle or wave; it can’t be both – but it is. We have to choose what it is we want to know, what we want to measure: where a thing is or how fast it is. And in the act of measuring, we perturb . . . (Halliday 2008: 36) Those of us who have participated in interdisciplinarity dialogue know that life wasn’t meant to be easy; but at its best we have all experienced moments in which the effort involved proved more than worthwhile. Paraphrasing Halliday, we might adapt his notion of complementarity to negotiation between singulars as follows: – interdisciplinarity means having things both ways – that you eat your cake and have it. – interdisciplinarity provides the surplus energy, the flexibility that enables knowledge to flourish in its eco-social environment. – interdisciplinarity is a special form of complexity: one can think of it as the management of contradiction. – interdisciplinarity is what turns ‘either/or’ into ‘both/and’. Society is either meaning or social relations; it can’t be both – but it is. We have to choose what we want to know, what we want to measure: what communication is or what it relays. And in the act of measuring, we perturb. As Bernstein alludes, interdisciplinarity is a contradiction in terms, since disciplinary specialization means that we shouldn’t be able to talk to one another. But we do. And from the tension of the contradiction, knowledge grows. Perhaps Donne is wrong and we now can only ‘peepe through lattices of eyes and hear through labyrinths of ears’. Yet lattices and labyrinths, whilst they localise both the beholder and the beheld, and so their meaning for and to each other, their very particularity may lead through to a tension, to expand the contexts of seeing and hearing. (Bernstein 1995: 422)
Notes 1
2
I’m following Bernstein in my use of terminology here, with ‘vertical’ referring to both hierarchical and horizontal knowledge structures. Maton and Moore (2010) have proposed the term ‘social realism’ for the ‘coalition of minds’ I have referred to as ‘BBology’ in recent presentations (a term I coined, in part, to provoke the broader coalition to name themselves); although there remain sociologists of education using Bernstein who might not use the term, I’ll continue to use Maton and Moore’s designation for the purposes of discussion in this chapter.
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6
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See especially Hasan 2005, chapters 1 2, 5, 6, 9, 10; the Hasan 2009 volume compiles her social linguistic studies in relation to coding orientation, including important references to work by collaborators. It is a matter of interest that although social realism has mainly interacted with functional linguistics, it has often appropriated terms from formal paradigms (e.g. competence, performance, code, rule, acquisition, embedding, syntax, grammaticality). SFL grammar analysis used in this chapter is based on Halliday and Matthiessen 2004; discourse semantic, register and genre analysis draws on Martin and Rose 2003/2007a, 2008. The last three of these comprise technical terms with processes realized as Classifiers. Elaborating nominal group complexes can also be used (nominal group ‘apposition’ in traditional terms) – for example rhetorical connections (technically internal conjunctive relations) above. See Martin and Rose 2003/2007a for discussion of the identification resources deployed in these examples. From Ioset et al. http://www.springerlink.com/content/m212u06283110j72/
References Bednarek, M. and Martin, J. R. (eds) (2010), New Discourse on Language: Functional Perspectives on Multimodality, Identity and Affiliation. London: Continuum. Bernstein, B. (1975), Class, Codes and Control, Volume 3: Towards a Theory of Educational Transmissions. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. — (1979), The new pedagogy: Sequencing, in J. Manning-Keepes and B. D. Keepes (eds), Language in Education: The LDP Phase 1. Canberra: Curriculum Development Centre, 293–302. — (1990), Class, Codes and Control, Volume 4: The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse. London: Routledge. — (1995), A Response, in A. R. Sadovnik (ed.), Knowledge and Pedagogy: The Sociology of Basil Bernstein. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 385–424. — (1996), Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. London: Taylor & Francis [revised edn 2000]. — (1999), Vertical and horizontal discourse: An essay. British Journal of Sociology of Education 20(2): 157–173. — (2001a), Video conference with Basil Bernstein. Morais et al., 369–383. — (2001b), From Pedagogies to Knowledges. Morais et al., 363–368. Christie, F. (1992), Literacy in Australia. ARAL 12: 142–155. — (ed.) (1999), Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness: Linguistic and Social Processes. London: Cassell (Open Linguistics Series). — (2002), Classroom Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum. Christie, F. and Martin, J. R. (eds) (1997), Genre and Institutions: Social Processes in the Workplace and School. London: Cassell. — (2007), Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives. London: Continuum.
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Christie, F., Martin, J. R., Maton, K. and Muller, J. (2007), Taking stock: Future directions in research in knowledge structure. Christie and Martin (eds), 239–257. Freebody, P., Martin, J. R. and Maton, K. (2008), Talk, text and knowledge in cumulative, integrative learning: A response to ‘intellectual challenge’. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 31: 188–201. Halliday, M. A. K. (1973), Foreword to Bernstein (ed.), Class, Codes and Control, Volume 2: Applied Studies towards a Sociology of Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ix–xvi [reprinted in Halliday 2007b, 223–230]. — (1995), Language and the theory of codes in Sadovnik (ed.), 127–144 [reprinted in Halliday 2007b, 231–246]. — (1998), Things and relations: Regrammaticising experience as technical knowledge in Martin and Veel, 185–235 [reprinted in Halliday 2004, 49–101]. — (2004), The Language of Science. London: Continuum (Volume 5 in J. Webster ed. Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday). — (2007a), Language and Education (Volume 9 in J. Webster ed. Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday). London: Continuum. — (2007b), Language and Society (Volume 10 in J. Webster ed. Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday). London: Continuum. — (2008), Complementarities in Language. Beijing: Commercial Press. Halliday, M. A. K. and Martin, J. R. (1993), Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. London: Falmer Press. Halliday, M. A. K. and Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (1999), Construing Experience through Meaning: A Language-based Approach to Cognition. London: Cassell. — (2004), An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3rd ed. London: Arnold. Hasan, R. (2005), Language, Society and Consciousness. London: Equinox (The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan edited by J. Webster, Volume 1). — (2009), Semantic Variation: Meaning in Society and in Sociolinguistics. London: Equinox (The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan edited by J. Webster, Volume 2). Hasan, R. and Williams, G. (eds) (1996), Literacy in Society. London: Longman. Martin, J. R. (1989), Technicality and abstraction: Language for the creation of specialised texts, in F. Christie (ed.), Writing in Schools: Reader. Geelong, Vic.: Deakin University Press, 36–44. [revised for A. Burns and C. Coffin (eds), Analysing English in a Global Context: A Reader. Clevedon: Routledge (Teaching English Language Worldwide) 2001, 211–228]. — (1992), English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: Benjamins. — (1993a), Genre and literacy – modelling context in educational linguistics. ARAL 13: 141–172. — (1993b), Technology, bureaucracy and schooling: Discursive resources and control. Cultural Dynamics 6.1: 84–130. — (1993c), Life as a noun, in M. A. K. Halliday and J. R. Martin (eds), Writing Science: Literacy as Discursive Power. London: Falmer Press, 221–267. — (1998a), Mentoring semogenesis: ‘genre-based’ literacy pedagogy, in F. Christie, 123–155. — (1998b), Practice into theory: Catalysing change, in S. Hunston (ed.), Language at Work: Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. — (1999), Linguistics and the consumer: Theory in practice. Linguistics and Education 9.3: 409–446.
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— (2000a), Design and practice: Enacting functional linguistics in Australia. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 20: 116–126. — (2000b), Grammar meets genre – reflections on the ‘Sydney School’. Arts: The Journal of the Sydney University Arts Association 22.2000: 47–95. — (2006a), Metadiscourse: Designing interaction in genre-based literacy programs, in R. Whittaker, M. O’Donnell and A. McCabe (eds), Language and Literacy: Functional Approaches. London: Continuum, 95–122. — (2006b), Genre, ideology and intertextuality: A systemic functional perspective. Linguistics and the Human Sciences 2.2: 275–298. — (2007a), Construing knowledge: A functional linguistic perspective, in Christie and Martin, 34–64. — (2007b), Genre and field: Social processes and knowledge structures in systemic functional semiotics, in L. Barbara and T. Berber Sardinha (eds), Proceedings of the 33rd International Systemic Functional Congress. São Paulo: PUCSP. URL: http:// www.pucsp.br/isfc. — (2008a), Tenderness: Realisation and instantiation in a Botswanan town. Odense Working Papers in Language and Communication, 30–62. — (2008b), Innocence: Realisation, instantiation and individuation in a Botswanan town, in N. Knight and A. Mahboob (eds), Questioning Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 27–54. — (2009a), Genres and language learning: A social semiotic perspective. Linguistics and Education 20: 10–21. — (2009b), Discourse studies, in J. Webster (ed.), A Companion for Systemic Functional Linguistics. London: Continuum, 154–165. — (2009c), Realisation, instantiation and individuation: Some thoughts on identity in youth justice conferencing. DELTA – Documentação de Estudos em Linguistica Teorica e Aplicada 25. 2009: 549–583. — (2010), Semantic variation: Modelling system, text and affiliation in social semiosis, in Bednarek and Martin, 1–34. Martin, J. R. and Rose, D. (2007a), (2nd revised edn). Working with Discourse: Meaning beyond the Clause. London: Continuum. — (2007b), Interacting with text: The role of dialogue in learning to read and write. Foreign Languages in China 4.5: 66–80. — (2008), Genre Relations: Mapping Culture. London: Equinox. Martin, J. R. and Rothery, J. (1988), Classification and framing: Double dealing in pedagogic discourse. Paper presented at Post World Reading Congress Symposium on Language and Learning. Mr Gravatt College, Brisbane. Martin, J. R. and Veel, R. (1998), Reading Science: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of Science. London: Routledge. Martin, J. R. and White, P. R. R. (2005), The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. London: Palgrave. Martin, J. R. and Wodak, R. (eds) (2003), Re/reading the Past: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of History (ed. with R. Wodak) Amsterdam: Benjamins. Maton, K. (2008), Knowledge-building: How can we create powerful and influential ideas? Paper presented at Disciplinarity, Knowledge & Language: An International Symposium, University of Sydney, December. — (to appear), Knowledge and Knowers: Towards a Realist Sociology of Education. London: Routledge.
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Maton, K. and Moore, R. (eds) (2010), Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education: Coalitions of the Mind. London: Continuum. Maton, K. and Muller, J. (2007), A sociology for the transmission of knowledges, in Christie and Martin, 14–33. Morais, A., Neves, I., Davies, B. and Daniels, H. (eds) (2001), Towards A Sociology of Pedagogy: The Contribution of Basil Bernstein to Research. New York: Peter Lang. Muller, J. (2000), Reclaiming Knowledge: Social Theory, Curriculum and Education Policy. London: Routledge. — (2007), On splitting hairs: Hierarchy, knowledge and the school curriculum, in Christie and Martin, 64–86. Rose, D. (in press), Beyond literacy: Building an integrated pedagogic genre. Proceedings of Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association Conference, Brisbane, 2009. www.asfla.org.au. Rothery, J. (1996), Making changes: Developing an educational linguistics, in Hasan and Williams, 86–123. Sadovnik, A. (ed.) (1995), Knowledge and Pedagogy: the Sociology of Basil Bernstein. Norwood: Ablex. Simon-Vandenbergen, A-M., Taverniers, M. and Ravelli, L. J. (eds) (2003), Metaphor: Systemic and Functional Perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Wignell, P. (2007), Vertical and horizontal discourse and the social sciences, in Christie and Martin, 184–204. Williams, G. (2001), Literacy pedagogy prior to schooling: Relations between social positioning and semantic variation. Morais et al., 17–45.
Chapter 4
Theories and Things: The Semantics of Disciplinarity Karl Maton
And our progress can best be gauged by comparing our old problems with our new ones. If the progress that has been made is great, then the new problems will be of a character undreamt-of before. There will be deeper problems, and there will be more of them. Karl Popper (1994: 4)
Introduction In proclamations of a brave new world of enquiry where disciplinary forms of knowledge are consigned to the dustbin of history, a dimension of disciplinarity is typically denied: the capacity to build knowledge. Most pronouncements of the death of disciplines (whether notices of their demise or calls to hasten their end) do not suggest the potential to build knowledge over time will be lost, for that potential is held to have been illusory. From this perspective, to believe in such notions of advance and progress is to suffer from what Bourdieu (1996) termed ‘misrecognition’ and be in thrall to misguided beliefs in grand narratives or scientism. Similarly, to argue that induction into disciplinary knowledge might enable students to develop disciplined thought is to wish a return to a dominating, teacher-centred approach where passive students are injected with inorganic and alienating knowledge. In both cases, ‘disciplinarity’ is not associated with creating cumulative and integrative knowledge but rather with stultifying, sclerotic obstacles to intellectual enquiry. Such arguments are exerting considerable influence in educational research. For example, practitioners of approaches that lay claim to the appellation ‘critical’ (such as post-structuralist theories) often eschew aspirations to building knowledge (while citing past work they are drawing on) and to notions of progress (while describing previous ideas as inadequate). Such positions fail to take account of the simple but inconvenient truths that disciplines and approaches can actually build knowledge over time and that some do it better than others. This raises the question of what enables them to do so, an issue this chapter aims to explore.1
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This question was also raised by the later work of Basil Bernstein, particularly his analysis of ‘knowledge structures’ (2000: 155–174). Bernstein distinguished between ‘hierarchical’ and ‘horizontal’ knowledge structures, highlighting different forms taken by the symbolic dimension of intellectual fields and their modes of development over time. Hierarchical knowledge structures, exemplified by the natural sciences, are explicit, coherent, systematically principled and hierarchical organizations of knowledge that develop through the integration and subsumption of existing knowledge. Horizontal knowledge structures, exemplified by the humanities and social sciences, are a series of strongly bounded approaches that develop by adding another approach alongside existing approaches. Bernstein highlights two key differences between these knowledge structures, which Muller (2007) terms ‘verticality’ and ‘grammaticality’. First, verticality refers to the relations between ideas within hierarchical knowledge structures, which Bernstein describes as ‘attempts to create very general propositions and theories, which integrate knowledge at lower levels and in this way shows underlying uniformities across an expanding range of apparently different phenomena’ (2000: 161). As such, they ‘appear by their users, to be motivated towards greater and greater integrating propositions, operating at more and more abstract levels’ (2000: 161). Where hierarchical knowledge structures are more integrated (‘verticality’), horizontal knowledge structures are segmented. Secondly, grammaticality refers to relations between ideas and empirical data and describes the way some knowledge structures generate relatively unambiguous empirical referents (‘stronger grammar’, such as physics), while others are less capable of doing so (‘weaker grammar’, e.g. sociology). These two features are said to be central to the capacity of knowledge structures to build knowledge; as Muller summarizes: verticality determines the capacity of a theory or language to progress integratively through explanatory sophistication . . . grammaticality determines the capacity of a theory or a language to progress through worldly corroboration. (2007: 71) These two dimensions recur in Bernstein’s model of individual theories in terms of internal (L1) and external (L2) ‘languages of description’ (2000: 131– 141). L1 ‘refers to the syntax whereby a conceptual language is created’, or how the constituent concepts of a theory are interrelated; and L2 ‘refers to the syntax whereby the internal language can describe something other than itself’ (2000: 132), or how a theory’s concepts are related to empirical data. Bernstein describes the ‘syntax’ or principles of each language as being stronger or weaker. A stronger L1 is where concepts are tightly interrelated within a theory; a stronger L2 is where concepts and empirical data are related in relatively unambiguous ways. With these two sets of concepts, Bernstein helped bring knowledge and its modes of change over time into view in ways that are generating productive debate and research within social realist sociology of education (Maton and
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Moore 2010). They also represented a key sociological starting point for what Martin (this volume) terms Phase III of the ongoing, fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue between social realism and systemic functional linguistics (e.g. Christie and Martin 2007). However, while suggestive, these concepts require development for several reasons. First, the notion of ‘verticality’ gives the impression of generating a deficit model. As Muller (2007: 71–72) suggests, Bernstein’s account views verticality as a categorical principle of presence/absence: a field either has verticality or it does not. By characterizing only hierarchical knowledge structures as doing so, the model implicitly suggests the social sciences and humanities have not created ideas which ‘integrate knowledge at lower levels’ and show ‘underlying uniformities across an expanding range of apparently different phenomena’. Ironically, this does not explain the possibility of the development of Bernstein’s own theoretical framework (which I discuss, below). More generally, as social realist thinkers argue (Maton 2010a; Moore 2010), horizontal knowledge structures are capable of integrative and subsumptive development, at least within each of their segmented approaches. Developing Bernstein’s dichotomous model to avoid discounting this capacity is relatively simple: one can recast his ideas to describe a continuum of stronger and weaker verticality. This does not, though, resolve a second issue, which is that the framework remains divided between concepts for intellectual fields (verticality/grammaticality) and for individual theories (L1/L2). Redescribing verticality along a continuum of strengths from stronger to weaker (in the same way as Bernstein defines L1 as stronger/weaker) helps align the two sets of concepts. However, this does not address how they can be integrated within a more encompassing framework. The key is to advance the model beyond ideal types by analysing the underlying principles structuring different kinds of theories and knowledge structures. Lastly, and most importantly, it is not clear what the two couplets refer to, beyond highlighting internal relations of knowledge (verticality/L1) and external relations of knowledge to data (grammaticality/L2). For example, we are told that verticality determines the form of intellectual progress but not what it is or how it determines that progress. The problem is that verticality is known by its outcomes and we cannot replace it by X, that is by a description of its internal structure as one of a range of possibilities (e.g. W, X, Y, Z). Similarly, the principles underlying L1 and L2 are not made clear and so what makes a language of description stronger or weaker remains uncertain. As Muller argues, the concepts remain ‘locked into an early (lexical) metaphorical stage of discussion, where the terms are more suggestive than they are explanatory’ (2007: 65). To paraphrase Bernstein, this does not mean we should abandon these ideas but we need to recognize them for what they are, something good to think about – they ‘may alert us to new possibilities, new assemblies, new ways of seeing relationships’ (1996: 137). In short, the underlying principles of verticality/L1 and of grammaticality/ L2 are unexplored in Bernstein’s model. It is not clear what these two
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dimensions refer to, how they are related in different knowledge structures and how they work together to shape the building of knowledge over time. In this chapter I address each of these issues in turn by analysing: what the internal relations (verticality/L1) comprise; what the external relations (grammaticality/ L2) comprise; and how they relate together to enable or constrain cumulative knowledge-building. I do so in a manner that itself aims to cumulatively build on Bernstein’s framework with concepts that extend his insights and are applicable to both individual theories and whole intellectual fields. I first outline these concepts before then addressing in turn the three issues through an analysis of two theories with similar foci, influences and concepts but differing capacities for cumulative knowledge-building.
Legitimation Code Theory: Semantics The concepts I draw on to develop Bernstein’s model form part of a wider approach called Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). This framework cumulatively builds on the insights of Bernstein, Bourdieu, critical realism and other theories, and represents part of the ‘coalition of minds’ known as social realism (Maton and Moore 2010). LCT has five dimensions. The best known at present is LCT(Specialization) which builds primarily on the concepts of epistemic relation, social relation, knowledge-knower structures and four specialization codes (Maton 2000, 2007, 2010a; Moore and Maton 2001). This dimension is proving fruitful in a wide range of studies (e.g. Carvalho et al. 2009; Lamont and Maton 2008, 2010; Luckett 2009; Chen et al., this volume). It is also part of the sociological contribution to Phase III of the interdisciplinary dialogue between social realism and systemic functional linguistics, with a growing number of studies using both frameworks (e.g. Doherty 2008; Luckett 2009; Martin 2009; Hood 2010; Christie and Macken-Horarik, this volume; Hood, this volume). This dimension provides one way of analysing the underlying principles structuring intellectual and educational fields and I shall draw briefly on these ideas to define different forms taken by a theory’s external relations. My principal focus, though, is a newer dimension, which Martin (this volume) describes as central to the move towards Phase IV of dialogue: LCT(Semantics). This dimension arose from engagement with ideas from systemics, especially notions of grammatical metaphor and technicality (Martin, this volume), and primarily builds on the concepts of semantic gravity, semantic density, constellations and cosmologies (Maton 2009, 2010a, forthcoming). Here I focus on the first two concepts. Semantic gravity (SG) refers to the degree to which meaning relates to its context. Semantic gravity may be relatively stronger (+) or weaker (–). Where semantic gravity is stronger (SG+), meaning is more closely related to its context; where weaker (SG–), meaning is less dependent on its context. The context may be social or symbolic.
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Semantic density (SD) refers to the degree to which meaning is condensed within symbols (terms, concepts, phrases, expressions, gestures, etc). Semantic density may be relatively stronger (+) or weaker (–). Where semantic density is stronger (SD+), symbols have more meaning condensed within them; where semantic density is weaker (SD–), symbols condense less meaning. The meanings condensed within a symbol may be an empirical description (or other meanings with relatively direct empirical referents) or they may be feelings, political sensibilities, taste, values, morals, affiliations and so forth. Semantic gravity and semantic density may be independently stronger or weaker along two continua of strengths (SG+/–, SD+/–). Varying their relative strengths generates four principal semantic codes of legitimation (or, for brevity, semantic codes), as represented by the quadrants of Figure 4.1.2 One can also describe processes of: z weakening semantic gravity, such as when principles are abstracted from the
concrete particulars of a specific context or case, or strengthening semantic gravity, such as when abstract ideas are made more concrete; and z strengthening semantic density, such as when a lengthy description is condensed into a term, or weakening semantic density, such as when an abstract idea is fleshed out with empirical detail. This is significant because, I shall argue, it is movements up and down the semantic continua, not just specific states of ‘stronger’ or ‘weaker’, that are crucial to the knowledge-building attributes of disciplinarity. Semantic gravity SG-
Semantic density
SD-
SD+
SG+
Figure 4.1 Semantic codes of legitimation Note: SG- is heuristically positioned at the top of the compass (where a ‘+’ sign might be expected) to reflect the tendency to picture such notions as ‘abstract’ or ‘decontextualized’ as higher than ‘concrete’ or ‘contextualized’. Positioning here is not a statement of value.
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To explore the basis of knowledge-building, I shall use these concepts to analyse two modes of theorizing with different capacities for enabling cumulative knowledge-building. To illustrate these modes I focus on the work of Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu. I choose these two for several reasons: focusing on two theories within one knowledge structure enables the analysis to be succinct enough for a chapter; they are arguably the two most influential postwar sociologists of education; and they are ostensibly similar. Both theorists are Durkheimian (among other influences), both aspire to building relational theories, they offer similar concepts (e.g. ‘habitus’ and ‘coding orientation’ are conceptualizations of similar phenomena), and both are theories that LCT is itself built upon. The analysis comprises three parts reflecting the earlier questions: internal relations (the ways the theories relate concepts to other concepts); external relations (such as to data); and how these two work together to enable or constrain cumulative knowledge-building. I show that in Bernstein’s mode these two dimensions are characterized by particular strengths of semantic gravity and semantic density that potentially enable both verticality and grammaticality. In contrast, Bourdieu’s mode of theorizing is characterized by an internal language with weaker vertical relations of condensation and abstraction between concepts, and external relations based on a ‘cultivated gaze’ rather than an external language of description. This I argue limits its capacity for enabling cumulative knowledge. I conclude by arguing that semantic codes provide a way of understanding this dimension of disciplinarity, the capacity to build knowledge over time, that advances beyond Bernstein’s model, and in ways that themselves raise new questions. I should emphasize: I am concerned with the mode of theorizing each theory represents and their potential for enabling cumulative knowledge, not with their theories and achievements per se. I am asking what kind of theorizing offers the greatest resource potential for knowledge-building, not which theory is better. As I mentioned, LCT builds upon both, and I explore elsewhere what Bourdieu’s mode offers that Bernstein’s mode does not (Maton, forthcoming).
Internal Semantic Relations: Reconceptualizing Verticality Bernstein’s Internal Language In his theorizing, Bernstein successively weakens semantic gravity and strengthens semantic density (heightening abstraction and condensation of meaning) both in the development of particular concepts and through the evolution of the overall framework. For example, Bernstein’s analysis of progressivist pedagogy (1977, chapter 6) begins with a description of six fundamental characteristics of a progressivist classroom, such as control of the teacher over children being implicit (see Figure 4.2). These are then analysed in terms of three basic features said to regulate pedagogic relations: ‘hierarchy’, ‘sequencing rules’ and ‘criteria’. The preceding characteristics are described as one possible
Disciplinarity
68 Theorization pedagogic device (see Figure 4.3) pedagogic codes:
Semantic gravity
Semantic density
–
+
+
_
E +Cie / +F ie
classification and framing (+C, +F) visible and invisible pedagogies hierarchy, sequencing rules, criteria description of empirical features
Figure 4.2 An example of semantic shifts through Bernstein’s theory
form of these features, such as implicit rather than explicit. These are in turn gathered and condensed into a distinction between ‘visible pedagogy’ (where all three are explicit) and ‘invisible pedagogy’ (all are implicit). Further analyses abstract and condense the principles underlying these pedagogies in terms of strengths of ‘classification’ and ‘framing’, where the original description is one (-C, -F) of four possible modalities (+C, +F). At this point three characteristics of the theorizing become increasingly salient. First, these concepts are less contextualized, for they are not necessarily locked onto descriptions of pedagogy: ‘classification’ refers to the strength of boundaries between contexts or categories, and ‘framing’ refers to the locus of control within those contexts or categories (1977: 176). Secondly, this generative conceptualization is of greater generality, because the other possible modalities may never have been actualized or empirically observed. Thirdly, as the framework moves towards higher levels of abstraction, it subsumes and integrates meanings at lower levels. The concepts of classification and framing incorporate preceding conceptualizations (Figure 4.2). They are in turn subsumed within a more generalizing conceptualization of ‘pedagogic codes’, which Bernstein defines as: E +Cie / +F ie where E refers to the orientation of the discourse (elaborated): ______ refers to the embedding of this orientation in classification and framing values. (Bernstein 2000: 100) These processes of decontextualizing, generalizing and subsuming are repeated in a further stage of theorizing when Bernstein shifts the focus from conceptualizing the structuring principles underlying empirical phenomena to conceptualizing what generates those principles in terms of the ‘pedagogic device’ (1990: chapter 5). At this stage the theory reaches a relatively high degree of abstraction and generality, which Bernstein condenses in the form of a complex diagram (Figure 4.3) that reaches from the family to the ‘international field’ context.
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International field
Field of production
Field of symbolic control
State
Dominant principles
Marketing of books Theories/practices
Theories/practices Official recontextualizing field
Official pedagogic discourse
Pedagogic recontextualizing field
Pedagogic discourse of reproduction Communication
ID RD
Time
Organization Space
Transmitters Selection, transmission, evaluation
Pedagogic code Acquirers
Recontextualizing field
Primary contextualizing context (family/community)
Figure 4.3 The pedagogic device Source: Bernstein (1990: 197).
Specialized contexts/agencies within and between
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Bernstein himself would describe his theory as ‘vertical discourse’: meanings are related to other meanings rather than to social contexts (‘horizontal discourse’). However, just as important is the form this relating takes. From this brief description of a part of his framework, it can be seen that higherorder concepts are abstractions from abstractions and condensations of condensations: SG–, SD+. When these relations to lower-order concepts are explicitly defined, it creates tight, vertical abstraction-condensation chains. For example, as the quote above shows, ‘pedagogic codes’ includes ‘elaborated’, ‘classification’ and ‘framing’. Often new concepts are not explicitly of a higher order but rather new versions of past ideas aiming at greater generality or at condensing a greater range of meanings. For example, ‘pedagogic codes’ also subsumes such previous conceptualizations as ‘positional’/‘personal’ and ‘instrumental’/‘expressive’ (Bernstein 2000: 89–100); or: ‘Elaborated and restricted codes have not disappeared, nor have they been abandoned: they have been subsumed under higher order concepts’ (2000: 207). However, relations between different aspects of Bernstein’s theory are not always systematically explicated – relations between earlier and later versions of concepts or between different concepts (such as ‘educational knowledge codes’ and ‘knowledge structures’) often remain tacit. Thus, Bernstein’s concepts are not always as interlocking vertically as they could be, nor as strongly related horizontally as those of Bourdieu (see below). This partly results from the dynamic nature of this mode of theorizing – each set of conceptualized principles raises the question of what in turn underlies them, and more generalizing ideas replace existing notions (vertical extension). It also partly results from a lack of explication. However, this mode of theorizing retains the potential for such relations to be made explicit.
Bourdieu’s Internal Language Bourdieu’s concepts are also characterized by high levels of abstraction and condensation. ‘Habitus’, for example, encompasses a wide range of meanings that are context-independent, including ‘the result of an organizing action . . . a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the body) and, in particular, a predisposition, tendency, propensity or inclination’ (1977: 214, original emphases). However, it is the relations between concepts that are of significance in determining the nature of an internal language rather than the concepts themselves. In these terms, Bourdieu’s theory is characterized by different levels of abstraction and condensation. Many of his concepts are tightly interrelated. For example, the constituent concepts of ‘practice’ (‘field’, ‘capital’ and ‘habitus’) and those of ‘symbolic violence’ (including ‘pedagogic work’, ‘pedagogic authority’ and ‘cultural arbitrary’) are defined in terms of each other (Bourdieu 1977; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). There are also
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vertical relations between concepts. The logic of practice, for example, is summarized as: [(habitus)(capital)] + field = practice. (Bourdieu 1984: 101) This condenses the idea that practice results from relations between one’s structured and structuring dispositions (habitus) and one’s relational position in a field of struggles (capital), within the current state of play of struggles in that social arena (field). However, where this mode of theorizing differs from that illustrated by Bernstein’s theory is the nature of these relations: they are between concepts of equivalent magnitudes of semantic gravity and semantic density. The concepts are thus more strongly related horizontally than vertically. Vertical relations do not move as far along the semantic continua of gravity and density by abstracting and condensing the principles underlying habitus or capital or field (and thus practice). In this mode, higher-order concepts are thus created by establishing horizontal relations between lower-order concepts. Similarly, at a lower level, ‘habitus’ is defined as a ‘structured and structuring structure’ (1994: 170) but the principles underlying that ‘structure’ are not abstracted. Internal semantic relations are thus characterized by relatively stronger gravity and weaker density. This limits a potential stimulus to theoretical development: answers (e.g. ‘habitus’) do not fruitfully lead to new questions of underlying principles (‘what are the underlying principles of habituses?’). This in turn reduces the number of levels or orders of concepts and so vertical extension of the theory. For example, Bourdieu defines the structure of a ‘field’ as given by the rate of exchange between its species of ‘capital’ (status and resources), where their relative values reflect the state of play in struggles among actors possessing those capitals. This raises the question of how their relative status is determined at a particular moment in time, or what the exchange rate mechanism is that actors are struggling over. Bourdieu’s response reflects a horizontal mode of theorizing: the limits of the field and of legitimate participation are at once what are at stake in struggles, the ground over which struggles are fought, and what are used in struggles (1994: 143). The field is not only the thing, it is the only thing – there is no underlying generative mechanism and so no higher-order concept to be defined. There is thus less vertical extension within the theory.
Summary The mode of theorizing represented by Bernstein’s framework develops through the integration and subsumption of concepts at lower levels within
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higher-order concepts. This relation is one of greater generality and abstraction, and higher condensation. Its internal relations are thus characterized by semantic moves to weaken gravity and strengthen density, or L1 = SG–, SD+. In contrast, the mode of theorizing represented by Bourdieu’s framework develops through the creation of new, similar order concepts or through bringing these concepts into horizontal relations. Its internal constituents are strongly interlinked horizontally but do not extend as far vertically. Though the concepts themselves are characterized by low context-dependency and high condensation, and so share similar features to those of Bernstein, the mode of theorizing and its development do not. Once an initial abstraction and condensation has created concepts, Bourdieu’s theory remains at the same level and advances horizontally; the semantic code of its L1 is thus SG+, SD–.
External Semantic Relations: Reconceptualizing Grammaticality Bernstein’s External Language The key external relation of the mode of theorizing exemplified by Bernstein’s work is to the empirical world. Bernstein insisted that the development of theory is of little consequence if the results are unable to engage with empirical problems (2000: 131–141). This is not the imposition of a model onto empirical phenomena; rather, the theory ‘must submit to an external ontological imperative’ (Moore 2001: 13), it ‘does not simply picture or represent reality; it engages directly with it, enters into a relationship with it’ (Moore and Muller 2002: 627). For Bernstein, concepts and data must be able to speak to one another, a dialogic relation between theories and things. This has two implications. First, in LCT(Specialization) terms, it exhibits a stronger epistemic relation (ER+) between knowledge and its object. Secondly, to enable dialogue between theory and data requires an explicit means of translating meanings along this epistemic relation. This is what Bernstein refers to as an external language of description or L2: a means for translating theoretical concepts into empirical descriptions and empirical descriptions into theoretical concepts. Once such an explicit means of translation is established for the specific object being studied, then the basis for analysis is visible for other researchers to engage with – it does not matter who you are as a person, you can see (once you understand the theory) if it makes sense, is consistent with the data, etc. So these relations are also characterized by a weaker social relation (SR–) between knowledge and its subjects (actors). The external relations of Bernstein’s theory are thus characterized by ER+, SR– or a knowledge code (Maton 2000). For Bernstein, this external language is crucial: ‘a theory is only as good as the principles of description to which it gives rise’ (2000: 91). An obvious
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objection is that these are more discussed than explicitly illustrated in Bernstein’s own corpus, something he acknowledged: ‘In my case sections of the theory (usually without strong principles of description) always preceded the research’ (2000: 121). However, one should not elide the form of publication nor the theoretical framework with the mode of theorizing: that Bernstein did not prolifically publish external languages does not mean this mode cannot generate them. Indeed, there are a number of examples by other scholars.3 One example is included in Table 4.1: an external language of description for the concept of ‘semantic gravity’. This was chosen not simply to be reflexive (by discussing the semantic gravity of an L2 for the concept of ‘semantic gravity’) but because it illustrates how an external language is not merely the ‘operationalization’ of concepts. This language of description draws on a study by Bennett (2002) of a constructivist learning environment, specifically a postgraduate Masters degree course for training instructional designers (professionals who design learning resources). It utilizes one aspect of this research that explored a task using ‘case-based learning’ and designed according to principles of ‘authentic learning’. The unit of study required students to analyse two case studies of real-life instructional design projects. The column entitled ‘Coding of responses’ builds on the analytic grid Bennett developed to analyse students’ work products, one adapted from Allen’s (1995) use of frameworks for classifying reflective writing, originally developed by Hatton and Smith (1995) and Sparks-Langer et al. (1990). To develop the language of description, the original coding scheme was reinterpreted and re-sequenced in terms of representing different strengths of semantic gravity. The results of the re-analysis were presented in Maton (2009) in a paper on ‘cumulative and segmented learning’ that illustrated the value of the concept. The concept of ‘semantic gravity’ itself had also been developed separately (Maton 2010a) and its definition was further advanced through the process of developing this language of description. It thereby brings together empirical research that unfolded prior to and separate from a theoretical development that was unfolding in relation to other empirical projects, and results from successive movements between the theory and the data until a means of translation emerged. The form of relations between the theoretical and the empirical involved in generating a language of description is thus neither empirically inductive nor the imposition of a pre-established matrix onto data. Rather it arises from as well as enables a movement between theory and data – it is ‘the dialogic move between the two that Bernstein emphasises’ (Moss 2001: 18). If one now analyses the semantic codes of this illustrative external language, relations between concepts and data are characterized by stronger gravity than an internal language. They are ‘locked onto’ a particular empirical phenomenon, in this case student work products. External languages for using the same concept to investigate other objects, such as classroom interaction, take different forms, because semantic gravity is realized differently in other
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Table 4.1
An external language of description for ‘semantic gravity’
Semantic gravity Weaker
Form taken by student responses
Example quote from student answers
Abstraction
Presents a general principle or procedure that moves beyond the cases to address wider or future practice.
Legal and intellectual property issues are a major consideration when developing a product.
Generalization
Presents a general observation or draws a generalizing conclusion about issues and events in the case.
Precious time would be wasted and deadlines not met when members did not have a full concept of the project.
Judgement
Goes beyond re-presenting or interpreting information to offer a value judgement or claim.
While each metaphor provides a realistic learning environment . . . , I felt that the Nardoo metaphor assists with navigation, while the StageStruck metaphor was a barrier to effective navigation.
Interpretation
Seeks to explain a statement by interpreting information from the case or adding new information. May include use of other literature or personal experience.
While not alluded to in the interviews, this may have caused problems for the team, as there would have been a new software to work with, and transferral of information from Hypercard to MediaPlant.
Summarizing description
Descriptive response that summarizes or synthesizes information presented in the case, including re-wording and re-structuring of a number of events into one statement. Does not present new information from beyond the case.
This involved creating the overall structure and content of the project, with design briefs and statements being forwarded to the client, with the final design statement being signed off by the client, giving a stable starting position for the project.
Reproductive description
Reproduces information directly from the case with no elaboration (i.e. quotations).
The NSW Department of Land and Water Conservation approached the Interactive Multimedia Learning Laboratory at the University of Wollongong to develop an educational multimedia package.
strong Source: Maton (2009: 49), developed from Bennett (2002).
Disciplinarity
Coding of responses
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contexts and practices. It also exhibits relatively weaker semantic density, with (albeit succinct) descriptions of the concepts and their realizations within the data. The semantic code of this L2 (or grammar) is thus SG+, SD–. Just as important is what this does to meanings. Reading Table 4.1 from right to left, the external language works to: weaken semantic gravity by moving away from the concrete specificities of student work products; and strengthen semantic density by condensing lengthy descriptions. Reading from left to right, the external language also works to successively strengthen semantic gravity by moving from: abstract concepts (in this example, differing strengths of SG); to what forms these take in this kind of object of study (‘abstraction’, ‘summarizing description’, etc); to how these forms are in turn realized in student work products (‘Presents a general principle . . .’, etc.); and to examples of how these are realized in the specific object of study (quotes from student answers). At the same time condensed concepts are fleshed out, successively weakening semantic density by filling in more empirical detail. So an external language provides a means of moving meaning both up and down the continua of strengths of both SG and SD. An external language thereby enables the possibility of dialogue between concepts and data. New problem-situations can ‘speak back’, demanding clarifications, revisions or extensions of the theory (as they did in the case of developing the concept of ‘semantic gravity’). Of course, this potential is not necessarily realized. For example, some scholars do not recognize this two-way translation of meaning and portray empirical research using Bernstein’s framework as imposing or ‘testing’ the theory. This conception leads to frustration when data does not neatly match the theory’s categories and to criticism rather than creation.4 Moreover, dialogue may not always require development of the internal language of the theory – this depends on the degree of explanatory power it provides the research. As Bernstein put it, the key is ‘less an allegiance to an approach, and more a dedication to a problem’ (1977: 171). Nonetheless, my concern here is with affordances offered by modes of theorizing rather than achievements of specific theories, and the external semantic code of this mode of theorizing represents a potential for knowledge-building through the particular ways it translates meaning.
Bourdieu’s External Gaze Bourdieu also emphasized that his concepts were intended to engage in a dialogue with data, proclaiming they are ‘a temporary construct which takes shape for and by empirical work’ (in Wacquant 1989: 50, original emphases). Against empiricism he warned of the dangers of accepting the accounts of participants in the object of study. Against theoreticism he warned about confusing the model of reality with the reality of the model (1977: 29) and emphasized differences between ‘the theoretical aims of theoretical understanding and the
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practical and directly concerned aims of practical understanding’ (1994: 60). This is similar to Bernstein’s position. Where Bourdieu differs is in how he attempts to avoid these problems. For Bourdieu they imply the need for a double ‘epistemological break’, first from the viewpoints of participants, and secondly from the viewpoint of the detached observer. Crucially, the ‘important thing is to be able to objectify one’s relation to the object’ (1993b: 53) in terms of the effects of one’s relational social positioning. Relations between theory and data are thus typically understood by Bourdieu in terms of the social positions of actors and their situated viewpoints (Maton 2003, 2005). This way of thinking has two key implications. First, in this mode of theorizing there are no explicit principles of translation between theory and data (no L2). Instead, Bourdieu attempted to create concepts of sufficient versatility to be flexible enough for any research; as Wacquant argues, ‘Bourdieu has not exhibited the “obsessive preoccupation” with achieving relatively unambiguous meaning in his concepts’ (in Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 35–36). The problem, as Swartz summarizes, is that ‘this very appealing conceptual versatility sometimes renders ambiguous just what the concept actually designates empirically’ (1997: 109). As has been widely commented, this opens up the possibility of circularity and ad hoc explanations, for example: an actor makes bourgeois choices because of their bourgeois habitus; their bourgeois habitus is shown by the bourgeois choices they make (Maton 2003, 2005; Moore 2006). Bourdieu acknowledged this possibility and claimed to be ‘keenly aware of this danger’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 129), but did not explicate how it could be avoided except through vigilance. In short, external relations of the theory are characterized by a relatively weaker epistemic relation (ER–). Secondly, instead of an external language, Bourdieu’s theorizing emphasizes developing a sociological ‘gaze’ or habitus: ‘a system of dispositions necessary to the constitution of the craft of the sociologist in its universality’ (1993a: 271): The task is to produce, if not a ‘new person’, then at least a ‘new gaze’, a sociological eye. And this cannot be done without a genuine conversion, a metanoia, a mental revolution, a transformation of one’s whole vision of the social world. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 251) The emphasis is thus on the gaze of knowers: a stronger social relation between knowledge and subjects (SR+). The external relations of Bourdieu’s theory are thus characterized by ER–, SR+ or a knower code. The use here of specialization codes highlights something of significance for understanding forms of theorizing. If one employs Bernstein’s model to analyse his own and Bourdieu’s theories, one would characterize them as stronger and weaker grammars, respectively – this appears to create a deficit model of Bourdieu’s mode. However, that mode does possess strong external relations but of a different kind. Extending Bernstein’s concept of ‘grammar’,
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one can distinguish two kinds: knowledge-grammars which relate concepts to data via explicit procedures (L2 in Bernstein’s model), and knower-grammars which relate concepts or ideas to data via the ‘gaze’ of knowers (Maton 2010a). All intellectual and educational fields comprise both knowledge and knowers, so every field involves a specialized gaze. A key difference is whether possession of specialized procedures generates the gaze (knowledge code) or the gaze defines the legitimate procedures (knower code). For example, training and experience in scientific practices enables a trained gaze, but knowledge of and experience in the specialized procedures of science form the gaze rather than the gaze defining the procedures (though it affects in turn when and how those procedures are employed). In contrast, Bourdieu’s mode of theorizing relies on a knower-grammar based on a cultivated gaze, where experience and immersion in exemplary works shapes the habitus in ways which define the appropriate procedures of enquiry and means of judgement. What matters is learning ‘the craft of sociology’: You have some general principles of method that are in a sense inscribed in the scientific habitus. The sociologist’s métier is exactly that – a theory of the sociological construction of the object, converted into a habitus. When you possess this métier, you master in a practical state everything that is contained in the fundamental concepts: habitus, field and so on. (Bourdieu et al. 1991: 253) A knower-grammar is less of a stimulus to cumulative knowledge-building because there is no procedurized means for the specificities of different problems to speak back to the theory. Instead this occurs via the actor’s habitus. Bourdieu describes the habitus as durable and transposable – it typically takes repeated and lengthy exposure to circumstances for the habitus to significantly change. Thus, to ‘master in a practical state everything that is contained in the fundamental concepts’ takes time, prolonged practice and typically intimate pedagogic relations to enable a ‘genuine conversion, a metanoia, a mental revolution’, that is to reshape one’s dispositions. Once established, these dispositions are again durable and transposable across contexts. Thus a knower-grammar provides a more slowly changing and mediated means of dialogue between data and theory than the external language of a knowledgegrammar. It is unsurprising that though Bourdieu described his concepts as a ‘temporary construct’, the framework remained relatively unchanged once established. Bourdieu’s oeuvre developed primarily through a growing range of applications yielding new and often more nuanced arguments rather than by the creation of new concepts of greater generality. Concepts did change; for example, ‘habitus’ evolved slowly in this direction in Bourdieu’s writings (e.g. from a more cognitive focus to embrace the corporeal; see Maton 2008). However, when a theory is based on a gaze, its development across an intellectual field depends on other practitioners sharing that gaze. In other words, the
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theory’s external relations are more contextually dependent on the knower and less symbolically condensed: SG+, SD–. Indeed, development of Bourdieu’s concepts by other scholars has typically been in the direction of less generality and abstraction; for example, a proliferation of adjectives prefixing ‘habitus’ and ‘capital’ (‘institutional’, ‘gendered’, etc) to denote the arena of social life or kinds of actors being studied. Though Bourdieu can do a Bourdieuian analysis, it is less easy for others to do so in the way Bourdieu argues it should be done, because it depends on the knower.
Conclusion One dimension of ‘disciplinarity’ is the capacity to build knowledge over time. As Bernstein’s model of knowledge structures highlights, such knowledgebuilding can be cumulative or segmental to varying degrees. His model suggests two key dimensions affect the form progress takes: verticality and grammaticality (for intellectual fields) or internal (L1) and external (L2) languages of description (for individual theories). These couplets both refer to internal relations among ideas and external relations of ideas to data, respectively. The model offers a heuristic way of thinking about intellectual progress that raises further questions, for it is unclear what the two dimensions comprise, and how they relate to shape knowledge-building. I have proposed two underlying principles as a means of exploring these features: semantic gravity, or the contextdependence of meaning; and semantic density, or the symbolic condensation of meaning. These were used to briefly analyse the modes of theorizing illustrated by the work of Bernstein and Bourdieu. The two modes exhibited contrasting strengths of semantic gravity and semantic density which, I argued, enabled or constrained cumulative knowledge-building in different ways. I suggested that stronger L1 / verticality is where a theory relates concepts vertically to lower-order or already established concepts through relations of lower context-dependence (or greater generality and abstraction) and higher condensation. Stronger L2 / grammaticality can be understood as where a theory relates concepts to data through relations of higher context-dependence (lower generality and abstraction) and lower condensation. In other words: z stronger L1 / verticality is characterized by weaker semantic gravity and stronger
semantic density (SG–, SD+); and z stronger L2 / grammaticality is characterized by stronger semantic gravity and
weaker semantic density (SG+, SD–). The semantic code for internal relations provides a basis for both height in the vertical extension of the theory (its capacity to be integrative and generalizing)
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and strength of vertical relations within the theory (how well integrated each conceptual strata of the theory is with higher- and lower-order concepts). The semantic code for external relations enables not only the theory to engage with the empirical (so it is not freely floating) but also horizontal extension of the range of substantive problems encompassed by the theory (use of the theory across an expanding range of different, segmented contexts). The capacity for enabling cumulative knowledge-building thereby depends on the semantic codings of L1 and L2 being inversely related, with the strengths given above, or what I’ll term the cumulative modality. This modality offers a potential for knowledge-building because of what it does to meanings. It lifts meaning out of the gravity well of a specific context through abstracting and condensing principles underlying that context into a compact language, freeing up space in the discourse; and both ‘concretizes’ the analysis and ‘fleshes out’ concepts through a dialogue with the particularities of the context. It enables both the strengthening and weakening of both semantic gravity and semantic density. This it does both between lower-order and higher-order concepts within the theory, and between theory and data. What is key here is the movements of gravity and density rather than specific states: the combination of codes enables maximum movement along the continua. The cumulative modality thus works as a kind of elevator of meaning upwards and downwards through both internal and external languages. It thereby enables the recontextualization of knowledge and so the possibility of knowledge-building across different contexts and over time. Bernstein offered the image of a triangle to describe hierarchical knowledge structures; Figure 4.4 extends that to heuristically portray the form taken by this mode of theorizing.
SG
SD
L1
L2
L2
L2
Figure 4.4 The cumulative modality Note: Triangle represents theory or knowledge structure; segmented line represents objects of study; SG is semantic gravity; SD is semantic density; arrows for SG and SD indicate strengths from weaker to stronger.
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The two codes also underpin the dynamic nature of this mode of theorizing. Its internal relations are characterized by each conceptualization of abstract principles raising the question of what in turn generates those principles. Each answer raises new questions; each moment of theorization thereby points forward to a future moment of further theorizing of greater generality, abstraction and condensation. Its external relations, based on a knowledge-grammar, are characterized by each engagement of the theory with a new problem-situation enabling the specificities of that context to pose questions to the theory. There are thus two stimuli to cumulative knowledge-building. In comparison, the mode of theorizing exemplified by Bourdieu enjoys these stimuli less because of its weaker vertical relations of condensation and abstraction between concepts and emphasis on a ‘cultivated gaze’ rather than an external language of description. Internally, the questions can soon stop, constraining vertical extension of the theory. Externally, the knower-grammar of the actor’s ‘gaze’ offers a less explicit means for data to ‘speak back’ to theory. Its combination of strengths of semantic gravity and semantic density for internal and external relations – which can be termed the segmental modality – thereby tends towards horizontal development, both in terms of relations between concepts and the applications of these concepts across different topics. This is not to say that knowledge does not build in this modality, especially in the work of an individual author, but rather that it provides relatively weaker enabling conditions for cumulative knowledge-building across an intellectual field. It is also not to argue that Bernstein’s theory is exemplary or Bourdieu’s theory offers little: Bernstein was not always explicit or systematic in relating new to existing concepts, while Bourdieu was prolific in providing exemplary analyses for others to study. My focus has been instead on the modes of theorizing their frameworks illustrate and, specifically, the semantic codings of those modes. The concepts used in this analysis themselves aim to contribute to cumulative knowledge-building. First, semantic codes represent, I am suggesting, part of the ‘syntax’ of languages of description and knowledge structures that Bernstein pointed to. They also enable the two dimensions of his model (verticality/ grammality or L1/L2) to be brought into relation. Secondly, redescribing his model in terms of relative strengths of semantic gravity and semantic density moves the conceptualization from dichotomous ideal types towards underlying structuring principles, the ‘X’ missing from the existing model. Thirdly, the concepts have greater explanatory reach. I analysed theories but they can also be applied to knowledge structures, as well as student work products (Maton 2009), classroom interactions and all cultural and social practices. This enables different levels to be brought within the same analytical frame. Fourthly, by highlighting different kinds of relations between theories and things – the different forms ‘grammar’ can take – the analysis brings new issues into view, such as the ways some approaches and disciplines are based on stronger knower-grammars. The illustrative analysis also highlights how a knowledge
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structure (sociology of education) can encompass contrasting forms of knowledge-building. Finally, the concepts subsume existing ideas, integrate knowledge at lower levels and show underlying uniformities across an expanding range of apparently different phenomena. Cumulative knowledge-building, however, also raises new questions. I emphasized that the cumulative modality provides enabling conditions or affordances for knowledge-building but that whether these potentialities bear fruit depends on more than just the form taken by the theory. What else it depends on is the obvious next question. Why a potentially cumulative theory may come to develop or be viewed segmentally requires explanation. Why cumulative theories are less pervasive than segmental theories in fields such as sociology and Education, and how this might be changed, are significant questions if we wish our research to be intellectually serious. Semantics is not the only issue, so other principles underlying progress in knowledge formations remain underexplored. In this illustrative analysis I focused on advances within an approach rather than between different approaches, so how different theories may interact cumulatively is yet another question. Ongoing research into classroom practices using ‘semantic codes’ alongside systemic functional linguistics is raising questions of the capacity of the theory to explain different phenomena and of its relations with another approach. Of course, issues are not generated from within: each time the concepts engage with a substantive problem, that problem-situation poses questions of the theory. However, as Popper (1994) highlights, the wonderful thing about building knowledge is that each tentative solution to a question in turn raises new questions.
Notes 1 2
3
4
This is a revised and expanded version of Maton (2010b). Given that referents for the context (for semantic gravity) and what is condensed (semantic density) depend on the practices being analysed, a comprehensive list of examples of the modalities would be prohibitively long or skewed to one referent. Lest misread and accused of fetishizing knowledge, I should emphasize that these concepts are intended to be applicable to all social practices. As illustrated in this chapter, the realizations of these concepts depends on the specific object of study. See Morais and Neves (2001), Morais, Neves and Pires (2004) and Hoadley (2007). See also Carvalho (2010), Chen (2010), Doherty (2008) and Lamont and Maton (2008) for examples using LCT. Such criticisms are typically made of lower-order, ideal typical concepts, such as Bernstein’s model of knowledge structures and of identities (e.g. Power 2010). Such research highlights the need to develop both the internal language of the theory by abstracting principles underlying such taxonomies and external languages of sufficient openness. Whether such ‘speaking back’ is heard this way or not is another matter.
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Hoadley, U. (2007), The reproduction of social class inequalities through mathematics pedagogies in South African primary schools. Journal of Curriculum Studies 39(6): 679–706. Hood, S. (2010), Appraising Research: Evaluation in Academic Writing. London: Palgrave. Lamont, A. and Maton, K. (2008), Choosing music: Exploratory studies into the low uptake of music GCSE. British Journal of Music Education 25(3): 267–282. — (2010), Unpopular music: Beliefs and behaviours towards music in education, in R. Wright (ed.), Sociology and Music Education. London: Ashgate. Luckett, K. (2009), The relationship between knowledge structure and curriculum: A case study in sociology. Studies in Higher Education, 34(4): 441–453. Martin, J. R. (2009), Realisation, instantiation and individuation: Some thoughts on identity in youth justice conferencing. DELTA – Documentação de Estudos em Linguistica Teorica e Aplicada 25. 2009: 549–583. Maton, K. (2000), Recovering pedagogic discourse: A Bernsteinian approach to the sociology of educational knowledge. Linguistics & Education 11(1): 79–98. — (2003), Reflexivity, relationism and research: Pierre Bourdieu and the epistemic conditions of social scientific knowledge. Space & Culture 6(1): 52–65. — (2005), The sacred and the profane: The arbitrary legacy of Pierre Bourdieu. European Journal of Cultural Studies 8(1): 121–132. — (2007), Knowledge-knower structures in intellectual and educational fields, in F. Christie and J. Martin (eds), Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy. London: Continuum, 87–108. — (2008), Habitus, in M. Grenfell (ed.), Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts. London: Acumen. — (2009), Cumulative and segmented learning: Exploring the role of curriculum structures in knowledge-building. British Journal of Sociology of Education 30(1): 43–57. — (2010a), Progress and canons in the arts and humanities: Knowers and gazes, in K. Maton and R. Moore (eds), Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education. London: Continuum, 154–178. — (2010b), Knowledge-building: Analysing the cumulative development of ideas, in G. Ivinson, B. Davies and J. Fitz (eds), Knowledge and Identity: Bernsteinian Approaches and Applications. London: Routledge. — (forthcoming), Knowledge and Knowers: Towards a Realist Sociology of Education. London: Routledge. Maton, K. and Moore, R. (eds) (2010), Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education: Coalitions of the Mind. London: Continuum. Moore, R. (2001), Basil Bernstein: Theory, models and the question of method. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 4(1): 13–16. — (2006), Knowledge structures and intellectual fields: Basil Bernstein and the sociology of knowledge, in R. Moore, M. Arnot, J. Beck and H. Daniels (eds), Knowledge, Power and Educational Reform. London: Routledge, 28–43. — (2010), Knowledge structures and the canon: A preference for judgements, in K. Maton and R. Moore (eds), Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education. London: Continuum, 131–153. Moore, R. and Maton, K. (2001), Founding the sociology of knowledge: Basil Bernstein, intellectual fields and the epistemic device, in A. Morais, I. Neves,
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B. Davies and H. Daniels (eds), Towards a Sociology of Pedagogy. New York: Peter Lang, 153–182. Moore, R. and Muller, J. (2002), The growth of knowledge and the discursive gap. British Journal of Sociology of Education 23(4): 627–637. Morais, A. and Neves, I. (2001), Pedagogical social contexts: Studies for a sociology of learning in A. Morais, I. Neves, B. Davies and H. Daniels (eds), Towards a Sociology of Pedagogy. New York: Peter Lang, 185–213. Morais, A., Neves, I. and Pires, D. (2004), The what and the how of teaching and learning, in J. Muller, B. Davies and A. Morais (eds), Reading Bernstein, Researching Bernstein. London: Routledge, 75–90. Moss, G. (2001), Bernstein’s languages of description: Some generative principles. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 4(1): 17–19. Muller, J. (2007), On splitting hairs: Hierarchy, knowledge and the school curriculum, in F. Christie and J. Martin (eds), Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy. London: Continuum, 65–86. Popper, K. (1994), The Myth of the Framework. London: Routledge. Power, S. (2010), Bernstein and empirical research, in P. Singh, A. Sadovnik and S. Semel (eds), Toolkits, Translation Devices, Conceptual Tyrannies. New York: Peter Lang, 312–332. Sparks-Langer, G. M., Simmons, J. M., Pasch, M., Colton, A. and Starko, A. (1990), Reflective pedagogical thinking: How can we promote it and measure it? Journal of Teacher Education 41(4), 23–32. Swartz, D. (1997), Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. London: University of Chicago Press. Wacquant, L. (1989), Towards a reflexive sociology: A workshop with Pierre Bourdieu. Sociological Theory 7(1): 26–63. Young, M. F. D. and Muller, J. (2010), Knowledge and truth in the sociology of education, in K. Maton and R. Moore, (eds), Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education. London: Continuum, 110–130.
Part II
Building and Breaking with Disciplinarity
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Chapter 5
Making the Break: Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity Rob Moore
. . . like most good ideas in social science, Interdisciplinarity is old news. Andrew Abbott (2001: 131)
Introduction For a long time it has been difficult to defend disciplinary-based knowledge and education for progressive purposes. The default setting in the field is that disciplinarity is the reactionary position and interdisciplinarity the progressive position. This has been the case in the sociology of education since the early 1970s when the New Sociology of Education (NSOE) promoted social constructionism and interdisciplinarity as a radical critique of ‘official’ educational knowledge. Its account of the social construction of knowledge (both in the formal curriculum and in the commonsense assumptions of everyday life in schools) contributed to an influential explanation of social inequalities in education, especially the underachievement of working-class pupils. In different forms (e.g. educational feminism, multiculturalism, some types of vocationalism), its principles were repeated in other episodes over the years and it is worth considering this particular case in search of more general features that might be associated with interdisciplinarity elsewhere (Moore and Muller 2010). The organization of school knowledge was represented as a reflection of broader relations and inequalities in power. This offered a radical critique of the liberal view of education as an agency of progressive social change. Within the logic of this analysis disciplinary (or ‘traditional’) based knowledge structures served the interests of dominant social groups and worked against the disadvantaged whose interests should be championed by interdisciplinary knowledge (‘progressivism’). Progressive interdisciplinarity was egalitarian as opposed to the hierarchy of disciplinary traditionalism. In the United Kingdom, this radicalism in the sociology of education emerged alongside significant changes elsewhere (Moore 2009, ch 4), such as the
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‘progressive revolution’ in the primary schools and curriculum reforms at the secondary level, all of which, in complementary ways, tended to view disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity as opposed rather than complementary. It became axiomatic for ‘progressive’ educationalists to view disciplinary knowledge as conservative and as an obstacle to educational and social change. Interdisciplinarity was a radical slogan and a weapon in the struggle for social justice. In what follows, I will describe this view of interdisciplinarity as ‘hyperindisciplinarity’ (HI) and contrast it with ‘routine interdisciplinarity’ (RI). I will first describe its general principles and two examples will later be examined in depth in order to explore HI as a ‘pedagogic device’ (Bernstein 2003: 180 [1990]1) within the educational field. Bernstein defines the ‘pedagogic device’ as: ‘. . . the condition for the production, reproduction, and transformation of culture . . . The pedagogic device generates a symbolic ruler of consciousness. The question becomes: whose ruler, what consciousness?’ (ibid.). The ideas of Basil Bernstein and Mary Douglas will be used to develop a sociological account of this particular device drawing upon the concepts of ‘classification’ and ‘framing’ and ‘group’ and ‘grid’ as developed by those thinkers. Although HI is associated with a wide range of educational movements and discourses, I suggest that they tend to share a set of basic principles: [1] the disciplines are historically arbitrary social constructions that have no special epistemological status. Hence there is no reason why knowledge should not be organized in other ways. [2] because disciplines are socially constructed under particular historical conditions they should be liable to change when those conditions change or in order to promote change. [3] because the disciplinary knowledge structure cannot be defended on epistemological grounds, then it has to be understood in some other way: in terms of the standpoints and interests of those historically placed to construct disciplines in the first instance. [4] consequently the defence of disciplines is the defence of entrenched social interests, either of a conservative elite within education or some wider dominant social group (or both with the former as representative of the latter). This constitutes what might be termed the basic ‘generic’ position of HI and it is this version of interdisciplinarity that is the focus of this chapter.
Being Sceptical about Scepticism There are two initial points to note about the position outlined above. First, there is an unexamined assumption that disciplines are epistemologically arbitrary because they are historically constructed. But this presupposes that the
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only possible defence of disciplines (and rational objectivity more generally) is some form of ahistorical positivist foundationalism. Social realism demonstrates that this is not so (see Maton and Moore 2010; Young 2008). There is no reason why disciplines should not be both historically constructed and epistemologically non-arbitrary (Moore 2009). The second is that disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are mutually exclusive positions, that there is a radical division between them that demands some irrevocable choice: in effect, ‘which side are you on?’. On this basis it is urged by those adopting such a position that interdisciplinarity should displace the disciplines (see below). There are, however, good reasons for challenging these assumptions and to re-present the knowledge debate in a very different way. Within some of the streams that promote interdisciplinarity there is a commitment to a thoroughgoing scepticism towards knowledge that ends in relativism. This is the consistent end point of the principle that disciplines are arbitrary because historically constructed. Today this position is exemplified by postmodernism, but also present at the time of the NSOE and points between. The intention here is not to engage with these issues at an epistemological level, but rather, to move towards a sociological account of interdisciplinarity in terms of the structuring of intellectual fields. A social realist defence of knowledge is being assumed here. What are the good reasons for reservations about the claim that disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are mutually exclusive and that interdisciplinarity entails a radical break with the disciplines?
Routine Interdisciplinarity A very different model of the relationship between the two is provided by Abbott (2001). Abbot informs us that the term, ‘interdisciplinarity’, first appears in the Oxford Dictionary in 1937 and that its promotion in the social sciences in the United States dates from the mid-1920s (p. 131). Abbott concludes that, ‘. . . the emphasis on interdisciplinarity emerged contemporaneously with, not after, the disciplines. There was no long process of ossification; the one bred the other almost immediately’ (p. 132, my emphasis). He also says that interdisciplinarity was encouraged in the new disciplinary field of the social sciences to make it more scientific. This suggests an alternative understanding of the relationship between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. Abbot’s analysis reveals two significant things. The first is that the emergence of ‘interdisciplinarity’ was simultaneous with the emergence of the disciplinary structure of the social sciences and that the level of interdisciplinary activity remained more or less constant over the 40 years he considered (p. 134). The second is that as an idea it goes in and out of fashion (p. 133) and is in vogue at some times, but not others. Although Abbott himself does not argue this, I think that his analysis is suggestive of the following situation: (a) that interdisciplinary work is a normal feature of scholarly practice (as RI) and seems to take
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place at a fairly stable rate, but (b) periodically the idea of interdisciplinarity (as HI) emerges sloganistically within educational and knowledge debates. However, arguing for interdisciplinarity in this particular HI way is not the same thing as doing interdisciplinarity in the way it actually is getting done anyway in RI. We should not assume too readily that there is a direct relationship between the schismatic rhetoric of interdisciplinarity (HI) and the mundane practice of interdisciplinarity (RI). RI is a routine feature of normal science; HI is a periodic event in educational discourse.
Disciplinarity Typically HI discourses promote interdisciplinarity on the grounds that it represents a radical break with an arbitrary disciplinary knowledge structure that has been inherited from the past and is now obsolete as a consequence of radical social change. Hyperinterdisciplinarity is an example of a more general type of ‘radical break’ or ‘schismatic’ theory (Moore 2009, ch. 2) that announces a new order of knowledge by either breaking with the past or with an assumed ‘dominant’ or ‘hegemonic’ mainstream order. I call this type of discourse ‘hyper’ because of the manner in which interdisciplinarity is promoted through a language of what might be called, ‘rhetoric inflation’, that through the use of hyperbole, raises the difference between disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge arrangements from a routine working relationship to the level of politicized radical opposition. A routine ‘working relationship’ between perspectives (and people) in the academic world is inflated into an epistemological division (Moore and Maton 2001) that is further aligned with a radical historical break (disciplinary = ‘before’, interdisciplinary = ‘after’) or division between groups (e.g. male/female, white/black, middleclass/working class).
Where are the Disciplines? A major problem with the HI model is that, in order to advance its radical credentials, it has to represent ‘the disciplines’ as fixed and ossified structures constituted in such a way that they generate alleged determinate effects. But it is by no means so simple. It might be useful to differentiate between three different ways in which the disciplines ‘exist’ (and interact). First, there is the epistemological map of disciplines: here disciplines are to be found (mostly in books) in their most abstract and ‘pure’ form. They will be described and distinguished as particular forms of knowledge with questions of ontology on one side and of methodology on the other. This could be seen as the ‘sacred’ representation of disciplines, but it exists in fuzzy outline rather than being set in stone. It is this that is mainly taught to students on subject-based undergraduate courses.
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Secondly, the institutional structure of disciplines: here disciplines are found in their least pure form – as they are distributed around universities in a discontinuous and fragmented manner. The epistemological map does not automatically translate into an institutional plan. The relationship between the epistemological map and an institutional structure is like that between the map of the London underground and the actual street-level geography of London. It is an elegant device for getting around the underground system, but useless if you want to explore the streets on foot (you need an A–Z). Thirdly, the professional organization of disciplines: here the disciplines are at their most ‘real’ because it is where they are alive – where the work gets down. This could be seen as the ‘profane’ expression of the epistemological map. At this level, the disciplines are represented in associations, journals, conferences, papers, seminars and people. This level of organization is a supra-institutional matrix that links academics between institutions and across continents; it also links them across time in that it connects current with past work and points towards future work (Moore and Maton 2001; Moore 2009). It is within this matrix that identities (and careers) are developed – and where the epistemological map(s) of disciplines are being continually reordered and updated. At the level of institutional organization, disciplines are typically represented in a fragmented rather than a unified way. At that of inter-institutional professional organization, they are represented in weakly co-ordinated networks where there is little possibility of centrally imposed orthodoxy or hegemony. In sum, what Bourdieu calls, ‘the cross controls of the field’ (2000) significantly decentre and weaken disciplinary structures in a way that makes it difficult to see how any kind of effective hegemony could ever be established. There are no centrally controlling bodies (like those of liberal professions such as medicine and law). Scholars can be disgraced, but not defrocked. At the same time, the epistemological map is continually contested and has no one, given form: it ‘exists’ within a quantum of tolerance rather than as a fixed point and this openness is crucial for the creativity of disciplines. In reality, disciplines are always fluid, evolving, diversifying and at numerous points interacting (RI). If RI rather than HI is taken as the model it follows that the normal relationship between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity is complementary rather than oppositional. This is borne out by Abbot’s observation that the consistent presence of interdisciplinarity within the field of social science disciplines for such a long time has not destabilized it. The disciplinary structure has remained stable and interdisciplinary work a stable feature of it. New areas, including multidisciplinary ones such as Media Studies and Education Studies, emerge within the structure and its dynamics, not (except rhetorically) in opposition to it. There are, however, good reasons to argue that it is disciplinarity that provides the foundational structure for intellectual work, organization and identity (see Conclusion). The core problem is that HI has to, simplistically, present disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity as radically different things rather than as normal features of one more complex reality: routine academic work. The relationship
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between the two only becomes problematical in ‘hyper’ episodes (and, then, only for some in particular places). It is these episodes that need accounting for and the implication could be that they are symptomatic of some other kind of disturbance within a field rather than really about interdisciplinarity per se. The clues to this might lie in the analysis of HI as a discourse.
Hyperinterdisciplinarity Calls for interdisciplinarity have been associated with different positions at different times, but it is suggested that they share a certain set of basic generic principles that come to be expressed in the particular ‘languages’ of these different positions. The distinction between RI and HI is of a different order. It has to do with the general relationship between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. In the first case that relationship is one of longstanding complementarity in routine scholarly work. In the second, it is one of radical discontinuity – interdisciplinarity is promoted as a radical critique of the disciplines and seeks to displace them. A number of substantive points have been made in order to suggest that the HI model relies upon a simplification of the operations and complexities of intellectual fields and has only a tangential relationship to actual interdisciplinarity (RI). It has also been suggested that this simplification is necessary in order to valorize the rhetoric claims and demands of HI and the hyperbole through which it is promoted. On this basis, HI has to be analysed as a phenomenon of the educational field. If HI is approached in this way within a more general theory of intellectual fields there are three initial sociological questions: what is its structure and how can this be conceptualized systematically relative to other possible structures within such fields; how are forms of this type distributed within fields; and, under what types of external social conditions do forms of this type emerge when and where they do? Questions of such generality and scope can only be fully addressed through a comprehensive programme of theoretical work and detailed historical and comparative study.
The Question of Boundaries Hyperinterdisciplinarity was described above in terms of the principles of its ‘generic position’. A key theoretical aim must be to move from such a description to a conceptualization. The obvious difference between a disciplinary knowledge structure and an interdisciplinary one is that in the former disciplines are well defined and strongly bounded whereas in an interdisciplinary one they are not. It might be tempting to say that one is defined by strong classification and the other by weak classification. The difference lies in the presence or absence of boundaries. However, this would be to overlook the fact that HI does, in fact, establish strong boundaries: in the first instance that between itself and
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disciplinarity. This is significant because within HI discourse, given its rejection of the epistemological case for disciplines, disciplinarity is understood as a representation of social order. Hence, the difference between disciplinarity and HI is that between alternative ways of representing social order. It is not the relative presence or absence of boundaries per se that is the central point, but, rather, what kinds of boundaries and where and how? This was Bernstein’s great insight in his seminal papers on classification and framing and visible and invisible pedagogies from the early 1970s (Bernstein 2003, chs 5 and 6 [1975]). It was Durkheim who first suggested that in modern societies education systems (or ways of conceiving them) could be treated in the same way as cosmologies in pre-modern societies. The sociology of education could draw upon resources from the sociology of religion. Bernstein’s developments of Durkheim were part of intellectual collaboration with the anthropologist Mary Douglas (see Bernstein 2003; Douglas 2003; Fardon 1999) in the second half of the 1960s. On Douglas’ part, this resulted in her book Natural Symbols (2003 revised edition [1st edition 1970]) that in addition to the original ingenuity of her own ideas is also one of the most imaginative applications of Bernstein’s ideas. Both thinkers were concerned with the basic Durkheimian problem: the relationship between social structure and symbolic systems and the organization of social life and consciousness. Douglas was concerned with the ways in which forms of religious life vary according to social structure and with how to systematically conceptualize such variations. Her central focus was the decline of ritual in modern society. She employs two principles through which to address these issues: ‘group’ and ‘grid’. To very briefly summarize: by ‘group’ she means the outer boundary of a social group – the criteria of belonging that people employ to acquire a sense of ‘them’ without and ‘us’ within – by ‘grid’ she means the internal organization within a group – the relationships between ‘us’ within. These are boundaries of different kinds. Both can vary in strength: hence group boundary can be relatively stronger or weaker and grid can be more or less hierarchical or egalitarian. This generates four basic types: strong group/strong grid, strong group/weak grid, weak group/strong grid, weak group/weak grid. In Douglas’ terms the first difference between disciplinarity and HI is that between strong and weak grid. But what of group? In what follows, I will examine in detail two examples of HI in order to show that HI is a case of strong group/weak grid. This is to come at HI from the opposite direction, as it were, in terms of how it operates with principles of strong classification – as Bernstein observed, boundaries do not just go away, they simply relocate.
The Boundaries of Hyperinterdisciplinarity Because HI is most obviously concerned with breaking down boundaries, it might seem odd to examine it in terms of how it creates them. Such a ‘reverse
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reading’ is intended to present HI in a different light in order to get a better sociological sense of it as a recurring phenomenon of a more general type in intellectual fields. I have described such things as ‘break theories’ or forms of ‘schismatism’ (Moore 2009). This is where positions promote their originality in terms of a radical break with an established or mainstream body of knowledge that is not infrequently depicted as being dominant or hegemonic and often as repressive. The break can be made in two (not necessarily mutually exclusive) ways. First there is the idea of the break with the past. It is claimed that those making the break hold a radically new knowledge that owes nothing to what went before and cannot be judged by past stands. Kuhn’s ideas (1971) provided an influential model for this type of thinking. Secondly is the claim to an exclusive standpoint that breaks contemporaneously with established, mainstream knowledge and is incommensurable with it. Althusser’s concept of the ‘class theoretical position of the proletariat’ or Harding’s ‘feminist standpoint theory’ are good examples. The cases below are instances of each type. Hyperinterdisciplinarity is now being considered as a narrative – that is, how the generic position unfolds as a ‘story’ about history, society and social groups.
Interdisciplinarity as the Future I will focus, first, upon a paper, ‘A Curriculum for the Future’, by Gunther Kress (2000). In this example the imperative behind interdisciplinarity is historical change. My intention is to draw from Kress’ paper a set of common themes and moves in HI arguments against the disciplines. Kress begins as follows: I address the question of the present curriculum, largely inherited from the 19th century, the disintegration of the frames which had given it its shape and purposes and then move on to ask about the broad outline characteristics of curricula relevant for the near future. In particular, I suggest that the presently existing curriculum still assumes that it is educating young people into older dispositions, whereas the coming era demands an education for instability. (Kress 2000: 133) The prescription for curriculum change is grounded in an overarching analysis of social change. Furthermore, this change is epochal in scale – ‘the coming era’. This type of narrative is typical of postmodernist thinking and its ‘apocalyptic ontology’ (Moore and Maton 2001). It is important because it valorizes the arguments that follow. It is the finality of the break between ‘eras’ that demands the unavoidable necessity of the move from one kind of knowledge structure to another. Two questions follow: (a) in general, what is the nature of the break – the differences between ‘before’ and ‘after’, and (b) more specifically, what are the differences between knowledge/education before and after.
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Kress encapsulates the historical break in this manner: ‘In important ways, the social mores, cultural values, forms of the economy and the social organisations of 1955 had more affinity with those of 1855 than they have with those of 1995’ (p. 133). The most fundamental change is that from an era of stability and predictability to one of instability and fluidity: ‘the homologies between the purposes of the nation state and the values of the school, the needs of the economy and the forms of knowledge and pedagogic practices of the school and the values of the school and the values of the media, all these have come adrift’ (p. 139). There are two kinds of problems with this type of account. First, it exaggerates the degree of stability in the preceding ‘era’ and secondly the degree of change in the present (the ‘new era’). But only in this way can changes be accepted as radical breaks rather than as simply just some more ‘social change’ (history). The first of these problems is represented in Kress’ view that, ‘The period from the middle of the last century [i.e. the 19th] to the middle of this can be seen as one such period, despite the cataclysmic events that have characterised it’ (p. 133); that is, as a period of stability. Surely by any measure, this is a perverse statement: ‘despite the cataclysmic events’! Take out the cataclysmic events and there is not much left. Even in the ‘boring’ decade of the 1950s (one of the few episodes of actual relative stability in the West), Britain, and most other nations in the developed world, was a markedly different place at the end of it than it was at the beginning. A ‘thoroughly modern’ young woman of the 1920s would very likely have seen herself as a very different kind of woman from her Edwardian mother who, likewise, would have seen herself as very different from her Victorian mother. The condition of the British working class in 1895 was profoundly different from that of 1845. The England of 1820 was radically different from that of 1780. Kress’ schematic epochal account of a seismic shift between ‘eras’ cannot stand any serious historical scrutiny.
Disciplines as ‘the Past’ The construction of the radical break is the necessary condition for Kress to press his ideas about the ‘curriculum of the future’. He describes the subjectbased curriculum of the past: Underpinning this curriculum were, of course, notions of social order which themselves appeared as givens in curriculum and in pedagogy: attitudes to authority and notions of individual agency (or the limitations on or of agency). And these notions appeared in theories and approaches to teaching and learning: teaching as transmission, learning as acquisition. In that structure learning was not a domain of individual creative agency; individual agency as work of acquisition, yes, individual agency as reshaping, no. ‘To learn’ was not supposed to mean ‘to change’: authority relations attempted
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However, whether in its elite form or in its aspirations for the masses, liberal education was crucially concerned with learning in order to change – whether as the development of ‘character’ in the elite schools or as ‘self-improvement’ in the workers’ and adult education movements. If it was the case that, ‘authority relations attempted to guarantee the unchanged replication of knowledge in learning’, then how come the nineteenth century saw such great advances in knowledge, including some of the greatest revolutions of them all: of Marx, Darwin and Freud and those in physics and chemistry? How do we account for the movement in the arts from impressionism to the cubism of Picasso and Braque and beyond or in literature from realism to modernism? The problem with Kress and others like him is not that they are all wrong, but only half right. It is the systematic one-sidedness of such accounts that creates hyperbole such as: ‘When tomorrow is unlikely to be like today and when the day after tomorrow is definitely going to be unlike yesterday, curricular aims and guiding metaphors have to be reset’ (Kress 2000: 134). This is not to deny academic writers the occasional literary flourish because this statement is an argument not an ornament. The guiding metaphors have to be ‘reset’ because of the radical depth of change and the one-sidedness is systematic because a set of half-truths needs to be assembled as a totalizing discourse that justifies the claim that the change is as radical as described. None of the above is intended to deny the obvious facts of social change. The disagreement is over the manner in which Kress ‘designs’ (to use his preferred metaphor) his narrative selectively in order to generate a set of oppositions (old/new, stability/instability, etc.) that embed the disciplinary/interdisciplinary pair within a particular narrative of social change that positions them as oppositional. The strong external boundary that is erected between disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge is transcribed as a radical break in history, as a switch from one era to another. On the ‘before’ side, grid is strong (stability and predictability), but on the ‘after’ side grid is weak (instability and unpredictability). The crucial move is when these oppositions are transcribed again in terms of the subject as, ‘deeply different to the social subject of the preceding era’. The social subject is intimately connected with the ‘knowledge’ subject. In Kress’ case the discipline is English and he concludes his article with a discussion of the future of English under these new conditions: In the world of market-dominated consumption, as much as in the world of an economy of information and services, meaning resides in commodities of
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all kinds, both because commodities have been constructed as signs and because commodities are taken as signs by those who construct their identity through choice-in-consumption. Meaning is therefore no longer confined or confinable to ‘texts’ in a traditional sense, nor is communication. A curriculum of communication which is to be adequate to the needs of the young cannot afford to remain with older notions of text as valued literary object, as the present English curriculum still does, by and large. (Kress 2000: 145) Much of what Kress says about a, ‘curriculum of communication’ in the light of technological developments in media and communications and young people’s involvement with them makes good sense. What is not obvious is that this is in some way incompatible with, ‘older notions of text as valued literary object’. Have such literary objects suddenly lost their value? In what sense are the ‘older’ notions older, except trivially, in that we invented books before we invented computers? When were ‘meaning’ and ‘communication’ ever, ‘confined or confinable to “texts” in a traditional sense’? The radical break creates a strong boundary between ‘subjects’ both in terms of knowledge and the self in order to ‘charge’ the distinction between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity.
Disciplinarity as Other This section will attempt to demonstrate that the basic structure of Kress’ historical break type account is also to be found where HI is promoted as an alternative to an assumed hegemonic disciplinary structure that is held to represent the standpoint of a dominant social group. The example is ‘women’s studies’. Bird’s (2001) study is based on interviews with women who worked in the 1970s on the first courses in ‘Women’s Studies’ (WS) in the United Kingdom and North America. This case of HI precedes Kress’ by some 30 years, but exhibits the same basic structure. Elizabeth Bird locates WS against the background of the student radicalism of the 1960s and experiences such as the civil rights movement in the United States. Although Bird employs a distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’, what is most important, for her, is that the knowledge divisions reflect gendered social and power relations. Disciplinary knowledge is male and conservative. This is represented in ‘competing theories of knowledge’ (p. 467): In one, a discipline corresponds to an abstract idea of an essential corpus within a structure of a given framework; in the other, a disciple is an artificial construct, determined by relations of power and authority. (ibid.) She says that, ‘Old knowledge was also exemplified by disciplinary boundaries. The first task of those who were developing a radical critique was to break down
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the boundaries . . .’ (ibid.). Hence, the aim is a political reordering of the social space of knowledge relations, both epistemologically and institutionally: ‘interdisciplinarity was part of a radical politics’ (ibid.) and, ‘there was no question but that curriculum innovation was inextricably linked to the women’s movement and was part of the agenda of radical politics in the period’ (ibid. p. 468). A very clear expression of the generic position of HI. Bird and her respondents are forthright in their advocacy of interdisciplinary as weak grid, but at other places in the text there is also the language of ‘group’: In the US, the politics of the Civil Right movement resulted in a demand for a separate space in which Black Studies might be located, made up of courses drawn from many disciplines. It was this model that was to be copied by Women’s Studies programmes. (ibid. p. 468 my emphases) Interdisciplinarity, but within the ‘spaces’ of Black Studies and Women’s Studies. It was not at all uncommon in that period for it to be insisted that only women could teach Women’s Studies and only blacks, Black Studies. A number of her interviewees regret the passing of these ‘separate spaces’ as WS transmuted into ‘gender studies’ and moved into the mainstream and started admitting men and ‘masculinity’. This regret at the weakening of group boundary might be seen as being at odds with the insistence of the weakening of grid within the group. But, as Douglas argues, different kinds of boundaries do different kinds of things.
From Margin to Mainstream Bird’s view is that this movement from margins to mainstream occurred as gender issues and studies were assimilated into the disciplines. The disciplines reasserted their conservative (male/patriarchal) authority over interdisciplinary, female radicalism. Bird’s paper is provocatively entitled, ‘Disciplining the Interdisciplinary’: ‘I want to look at how the interdisciplinary project was disciplined: at how the established disciplines were able to either re-assert or retain control over the curriculum . . .’ (ibid. p. 468). Within the academy, the established disciplines and the organizational structure that embedded political power in those disciplines resulted in the disciplines themselves changing their character, rather than the emergence of a new discipline of Women’s Studies. (ibid. p. 475) Given her broader argument it is rather strange that she wanted WS to emerge as a ‘discipline’.
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Bird suggests two rather different kinds of reasons for how the interdisciplinary project failed as she sees it. One, which I think she most favours, is political and ideological: z Universities are in the first instance sites of power reflecting broader power
relations in society (including patriarchy) and, furthermore, are conservative. z That power is most directly represented in the structure of disciplines. z The challenge to that power in the 1960s and 1970s failed and the profiles
of oppositional social movements have significantly changed since. The issues today are different. z The disciplines incorporated and defused the areas promoting interdisciplinarity. The second account is more prosaic: z The institutional structure of universities did not initially enable independ-
ent budget centres for interdisciplinary courses in areas such as Women’s Studies. z Courses in Women’s Studies lacked single departmental bases. z Career development requires both a departmental location and a disciplinary identity. z Career development entails on-going socialization into a disciplinary identity. These two accounts could be complementary in the sense that the second might be the fine detail of the first. However, the differences in emphasis might have significant implications – on a closer reading it is not clear whether Bird and her respondents are addressing (and were challenging) the epistemological organization of disciplines or the institutional organization of departments. Bird herself acknowledges that: Precisely how these [disciplines and sub-disciplines] relate to the organisational structure of the universities is also complicated. Many ‘subjects’ are in themselves interdisciplinary: education is one such example, university departments or schools tend to include academics from a range of disciplines, as do departments of social policy, development studies or management. Equally, many other subjects that also lay claim to being a single discipline combine different disciplinary approaches; for example, archaeology includes geology and ancient history, geographers divide themselves into physical and human types. (ibid. p. 467) All of this is true. But, then, how do disciplines have the power that Bird and others attribute to them?
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These points return to the more substantive observations made earlier regarding the organization of disciplines at different levels. Indeed, what was said above is more or less what Bird is saying here, but it then becomes difficult to see how disciplines could present the massive threat they are presented as being or how they could exercise the powers attributed to them: ‘how the established disciplines were able to either re-assert or retain control over the curriculum . . .’. On balance the second of Bird’s accounts above, the more prosaic, seems to make better sense than the first more apocalyptic one.
Observations Bird shares Kress’ assumption that disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are oppositional rather than complementary and similarly takes for granted that interdisciplinarity is ‘progressive’ and disciplinarity ‘conservative’. The distinction between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity is superimposed upon, and underwritten by, a narrative of historical and social division, of incommensurable breaks with the past and/or the dominant social group. Both assume a ‘reflectionist’ view of the relationship between the order of knowledge and the social order – the former simply mirrors the latter. There is no space for the autonomy of knowledge. HIs, through simplification, significantly inflate the ‘power’ of disciplines, but need to do so in order to valorize their own positions (as the ‘powerless’). The figure of ‘the disciplines’ is an outward projection from within HI discourses in opposition to which they can refine their own sense of identity. This construct of ‘the disciplines’ is no more closely related to the actual disciplinary structure than HI is to RI. Despite their surface differences and distance in time, both of these examples of HI share a common structure: interdisciplinarity (weak grid) is promoted within a strong boundary (strong group). In Kress’ case, the boundary is marked as a radical break in history that brings into being a new type of subject, in Bird’s case as a radical break with the dominant, masculinist hegemony inaugurated by a marginalized social group. Such schismatic devices break the link between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’, the ‘dominant’ and the ‘marginalised’. The hyperbole of the radical break valorizes the distinction between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in a way that generates radically opposed subject positions: old/new, male/female, self/other, etc., and these, in turn are valorized ideologically as reactionary/progressive. In both cases these things are achieved through ‘narratives’ that rhetorically inflate the differences between each pair, but at the expense of simplifying historical and institutional complexities. In their different ‘languages’ they each say the same thing.
Sects, Fractions, Segments and Enclaves Different kinds of boundaries do different kinds of things. The key to HI lies not in weak grid but in strong group, not in boundaries within but in the
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construction of the boundary around the grid – the schismatic break. If HI is understood in terms of weak grid/strong group, then, in Douglas’ terms this is a form of sect. Bernstein also (originally in 1972) used this term: ‘Every new approach becomes a social movement or sect which immediately defines the nature of the subject by re-defining what is to be admitted, and what is beyond the pale, so that with every new approach the subject starts from scratch’ (2003: 157 [1975]). But what in sociological terms does this mean? Douglas registers concerns about the term ‘sect’: ‘we need a neutral term to refer to the social environment constituted by a strong group boundary and weak internal distinction’ (2003: xx). The problems are to do with transposing terms from the sociology of religion into modern, secular areas. In Natural Symbols she chooses to employ instead the term ‘enclave’: It just happens to be a quirk of intellectual history that the study of sects has been assigned to the sociology of religion, consequently the general understanding of enclaves as organizational forms with particular problems of authority has been fragmented. There are theories of hierarchy and of markets, but no secular theory of this third kind of organization. (Douglas 2003: xxiii my emphasis) Douglas is raising a point of wider significance. Durkheim’s insight into how the study of cosmologies can be carried over into modern, secular societies requires a translation of terms such as ‘sect’ into a more neutral term that, within comparative analysis, can produce ‘general understandings’ across a wide range of otherwise apparently disparate social and cultural arrangements and contexts (across both modern and pre-modern societies). In what manner might HI, as I have presented it, be ‘sect-like’ or understood as an ‘enclave’ within the educational field? Essentially, in that HI as a device attempts to carve out a distinctive space for itself within the field by establishing a strong group boundary. Strong group boundary is essentially defensive. It insulates members by severing links with the past and the mainstream. But at the same time it also privileges and protects them by authorizing their ‘voice’ (Moore and Muller 2010). Paradoxically, the device of interdisciplinarity within HI discourses (weak grid) operates to strengthen group boundary and so specializes a developing sense of identity within the group – WS is a good example of this, but in line with Douglas’ concern for a more general understanding of ‘enclave’ organization, it can be noted that religious sects and radical political groups do the same. Some general observations can now be made: HI is associated with areas that are new and relatively marginal. WS and Black Studies are examples – see also in that period Cultural Studies (Maton 2010). The case of the NSOE considered at the beginning of the chapter fits this scenario. These areas lack stable identities and problematics or established canons. It is for these reasons that they are often preoccupied with narcissistic issues of self and reflexivity. The lack of an authoritative centre is associated with their tendency to egalitarianism (weak grid),
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though, as Douglas points out this also can be destabilizing tending towards factionalism and schism. This is especially so when the enclave is grounded in an identity – there can be no unambiguous criteria whereby to define, say, ‘woman’. Abbott refers to this tendency as ‘fractionation’ and it can also be understood in terms of Bernstein’s ‘horizontal knowledge structure with a weak grammar’ (2000) and a tendency to ‘segmentation’. HI episodes happen at times when sites within the education system are undergoing rapid change. For example, in England in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the secondary sector the raising of the school leaving age required the formation of a new kind of teacher specializing in the education of the non-academic pupil. Women’s Studies, Black Studies and Cultural Studies emerged with the entry of new, previously under-represented social groups into higher education. Essentially, in all of these cases HI is associated with a problem of ‘accommodation’ of new social groups. HI might be a ‘pre-paradigmatic’ phase in which new subjects stabilize their problematics and establish recognizable professional identities and organizations – though there might be differences in how successful some areas can be in achieving this. Strong group boundary is a protective device that nurtures the initial development of the subject and the weak internal grid reflects the lack of an agreed problematic. As the former emerges, grid becomes stronger and group weaker. The movement from WS to ‘gender studies’ could be an instance of this. HI, as a pedagogic device in the educational field, is an instance of a more general social form and, hence, requires a more general theory of such forms.
Conclusion This chapter proposes that disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are complementary aspects of one more complex whole: routine scholarly work. On this basis, the relationship between the two is not problematical. The real issue is the relationship between routine interdisciplinarity and hyperinterdisciplinarity. How far can the latter be understood in terms of the former? The argument is that the relationship between HI and RI is tangential. There is a distinction between ‘interdisciplinarity’ as a device and interdisciplinarity as actual practice. RI in itself tells us very little about HI because HI does not take RI as its object. Rather, HI has to be approached as a structured position within the more general structural dynamic of the educational field. It was also suggested that within the complementary relationship between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, it is the former that provides the foundation. This can only be explored briefly here. The major issue is to do with where ‘problems’ are located: whether within the field of a discipline or outside it.
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The main points are as follows: Interdisciplinary problem-oriented projects are short-term. The configuration of resources around a ‘problem’ is (a) contingent upon some agency identifying a problem as such, and (b) epistemologically and methodologically ad hoc in terms of the particular set of resources brought to bear upon it. The term ‘interdisciplinary’ is fundamentally a misnomer. In reality ‘bits’ of disciplines are brought together to address specific problems. How is this selection and recontexualization achieved? What are the agencies that regulate it? This is a dimension of power that advocates of HI ignore. Once the problem is solved, the interdisciplinary configuration/team is dissolved. The knowledge produced is of limited general application by virtue of its initial contingency and ad hocness and is low in ‘transportability’. Knowledge integration and abstraction requires a deeper ‘metatheoretical’ language of a disciplinary nature. The fruits of interdisciplinary projects need to flow back into the integrative languages of disciplines. Following Randall Collins (2000), it is the case that, historically, productive intellectual fields thrive on problems not solutions. Interdisciplinary projects have truncated ‘problem chains’ because once the initial problem is ‘solved’ to the satisfaction of whoever has defined (and funded) the problem, then the project terminates. By contrast, the internal problem fields of disciplines generate extended problem chains because each ‘solution’ constitutes new problems. Disciplinary problem chains can extend over centuries. It is precisely because disciplinary structures stabilize that they go on to be so innovative and productive within themselves (and routinely across themselves at critical nodal points). It is the most stable disciplines that are the most productive (e.g. physics). It is no accident that HI occurs most often and most vociferously in areas that have failed to stabilize around an agreed problematic. Disciplines provide the bases for identities. The relationship between the social structures of disciplines, the institutional structure of higher education and the identities of academics is crucial – especially for the present argument because of the manner in which Kress and others describe the ‘new subject’ of interdisciplinarity in the ‘new’ era of instability. Again, there are pragmatic issues, here. Disciplinary identities are stable and long term. They provide a basis whereby, for example, institutions can advertise for posts and write job descriptions and around which courses of study can be developed. What would it mean to advertise academic appointments as ‘interdisciplinary’? No one is or could ever be in any meaningful sense ‘interdisciplinary’, though all may be able to contribute aspects of disciplinary expertise to projects involving others from other disciplines doing the same for particular, short-term purposes. Interdisciplinary work is short term and ad hoc and dependent upon the patronage and largesse of the external agencies defining and funding ‘problems’. Interdisciplinarity in itself cannot provide a secure academic identity or security in work and career development.
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Abbott summarizes the situation thus: There are far more research problems than there are disciplines – so many, in fact, that a university organized around problems of investigation would be hopelessly balkanized. Furthermore, there do exist bodies of knowledge that can be used to address many different substantive problems. Such problemportable knowledge is precisely what disciplines generate. To be sure, any particular disciplinary knowledge works better with some problems than with others: hence the practical importance of interdisciplinarity. But an academic system based merely on problems – with Ph.D.s only in fields like women’s studies, poverty studies, American studies, urban studies, population studies, criminology, and Asian-American studies – would be hopelessly duplicative and would obviously require far more ‘interdisciplinarity’ than does the current one. The reality is that problem-based knowledge is insufficiently abstract to survive in competition with problem-portable knowledge . . . interdisciplinary studies are ultimately dependent on specialized disciplines to generate new theories and methods. Interdisciplinarity presupposes disciplines. (Abbott 2001: 135, my emphasis) What is important about disciplines is the capacity for generating ‘problemportable knowledge’ through theoretical abstraction and generalization in a way that is not possible for ‘problem-based’ interdisciplinary studies. This stability is the condition for successful innovation within and between disciplinary networks rather than ossification and for radical, progressive advancement in knowledge – as the actual history of the disciplines amply demonstrates.
Note 1
Volumes 1–4 of Bernstein’s Class, Codes and Control, were reprinted in 2003. The pagination remains the same between the originals and the reprints. Original publication dates will be given in [ ].
References Abbott, A. (2001), Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bernstein, B. (2000), Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. — (2003 [1st edn, 1975]), Class, Codes and Control vol III: Towards a Theory of Educational Transmission. London: Routledge. Bird, E. (2001), Disciplining the interdisciplinary: Radicalism and the academic curriculum. British Journal of Sociology of Education 22(4): 463–461. Bourdieu, P. (2000), Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity.
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Collins, R. (2000), The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Douglas, M. (2003), Natural Symbols. London: Routledge. Fardon, R. (1999), Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography. London: Routledge. Kress, G. (2000), A curriculum for the future. Cambridge Journal of Education 30(1): 133–145. Maton, K. (2010), Analysing knowledge claims and practices: Languages of legitimation, in K. Maton and R. Moore (eds), Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education. London: Continuum. Moore, R. (2009), Towards the Sociology of Truth. London: Continuum. Moore, R. and Maton, K. (2001), Founding the sociology of knowledge: Basil Bernstein, intellectual fields and the epistemic device, in A. Morais, I. Neves, B. Davies and H. Daniels (eds), Towards a Sociology of Pedagogy: The Contribution of Basil Bernstein to Research. New York: Peter Lang. Moore, R. and Muller, J. (2010), ‘Voice Discourse’ and the problem of knowledge and identity, in K. Maton and R. Moore (eds), Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education, London: Continuum. Young, M. F. D. (2008), Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism. London: Routledge.
Chapter 6
Writing Discipline: Comparing Inscriptions of Knowledge and Knowers in Academic Writing Susan Hood
Introduction If academic writing is a form of knowledge making, then differences in knowledge problems or ways of addressing such problems should account for much of the variation among the disciplines. MacDonald (1994: 21)
Discussions within the applied linguistic field over several decades have concerned the notion of academic discourse communities and the ways in which they might be described (Jolliffe and Brier 1988; MacDonald 1994). Jolliffe and Brier (1988), for example, cite Crane’s (1972) discussion of the discourse communities of sociology and mathematics as ‘networks of “invisible colleges” ’, and Fish (1980, 1982) on literary criticism and jurisprudence as ‘groups of scholars who are constrained by their audience to accept certain methods of reading texts and responding to literature’. Studies of disciplinary difference continue to proliferate in the literature of the field, made more easily undertaken with the availability of technologies for corpus-based analysis. However, much of the work has been constrained in its explanatory power by limitations in those technologies, as well as in linguistic theories that restrict computational analyses to the level of discrete lexis or syntactic forms. Such studies can describe difference in quantitative distributions of specific wordings or structural elements from one discipline to another (e.g. Hyland 2000). Nonetheless, an intuitive leap is required to move from descriptions of frequency in form to variations in meaning at the level of epistemology. The consequence can be a proliferation of descriptions of difference without taking us closer to understanding ‘differences in knowledge problems or ways of addressing such problems’ (MacDonald 1994: 21).
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On another applied linguistic front are discussions of whether disciplinary entities can be said to exist at all in anything other than a very abstract sense (Casanave 1995; Lundell and Beach 2002). Underlying such claims is typically a preference for ethnographic methods of enquiry that background or even dismiss any close analysis of academic discourse as language, and/or for theoretical models that cannot account for relationships in meanings across discourses. It is apparent that there is much yet to be understood around questions of disciplinarity and the quest becomes more significant in the context of widespread promotion of interdisciplinary research.
Theorizing Knowledge-construction In this chapter I propose an alternative approach to investigating questions of disciplinarity. Beginning outside of linguistic theory I draw from a Bernsteinian perspective on the sociology of knowledge, connecting initially with Bernstein’s construct of discourses, differentiating along a continuum from horizontal discourse to vertical discourse. Horizontal discourse constitutes commonsense knowledge and ‘entails a set of strategies that are local, segmentally organised, context-specific and dependent’. Vertical discourse or uncommonsense knowledge takes the form of a ‘coherent, explicit and systematically principled structure’ (Bernstein 1999: 159). Vertical discourse of uncommonsense knowledge is that associated with academic study. Within the realm of vertical discourse, Bernstein theorized how different intellectual fields or disciplines represent different kinds of knowledge structure (Bernstein 1996, 1999, 2000). At one end of this continuum lie hierarchical knowledge structures, typical of the natural sciences, where knowledge accumulates through the integration of knowledge at lower levels ‘to create very general propositions and theories’ (Bernstein 1999: 162). At the other, are horizontal knowledge structures typified by the humanities (e.g. sociology, cultural studies) in which knowledge is built segmentally as ‘a series of specialised languages, each with its own specialised modes of interrogation and specialised criteria’ (Bernstein 1996: 172–173). The social sciences (e.g. linguistics) can be located somewhere between the two. Wignell (2007) suggests that ‘[since] the language of the social sciences evolved as a hybrid of the language of the physical sciences and the language of the humanities there is always a kind of dynamic tension between the science and the social in the discourse’ (Wignell 2007: 202). (See Martin this volume for a related discussion.) Building on the work of Bernstein, others in this field of sociology have continued to theorize the ways in which different intellectual fields differ in relation to the production of knowledge. Maton (2007, 2009) challenges, in the spirit of Bernstein, any simple dichotomous interpretation of horizontal and hierarchical knowledge structures in favour of a continuum representing the relative strength or weakness of the integration or segmentation of knowledge.
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Maton (2000, 2007, 2006, 2009) then takes the conceptualization of different kinds of knowledge structures a step further. Importantly he argues that claims to knowledge are not just ‘of the world’, they are also made ‘by authors’ (Maton 2000: 154), and that ‘for every knowledge structure there is also a knower structure’ (Maton 2007: 88). Just as we can speak of intellectual fields as representing hierarchical or horizontal knowledge structures, so we can also consider them as hierarchical or horizontal knower structures. Maton (2007), for example, illustrates how science can be characterized as a horizontal knower structure, in which knowers are segmented by specialized modes of acting, and where the social profile of the scientist is deemed irrelevant to scientific insight, while the humanities can be seen as a hierarchical knower structure where knowers are integrated hierarchically in the construction of an ideal knower and knowledge claims are predicated on attributes of knowers – who you are is more important than what you are discussing and how. In developing LCT, Maton reinterprets these dimensions as two sets of relations, the epistemic relation and the social relation. The epistemic relation is that ‘between educational knowledge and its proclaimed object of study (that part of the world of which knowledge is claimed)’. It concerns what can be known and how. The social relation is that ‘between educational knowledge and its author or subject (who is making the claim to knowledge)’ (Maton 2000: 154). It concerns who can know. Each of these sets of relations can be relatively stronger or weaker. Stronger epistemic relations give emphasis to the possession of explicit principles, skills and procedures; stronger social relations and give emphasis to the attitudes and dispositions of knowers (Maton 2009: 46). Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) proposes that intellectual fields or disciplines can be differentiated in terms of the relative strength or weakness of their epistemic relations and their social relations (see Figure 6.1). epistemic relation ER+ knowledge
social relation
elite
SR-
SR+
relativist
knower
ER-
Figure 6.1 Legitimation codes of specialization (from Maton 2007: 97)
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LCT theory suggests questions that we might usefully ask in a social semiotic analysis of writing in different intellectual fields. If intellectual fields can be differentiated in terms of the nature of the epistemic relations (what can be known and how) and the social relations (who can know), we can ask how such differences might be instantiated in the discourses, in the key academic genres of those intellectual fields. But what do we look for among the multitude of variations in language from text to text that can generate patterns of difference that we can relate to differences in knowledge-knower structuring of intellectual fields?
Discourses for Legitimizing Knowledge In this chapter the scope of the quest is narrowed by focusing on one kind of text that is common across a spectrum of intellectual fields, including the sciences, the social sciences and the humanities: the research article. More precisely the focus is on one component of that longer text: the introductory section. Hood (2010) identifies the structuring of this section as a macro-genre constituting a ‘research warrant’. It is typically composed of a series of genres, each playing a role in the process of legitimizing a forthcoming contribution to knowledge. While component genres of the macro-genre can vary from factual descriptions and reports to kinds of story genre, the whole invariably functions to persuade a community of readers of the legitimacy of the study reported on. The research warrant provides, then, a relevant site for exploring the kinds of knowers that are implicated and the nature of their contribution to knowledge. The framing question for analysis is essentially that of who gets to say what in the process of legitimization. The extracts analysed are drawn from published articles across a spectrum of intellectual fields in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. They loosely associate around aspects of science – from scientific research itself, to studies of science education. In the case of the latter category the examples are drawn from the realm of social sciences (as applied linguistics research) and from the humanities (as cultural studies research). The issue of typicality is by no means addressed here, although each instance is considered to be legitimate discourse within its intellectual field, given its publication in a reputable journal. Rather, the intention is to begin to explore some of the means by which research writers can and do represent differently the knowledge and knowers they draw on to legitimize their own research. In this way we can begin to open up a richer research space in applied linguistic research for exploring dimensions of disciplinary difference or for evidencing its sometimes claimed demise.
Identifying Projecting Sources as Knowers At this point some further explanation of aspects of systemic functional linguistic theory is required. In analysing who gets to know, reference is made to the
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modelling of interpersonal meaning in discourse as appraisal (Martin and White 2005). One aspect of appraisal theory, that of engagement, makes a basic distinction between single-voiced or monoglossic discourse and multi-voiced or heteroglossic discourse (Martin and White 2005; after Bakhtin 1935 [1981]). In monoglossic text the writer is the sole knower in the discourse. In heteroglossic discourse, there are a number of linguistic means by which writers construe the presence of other voices. In the analyses in this study I focus on projection to identify where writers give voice to other sources by quoting or reporting, the ways in which writers represent those projecting sources, and the nature of what is projected. Projection can be realized congruently in the grammar of clause relations around projecting mental or verbal processes, as underlined in a, b and c, or in pre-projected ‘facts’ within a clause, as in d (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999). a) Halliday (1993) argues // that science has developed a highly sophisticated way of representing ideas. b) Halliday (1993) claims // ‘science has developed a highly sophisticated way of representing ideas’. c) Halliday (1993) believes // that writing science is especially difficult for students because of the way ideas are represented. d) The fact that writing science is especially difficult for students is widely appreciated. Importantly too projection can be realized metaphorically in nominalized mental or verbal processes, as underlined in e and f. e) There is considerable, although not unanimous, agreement on that. f) Anderson (2004) offers a number of suggestions. First, . . . Secondly, . . . Finally, . . . In other instances the projection is signalled only in conventionalized graphological resources, as in the quotation marks in g, or in the bracketed numbers at the end of the clause in h. g) The many stories and ‘radical’ fragments within this work can be envisaged as a series of sites to which the reader is exposed. h) . . . it appears to be a minor substrate in municipal sewage [2, 3]. We can even consider the metaphoric realization of projected feelings in the nominalized behavioural process in i. i) Everyone joined her in laughter. When viewed from the perspective of discourse semantics, projection can function within a clause (as in d, e, g, h, i), across a clause complex (as in a, b, c), or
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across phases of stages of longer text (as in f). A more detailed discussion of engagement can be found in Martin and White (2005) and for further discussion of projection in academic discourse, see Hood (2010). Here it is sufficient to identify projecting sources and the kind of knowledge that is projected. These two dimensions of projecting sources and projected knowledge frame the analyses in this chapter.
Projecting Sources in the Natural Sciences and the Humanities: Degrees of Visibility As instances of heteroglossic discourse are located in the data it is quickly apparent that there are significant differences in how projecting voices are represented and what we can know of these voices. Compare, for example, an extract from an introduction to a research article in a science journal in [1] and one from a cultural studies journal on science education in [2]. The locations of projecting sources are underlined. [1] Incorporation of organic molecules such as dyes inside solid matrices is an attractive topic of research because of the photostability and fluorescence quantum yield1–3 of the modified materials. An approach in this regard is to incorporate molecules inside silica spheres4–5, the advantage of this kind of nanoscopic containers is that they can be used to control the environment of the molecule. [source: Rosemary et al. 2006] [2] As I looked around the room, I recognized most of the students as biology majors who had at one time or another stopped by my office. Of the twenty students gathered, most were women; a group of four young men sauntered in together just as the meeting began. As it turned out, many of the attendees had chemistry and biology classes together. Several women mentioned how they wanted to find some old exams, and one person asked if there were class notes from last week’s lecture that she missed. After 40 min, Cindy suggested we end the meeting so a group of them could study for an exam together. ‘Let’s feed our brains!’ she yelled. Everyone joined her in laughter. [source: Brandt 2008] To begin with we can consider the relative visibility of projecting sources in texts from different disciplinary contexts, and the extent to which they are foregrounded or backgrounded in the discourse. Focusing initially on the science text in extract [1] it is evident that the writer uses a citation convention in which sources are referenced with superscript notation outside of the clause structure. The source as researcher/publication is retrievable from a reference
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section at the end of the article, but this information is not accessible in the flow of text. Here the projecting source as researcher or author is invisible. By implication what is projected is made more prominent than the projecting source. It is more visible in the discourse and it is thematized. A similar strategy is evident in extract [3] [3] . . . reduction of these functional groups is carried out using stronger reducing agents like lithium aluminum hydride.2 Sodium borohydride can, however, be easily modified to stronger or more selective reducing agent.3 Examples include the borohydride reduction step in the industrial Sumitomo’s synthesis of D-biotin (vitamin H)4 and the selective hydroxy ester reduction in presence of non-substituted esters, employed in the synthesis of R-lipoic acid.5 [source: Saeed and Ashraf 2006] This is not to say that this is the only means by which propositions are projected in scientific research articles. In [4] a number of semiotic entities are introduced as projecting sources: hypotheses explain, a proposal hypothesises the hypothesis in turn posits a claim, and studies suggest. [4] Many hypotheses have been advanced to explain the chemical composition of infectious prions and the mechanism of their formation in the neurons of infected hosts, but none has yet been proven. Perhaps the most provocative proposal has been the ‘protein-only’ hypothesis, which posits that the infectious agent is composed exclusively of a misfolded, host-encoded protein called the prion protein (PrP). However, three decades of investigation have yielded no direct experimental proof for this stringent hypothesis. Moreover, various biochemical studies have suggested that nonproteinaceous cofactors may be required to produce infectious prions, possibly by forming physical complexes with PrP (11–4). [source: Surachai Supattapone 2010] The projecting semiotic sources may be elaborated in various ways, as in Many hypotheses the most provocative proposal various biochemical studies but the elaborations do not add to the visibility of the researchers and authors that lie behind the proposals, studies and hypotheses.
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There are also instances where human voices are projected into the flow of text, as underlined in the opening clause in [5], although here it is a generic reference only. [5] Although many researchers believe that acetic acid is an important substrate for the removal of phosphate in anaerobic/aerobic activated sludge (AS) processes [1], it appears to be a minor substrate in municipal sewage [2, 3]. Therefore, novel methods of acetic acid production from sludges are still reported at the present time [4, 5]. [source: Ubukata 2007] Finally, integral citations that reference the source as researcher+publication (as year) are also found, as in [6] from an applied physics journal. [6] Luikov (1975) developed a set of coupled partial differential equations to describe the heat and mass transport in capillary porous media. It was assumed that the transfer of moisture is similar to heat transfer. [source: Younsi et al. 2006] These examples from the introductions to science articles reveal a continuum of degrees of visibility of projecting sources. There is a strong preference for super-/sub-script notation which means that what is projected is typically given much greater prominence in the discourse than the source of the projection. Where projecting authors themselves are introduced into the discourse, these are always voices from the field of research; they are named as such (researchers), or referenced as research publications (Luikov (1975)). In the cultural studies text in [2] the highlighted projecting sources incorporated into the discourse are represented quite differently. They are very visible in the flow of text and are made thematic at clause level, foregrounding the projecting source over that which is projected. The sources referenced in [2] are also of a very different kind. They are not the voices of academic / published sources but of participants within the field of study. The participant voices are introduced as the source of thoughts (they wanted to find some old exams), sayings (Let’s . . . she yelled) and feelings (everyone joined her in laughter), and in the process they contribute to the writer’s representation of the world observed. Where voices other than the writer’s are not present in the discourse, that is, in monoglossic text, we interpret the writer to be the default projecting source. In [2], however, the writer references herself explicitly in this regard, making herself visible as co-present with the participants in the world she is representing, as underlined in As I looked around the room, I recognized most of the students as biology majors who had at one time or another stopped by my office
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A similar strategy is evident in [7]. [7] Aileen, an eighth grade African-American student in a district with school choice at the high-school level, was having a conversation about the process of applying to high schools with several of her peers and me. She said that it was unfair that they did not admit her to the performing arts school because of her low grades in science and math: ‘Why do they care about math and science if the school is supposed to teach art? I won’t even need science since I am going to be an artist.’ Her statements on the issue cohered with others she had made over the course of the school year expressing frustration that she was required to learn science, as she did not feel that it was going to be useful to her in her chosen life path. [source: Olitsky 2006] Participant voices project representations of the world of which they are part, and the writer also represents herself as co-present: having a conversation . . . with several of her peers and me. Other excerpts from cultural studies texts draw on researcher voices in a way similar to that observed in the science extract in [6]. In [8], for example, projecting voices are named as specific authors associated with publications. However, important differences can be noted in the underlined information about the source. [8] Recently, American Indian women have written autobiographies of their experiences in the academy, providing a look at how they incorporate their vision of themselves as Indigenous women into their framework of academic discourse. Lowrey (1997), from Laguna Pueblo, writes a self-study of her passage through a PhD program in sociology at the University of Washington. In her search for a sense of place in higher education, she hungered for stories of Indigenous people who struggled with the same issues of identity. McKinney (1998), a member of the Potawatomi tribe, uses ‘multivocality’ or a crosscultural approach in her academic research and writing to represent her ‘self.’ [source: Brandt 2008] In these instances the information we are given is elaborated in terms of the heritage and location of the individuals, in other words in terms of their particular ‘social gaze’ on the world – their past and/or present positions in social space and time (Maton 2010). The elaboration makes the source more ‘visible’, and implies that the elaborating information is relevant to the status of what is known. The kind of knower is important in the process of legitimation (see Maton 2007 on hierarchy of knowers). Such elaborations may also be of the
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writer her/himself as the projecting source, as in [9] and [10]. Here the writers’ dispositions are presented as relevant to the process of legitimation of the projected knowledge. [9] In this story I position myself as a white Western woman and my values, beliefs, prejudices and aspirations form a complex lens through which I have come to understand myself in a particular social context that was at once strange and familiar over time. [source: Ryan 2008] [10] As a feminist researcher, I want to understand and describe this significant transformation of self where one’s identities and the doing of science are complexly intertwined. [source: Brandt 2008] The different representations of projecting sources evident across both sets of extracts (i.e. from the science and from the humanities) can be plotted along a continuum. At one extreme is the invisible voice of extract [1], where the source author/researcher is omitted from the flow of discourse and referenced only by means of a super-/sub-script notation. At the other extreme are voices made integral to the flow of discourse, and elaborated in terms of the locus of the individual knower (e.g. their status as co-present in time and place with what is observed). We can label this dimension as one of +/– visibility, as in Figure 6.2. The voices in the science texts associate more strongly with the invisible end of the continuum, although they can, as noted in some instances above, drift towards the visible. The voices in the cultural studies texts, on the other hand can occupy the extreme of the highly visible end of the continuum and drift towards less visible. Returning to the discussion of Legitimation Code Theory in the introduction to this chapter, I suggest that we can interpret this as a representation of relative strength or weakness in the social relations (SR+/–) (Maton 2000, 2007, 2009), where the social relation is that ‘between educational knowledge and its author or subject (who is making the claim to knowledge)’ (Maton 2000: 154). Stronger social relations give emphasis to the attitudes and dispositions of knowers, while weaker social relations de-emphasize these attitudes and dispositions (Maton 2009: 46). This association is represented in Figure 6.3.
– visibility
+ visibility (natural sciences)
(humanities)
Figure 6.2 The visibility of projecting sources in natural sciences and humanities
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116 – visibility (SR–)
+ visibility (SR+) (natural sciences)
(humanities)
Figure 6.3 The visibility of projecting sources in sciences and humanities interpreted as SR+/–
To this point variations in visibility have been considered across a set of science and humanities texts. What then of instances from the introductions to social science research articles?
Projecting Sources in the Social Sciences: Degrees of Visibility Maintaining a similar focus to the cultural studies texts, the extracts below are from introductions to applied linguistics studies of science classrooms. As with all the extracts represented here, they are drawn from sections of the introduction in which the writer is establishing a warrant for a chosen area of research. Extract [11] is similar in many respects to the cultural studies texts in [2] and [7]. It is an account of an observation of students in a science classroom. However, in this text there is a move towards a less subjective representation of the writer. While it might be assumed that the writer is co-present with the participants, there is no explicit reference to such. [The shift into the universal present in this observation is discussed at a later point in relation to what is projected.] [11] In a middle school science classroom in the suburbs of Washington, DC in 2003, an ethnically and linguistically diverse group of 8th grade students, Philip, Natalie, Gloria, and Sean, discuss the answer to a written question about a scientific phenomenon they are observing at their table. Prompted by a new set of curriculum materials, the students repeatedly refer to, point to, and even make pictures of, the objects of their discussion as these things lie on the table before them. [source: Massoud and Kuipers 2008] More commonly in the social sciences than in the sciences, sources other than the writer are explicitly referenced in the flow of discourse, either as integral or non-integral to the clause structure. Frequently multiple contributions to a domain of knowledge are referenced, as underlined in [12]. [12] Laboratory activities have long been advocated in science classrooms as an ideal way for students to challenge naïve conceptions first-hand and develop
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scientific understandings (American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 1989; Anderson & Smith, 1987; Eliot, 1898; Singer, Hilton, & Schweingruber, 2005). Some researchers (AAAS, 1989; Anderson & Smith, 1987; DeBoer, 1991; Driver, 1983; Singer et al., 2005), however, have discussed the inherent challenges of using laboratory activities with regard to student learning. For example, Millar (2004) suggests that students’ experience with natural phenomena in laboratory activities can be messier or more ambiguous than other forms of instruction such as lectures and textbooks and because of this, they may present particular challenges for students trying to learn science. [source: Wright 2008] Where elaboration occurs in relation to sources in [12], it is not in terms of the locus of the sources as first-hand observer / participant as found in the cultural studies examples. Rather the elaboration is of the sources as researchers, opening up a wider set of possibilities in terms of ways of knowing, and reflecting the example from the science text in [5] (many researchers believe). Some researchers (AAAS, 1989; Anderson & Smith, 1987; DeBoer, 1991; Driver, 1983; Singer et al., 2005) In other social science texts elaborating information is given about a source as a product rather than a person. In extract [13], the authors are backgrounded in relation to a reference to the product of their research: Latour and Woolgar’s (1986) seminal study. [13] Latour and Woolgar’s (1986) seminal study provides an ethnographic account of the scientific writing cycle in a professional laboratory. They document how scientists transform raw data by putting them into charts and graphs, and subsequently use them along with articles, books, and grant proposals to produce new articles. In turn, the articles are circulated to colleagues, submitted for publication, and, when published, often become part of the received body of knowledge. [source: Wright 2008] While authors are named in the first reference to the source, Latour and Woolgar’s (1986) seminal study, the authors are not the head of the nominal group. They are relegated to the role of pre-modifier for the head (study). So the additional information included in the nominal group elaborates on the study not the authors. Because this nominal group occurs within the hypertheme of the paragraph (Martin 1992, Martin and Rose 2007), it establishes the product (the study) rather than the producers (Latour and Woolgar) as the point of departure for the proceeding phase of text. However, a tension immediately arises when this non-human source (study) is reinterpreted as human source (They) in the Theme of the second clause. This tension is perhaps indicative of
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a space occupied by the social sciences somewhere between the natural sciences and the humanities. A similar strategy is evident in the social science text in [14]. Specific sources are referenced with author name as non-integral, bracketed citations at the end of the clause-complex. However, within the structuring of the clause-complex what is given thematic prominence is a semiotic entity (Recent work in science studies). It is the semiotic entity that projects (highlighted, drawn attention to) the knowledge claims (the social nature of knowledge production in science; the important role played by the scientific community). This semiotic source then projects another source, this time a generalized group of knowers (the scientific community) that in turn projects (coming to agreement about) a decision (what should count as a discovery, or a new fact, in a given field ). [14] Recent work in science studies has highlighted the social nature of knowledge production in science and has drawn attention to the important role played by the scientific community, acting in the Literature, in coming to agreement about what should count as a discovery, or a new fact, in a given field (Jasanoff, Markle, Petersen, & Pinch, 1995; Latour, 1987). [source: Viechnicki 2008] The social science texts observed here occupy the middle ground (Figure 6.4). As with the voices from the humanities texts, they are made visible in the flow of the discourse. However, where there is elaboration it is more like that from the science texts, representing the sources as researcher voices rather than participant voices, or as depersonalized semiotic entities (science studies, seminal study).
What Do Sources Project in Discourses of Legitimization in the Natural Sciences and Humanities? To this point comparisons have been made of the ways in which projecting voices are represented in the discourse, generating a continuum of ‘visibility’. At the maximally visible end of the continuum sources are explicitly named as ‘sayers’ (authors or participants) in the flow of the discourse, where elaborating information is provided on their locus and disposition, and hence the kind of gaze they take on the world. At the minimally visible end sources are removed – visibility (SR–)
+ visibility (SR+) (natural sciences)
(social sciences)
(humanities)
Figure 6.4 The visibility of projecting sources in natural sciences, social sciences and humanities interpreted as SR+/–
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from the flow of text to be retrieved from elsewhere in the document. Their presence is backgrounded to that which they project. This leads us to a further consideration: that of variation in what the sources are introduced to contribute to discourses of legitimation. What variations are evident in the nature of what is projected in the instances of the science, humanities and social science texts explored in this study? First, revisiting extract [1] from the introduction to a journal article in the sciences, projecting sources (super-scripted) are seen to project analytical procedures that underlie observations of the scientific world. These are captured in the underlined wordings in: [1] Incorporation of organic molecules such as dyes inside solid matrices is an attractive topic of research because of the photostability and fluorescence quantum yield 1–3 of the modified materials. An approach in this regard is to incorporate molecules inside silica spheres,4–5 [source: Rosemary et al. 2006] Analytical procedures are represented here as a process (to incorporate) and as nominalized processes (Incorporation; An approach). In a longer phase of text in [15] there is a similar pattern of projection of analytical procedures, in this case contributing to observations of the scientific world. References to projected analytical procedures are underlined. [15] A number of researchers (Fhyr and Rasmuson, 1997; Johanson et al., 1997) solved the equations describing the drying process separately for each phase (gas, liquid and solid). These equations contain various thermophysical properties for each phase. More experimental work is necessary for the determination of these properties. In addition, it is very difficult to identify exactly the boundaries among the phases. Younsi et al. (2006) studied experimentally and numerically the high temperature treatment of wood. The authors used the Luikov’s approach for the mathematical formulation. The numerical solution is, however, complicated (Liu and Cheng, 1991). Lewis et al. (1996) and Malan and Lewis (2003) solved the highly non-linear equations describing drying systems using the finite element method. Sanga et al. (2002) solved the diffusion model for transient heat and mass transfer processes to analyse the drying of a shrinking solid surrounding a nonshrinking material using microwave energy. In literature, the models describing the water migration in wood are usually 1D or 2D, which neglect the real variation of thermophysical properties in 3D. Most of the models are developed to simulate conventional drying, and there are few reported studies on the modeling of high temperature treatment of wood. [source: Younsi et al. 2006]
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In [15] there is a progressive unfolding of analytic procedures and observations. So, for example, Malan and Lewis (2003) draw on an analytical process (using the finite element method) in order to arrive at the analytical observation (highly non-linear equations describing drying systems). Similarly, Sanga et al. (2002) employ an analytical procedure (using microwave energy) in order to arrive at the analytical observation (the diffusion model for transient heat and mass transfer processes [for] the drying of a shrinking solid surrounding a nonshrinking material). Observations are represented both as realized findings (e.g. solved the equations describing the drying process separately for each phase) and as yet to be realized findings (e.g. the boundaries among the phases). In these discourses of science, sources other than the writer are introduced to project observations on the world (in these instances the technical world of the laboratory), observations that are reported as arrived at through explicitly articulated processes of analysis, sometimes captured in a nominalized reference to a model or method. We can refer to such discourse as analytical observations. Observations on the world that is the object of study are certainly not confined to the discourses of science. Returning to the disciplinary domain of cultural studies, we find many instances of such, as for example in [7] and [2] from cultural studies takes on science education. [7] Aileen, an eighth grade African-American student in a district with school choice at the high-school level, was having a conversation about the process of applying to high schools with several of her peers and me. She said that it was unfair that they did not admit her to the performing arts school because of her low grades in science and math: ‘Why do they care about math and science if the school is supposed to teach art? I won’t even need science since I am going to be an artist.’ Her statements on the issue cohered with others she had made over the course of the school year expressing frustration that she was required to learn science, as she did not feel that it was going to be useful to her in her chosen life path. [source: Olitsky 2006] [2] As I looked around the room, I recognized most of the students as biology majors who had at one time or another stopped by my office. Of the twenty students gathered, most were women; a group of four young men sauntered in together just as the meeting began. As it turned out, many of the attendees had chemistry and biology classes together. Several women mentioned how they wanted to find some old exams, and one person asked if there were class notes from last week’s lecture that she missed. After 40 min, Cindy suggested we end the meeting so a group of them could study for an exam together. ‘Let’s feed our brains!’ she yelled, and everyone joined her in laughter. [source: Brandt 2008]
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However, in contrast to the observations in the science texts, in the cultural studies texts the observations are represented as arrived at through direct observation either made by the writer her/himself or by others who bear direct witness perhaps as participants in the field that is being observed. There is no reference to any analytical procedures other than a commonsense interpretation of seeing the world, first hand. In [2], for example, the writer makes many references to herself as co-located within the world of the object of study in time and space (I entered; I noticed; I waved; I felt, etc). Being in the right place at the right time is constructed in this discourse as key to the legitimation of the observation. This commonsense interpretation may, however, be filtered through a particular kind of gaze or disposition, as was noted above in the discussion of kinds of knowers. So, for example, the writer of [2] later articulates the kind of gaze she directs to the object of study, as evidenced in [10]. [10] As a feminist researcher, I want to understand and describe this significant transformation of self where one’s identities and the doing of science are complexly intertwined. [source: Brandt 2008] We might interpret the following underlined instances in the cultural studies texts in this study as a minimal step towards technicalization of a procedure for observation. However, the underlined wordings refer more to the object of study rather to a process of analysis. . . . To self-identify, then, can become a narrative of one’s location. . . . American Indian women have written autobiographies . . . Lowrey (1997), from Laguna Pueblo, writes a self-study of her passage through a PhD program . . . [source: Brandt] Once again we can locate these strategies of legitimation along a continuum, this time a continuum to do with the degree of specification of analytical procedures by which observations of the world are arrived at. At one end of the continuum legitimation strategies rely on articulated analytical procedures of enquiry. We can refer to this end as that of analytical observation. At the other end the legitimation strategies rely on the accounts of witnesses to the events, as co-present and as having the right dispositions to know. We can refer to this discourse as testimonial observations. The science texts associate strongly with the former and the humanities texts strongly with the latter. This is represented in Figure 6. 5. analytical observations
(natural sciences)
(humanities)
Figure 6.5 Procedures of inquiry in the sciences and humanities
testimonial observations
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ER+ analytical observations
sciences
SR+ maximal visibility of observer
SR– minimal visibility of observer humanities
ER– testimonial observations
Figure 6.6 (a) A topographic representation of the discourses of legitimization along dimensions of projecting sources and projected observations
With reference to Legitimation Code Theory we can interpret the emphasis on observations based on analytical procedures as stronger epistemic relations, and as a lack of such emphasis as weaker epistemic relations. The dimension of the epistemic relations that is foregrounded in these analyses is that of the how of what can be known (Maton 2000), or of what Bernstein calls the external grammar (1996, 2000) and Muller (2000, 2007) refers to as the grammaticality of a theory. The two dimensions of variation considered in this study can now be brought together into the one topographic representation, as modelled in Figure 6.1 from Maton (2007: xx). Such a representation allows us to map the positions of the different discourses explored in this study (see Figure 6.6 (a)). To this analysis we need yet to consider the nature of the projection in the social science texts, and where they may now be positioned in the spaces in Figure 6.6 (a).
What Do Sources Project in Discourses of Legitimation in the Social Sciences? An analysis of the projections in the social science texts once again reveals a position in the middle ground between those from the natural sciences and
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those from the humanities, this time along the vertical axis. While there may be less explicit reference to a method of analysis as was frequently the case in the science texts, the social science writers often imply a degree of rigour in analytical procedures that is less evident in the humanities texts. They typically do so through the lexis they choose to encode the process of doing research. So, for example, in the following instances it means differently if the writer chooses the process explore or examine rather than look at to describe the activities engaged in by the researchers. From social science texts Halliday and Martin (1993) also set out to explore . . . Martin (1993) examines . . . From humanities texts Deyhle and Margonis (1995) look at The meaning of look at is intensified in explore or examines, the intensification resulting from the infusion of a circumstance of manner into the material process. In other words examine = look at + thoroughly (see Martin and White 2005; Hood 2010; Hood and Martin 2007 on graduation). In the humanities texts sources are more often engaged in processes that describe the production of text rather than those that refer to the analysis of data, as for example in: Davies and Harre´ (2000) speak about ‘positioning’ . . . document how students identify with Eurocentric science Lowrey (1997), from Laguna Pueblo, writes a self-study At a glance, extract [11] appears to be a testimonial observation of the same kind as the cultural studies text in [7]. But there is a small degree of difference. In [7] the events were represented in the past tense, whereas in [11] they are in the present tense. The universal present tense functions to shift the representation from a specific instance to an instance that symbolizes a kind of interaction, suggesting a level of generalization, perhaps implying the observation referred to as one of a set of observations. [11] In a middle school science classroom in the suburbs of Washington, DC in 2003, an ethnically and linguistically diverse group of 8th grade students, Philip, Natalie, Gloria, and Sean, discuss the answer to a written question about a scientific phenomenon they are observing at their table. Prompted be a new set of curriculum materials, the students repeatedly refer to, point to, and even make pictures of, the objects of their discussion as these things lie on the table before them. [source: Massoud and Kuipers 2008]
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The generalized representation of observations is also evident in the social science extracts in [16], once again implying the claims are arrived at through multiple observations, in other words somewhat more analytical procedures. [16] For example, Millar (2004) suggests that students’ experience with natural phenomena in laboratory activities can be messier or more ambiguous than other forms of instruction such as lectures and textbooks and because of this, they may present particular challenges for students trying to learn science. [source: Wright 2008] In [17], in addition to the use of the present tense, there are implications of analytical procedures in the quantification of observations, as underlined [17] While many researchers have theorized about the importance of writing, Martin, D’Arcy, Newton, and Parker (1994) assert that few have taken an empirical approach to examining the purpose of children’s every day writing practices and written work in school settings. In attempting to fill this gap in research, they show that teachers are the primary audience for students’ writing and that students seek to please the teacher by choosing topics and language that they think will be favored. They state, ‘when children write in school they are usually writing for someone who, they are well aware, knows better than they do what they are trying to say and who is concerned to evaluate their attempt to say it’ (p. 45). Furthermore, they observe that students’ writing tasks are most often transactional; that is, they require language to be used to directly represent knowledge, as opposed to poetically or expressively. This is especially the case in science classes in which over 90% of writing tasks are transactional. [source: Wright 2008] Summarizing further, we can locate these discourses from the social sciences as occupying the middle ground in relation to both axes as in Figure 6.6 (b). A topological representation as in Figure 6.6 (b) is useful in that it captures domains of space to be occupied and allows for degrees of similarity in a way that typological categorizations do not. This is important given the syndromes of features with which writers can position their languages of legitimation. Such diagrammatic representations are also important in alerting us to spaces that are theoretically possible, if not yet identified. A challenge arising from this study, one yet to be explored, is to identify the discourses that might occupy the upper right and bottom left quadrants. Each of the dimensions in Figure 6.6(b) also constitutes a linguistic translation of aspects of Maton’s social and epistemic relations (as represented in Figure 6.1). To the extent that the linguistic translations argued for in this chapter are sound, then the positioning of the discourses of the research
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ER+ analytical observations
sciences
SR– minimal visibility of observer
social sciences
SR+ maximal visibility of observer humanities
ER– testimonial observations
Figure 6.6 (b) A topographic representation of the discourses of legitimation analysed as features of projecting sources and projected observations
warrants characterizes those of the natural sciences as representating a knowledge code, and those of the humanities (or at least these cultural studies texts) as representating a knower code. The implication flowing from such a distinction has to do with their capacities to build knowledge over time, as shown in Maton (2000, 2009, 2010).
Conclusion There has been much recent discussion in studies of academic literacy around the need to address disciplinary differences. An understanding of the ways in which disciplines use language differently is fundamental to understanding the potential for effective collaboration, and to providing meaningful support for those who study and or research across disciplinary boundaries. This is especially relevant in an evolving academic context in which cross- or trans-disciplinary study is actively encouraged, such as this volume represents. In applied linguistic studies the response to a concern for understanding disciplinary difference has largely been corpus-based, dominantly focused on identifying disciplinary specific genres or move structures (e.g. Hyland 2000; Huckin 2001; Yang and Allison 2004) or disciplinary preferences for particular grammatical constructions or lexical choices (e.g. Hyland 1999; Hewings and
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Hewings 2001). My aim in this chapter has been to broaden the ways in which we conceive and hence analyse disciplinary differences from an applied linguistic perspective. Engaging with sociological theorizations of knowledgeknower structures (e.g. Maton 2007, 2009) has suggested a number of fruitful directions for the linguistic analysis and explanation of difference. What has emerged in the analyses in this chapter is a syndrome of features that reflect differences in the ways in which writers in different disciplines engage with knowers and knowledge in the context constructing the warrant for their own research. Importantly these differences are represented along clines that represent degrees of difference. It is hoped that the explication of the ways in which different disciplines legitimate research from a linguistic perspective can assist to clarify what may be at stake in debates around transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary studies. It suggests there are different principles of legitimation, different ‘rules of the game’ that cannot be ignored. If disciplines with different underlying legitimation codes are brought together, there may be a ‘code clash’, an inability to agree on the grounds of debate that debilitates collaboration and knowledge-building. However, there is a need for more substantial studies of how the dimensions of difference studied here factor out in a wider range of disciplines, how they vary across different academic genres, how they shift over time, and importantly what kind of knowledge-knower structures emerge in interdisciplinary studies of various kinds.
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Wignell, P. (2007), Vertical and horizontal discourse and the social sciences, in F. Christie and J. R. Martin (eds), Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy: Functional Linguistics and Sociological Perspectives. London: Continuum, 184–204. Yang, R. and Allison, D. (2004), ‘Research articles in applied linguistics: Studies from a functional perspective’. English for Specific Purposes 23: 264–279.
Source texts Brandt, C. B. (2008), Discursive geographies in science: Space, identity, and scientific discourse among indigenous women in higher education. Cultural Studies of Science Education 3: 703–730. Massoud, L. A. and Kuipers, J. C. (2008), Objectification and the inscription of knowledge in science classrooms. Linguistics and Education 19: 211–224. Olitsky, S. (2006), Structure, agency and the development of students’ identities as learners. Journal of Cultural Studies of Science Education 1(4): 745–766. Rosemary, M. J., Suryanarayanan, V., Maclaren, I. and Pradeep, T. (2006), Aniline incorporated silica nanobubbles. Journal of Chemical Science 118(5): 375–384. Ryan, A. (2008), Indigenous knowledge in the science curriculum: Avoiding neo-colonialism. Cultural Studies of Science Education 3: 663–702. Saeed, A. and Ashraf, Z. (2006), Sodium borohydride reduction of aromatic carboxylic acids via methylesters. Journal of Chemical Science 118(5): 419–423. Supattapone, S. (2010), What makes a prion infectious?. Science 327(5969): 1091–1092. Ubukata, Y. (2007), The role of particulate organic matter and acetic acid in the removal of phosphate in anaerobic/aerobic activated sludge processes. Engineering Life Science 7(1): 61–66. Viechnicki, G. B. (2008), Grammatical processes of objectification in a middle school science classroom. Linguistics and Education 19(3): 244–264. Wright, L. J. (2008), Writing science and objectification: Selecting, organizing, and decontextualizing knowledge. Linguistics and Education 19(3): 265–293. Younsi, R., Kocaefe, D., Poncsak, S. and Kocaefe, Y. (2006), A diffusion-based model for transient high temperature treatment of wood. Journal of Building Physics 30(2): 113–123.
Chapter 7
Absenting Discipline: Constructivist Approaches in Online Learning Rainbow Tsai-Hung Chen, Karl Maton and Sue Bennett
Introduction Online flexible learning and internationalization have been two major stimuli to recent changes in higher education in Western countries. At the same time, constructivist approaches to teaching have become increasingly popular, and have had considerable impact on online teaching programmes. ‘Constructivism’ is often loosely defined by its advocates and related to a wide range of pedagogic approaches, but these can be described as sharing a model of teaching and learning in which the teacher downplays direct instruction in favour of facilitating and advising learners about their learning in independent ways, ostensibly ‘constructing’ their own knowledge (Duffy and Cunningham 1996; Grabinger and Dunlap 1995; Lave and Wenger 1991). They are typically contrasted with more explicit forms of teaching involving disciplinary forms of knowledge. Such constructivist approaches are held by many proponents of new technologies to be highly compatible with online learning (Herrington et al. 2005; Huang 2002; Tam 2000). For instance, it is argued that the convergence of this pedagogy and online learning provides a rich context for learning, which, in turn, leads to active and reflective learning, and learner empowerment. However, there is little empirical evidence for these claims. In fact, relatively little is known about the actual (rather than proclaimed) effects of this form of online education on students. Based on results of a qualitative case study, this chapter argues that constructivist teaching practices in the online context may often have the opposite effects on learners to those intended. Specifically, the study suggests that withholding explicit knowledge and teaching – what could be called absenting disciplinarity – may disadvantage students whose prior educational experiences are based on more explicit principles. In these cases, students can experience a vacuum of legitimacy: they feel there is nothing on which to base potential achievements in such learning environments.
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Specifically, this chapter explores the effects of constructivist teaching in the online context on Chinese international students in Australian higher education, the largest international student cohort in Australia (Australian Education International 2009). It presents findings from a case study of postgraduate Chinese students’ online experiences in a Faculty of Education at an Australian university. Previous research investigating Chinese learners’ online experiences has tended to interpret challenges confronting these learners in light of their cultural attributes or language barriers (Morse 2003; Smith et al. 2005; Tu 2001; Zhao and McDougall 2008). This is, in essence, a deficit view of learners, who are said not to possess the attitudes or qualities required for success in the online learning environment. This deficit model ignores the possibility that the teaching practice may be a factor as well in causing students’ difficulties. Conversely, other studies on constructivist educational practices have mainly looked at the pedagogical approaches involved. The aim of these studies has been to describe and promote innovative learning designs. Although many of them have indicated students’ satisfaction with the innovative features of the learning environment, these studies revealed little about the nature of students’ experiences (e.g. Gunawardena et al. 2006; McAlpine 2000). They have not, for example, investigated the nature of earlier programmes of study students may have completed, or the practices and habits of work and reasoning they may have gained from such programmes. In short, these two lines of research tend to concentrate on either the learner or the teaching rather than on relations between the two. It is important to consider both factors and their relations, as the outcomes of educational experiences are the result of what Pierre Bourdieu (1996: 256) called ‘the meeting of two histories’: the dispositions (ways of acting, thinking and being) brought by the learner to the educational context, and the nature of the educational context itself. In other words, what has created learners’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction may not be simply the expectations students bring to the learning context or the learning context itself, but rather relations between the two and how such relations are explicated and negotiated. The study discussed in this chapter, therefore, asks: ‘How does constructivist teaching practice affect Chinese students’ learning in an online context?’ To answer this question, the research examined: the educational dispositions these students brought with them to the online environment; the kinds of practices and contexts they were now in after starting study in Australia; and the outcomes resulting from the meeting of these two factors. Before outlining the study discussed here, it is important to note that although focused on Chinese international students, many of the study’s findings are applicable to other learners. This has been demonstrated, for
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example, by studies drawing on Bernstein’s framework, that highlight the ways students whose prior social and educational experiences are not already predisposed towards constructivist-inspired pedagogies, may experience disadvantage (e.g. Hoadley 2007; Lubienski 2004; Morais and Neves 2001; Rose 2004).
Specialization Codes of Legitimation This research examined both the dispositions towards learning that students brought from their previous education (their preferences, beliefs, attitudes and established practices) and the online teaching practices they encountered in their new learning environments in Australia. The principles underlying each of these, and relations between them, were analysed using a dimension of Legitimation Code Theory (henceforth ‘LCT’), an approach that develops the work of, inter alia, Basil Bernstein (Maton 2000, 2007, 2010, in press; Moore and Maton 2001). LCT describes education as comprising social fields of struggle where actors’ beliefs and practices represent competing claims to legitimacy, that is, what should be considered the dominant measurement of achievement within that field. The underlying principles of these ‘languages of legitimation’ are analysed in terms of ‘legitimation codes’. The current study drew upon one facet of the theory: LCT(Specialization). This refers to the basis of distinctiveness, authority and status, or ‘what makes actors, discourses and practices special or legitimate’ (Maton 2007: 98). Underpinning LCT(Specialization) is the notion that educational practices and contexts represent messages as to both what is valid to know and how, and also who is an ideal actor (learner or teacher). That is, every practice or knowledge claim is by someone (the subject) and is about, or oriented towards, something (the object). So, knowledge claims and practices involve both relations to an object (‘epistemic relations’ or ER) and relations to a subject (‘social relations’ or SR). Each of these relations may be more strongly (+) or weakly (–) emphasized as the basis of practices. Together these two give the ‘specialization code’ (ER+/–, SR+/–) for the practices or beliefs that are the object of study. The four principal specialization codes of legitimation are: z knowledge code (ER+, SR–), where possession of specialized knowledge,
procedures or skills is emphasized as the basis of achievement and the dispositions of actors are considered less significant; z knower code (ER–, SR+), where the dispositions of actors are emphasized and specialist knowledge or skills are downplayed. These dispositions may be considered innate or natural (e.g. notions of ‘genius’), cultivated (e.g. an
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artistic sensibility developed through immersion in great works), or socially based (e.g. a specific gender); z elite code (ER+, SR+), where achievement is based on having both specialist knowledge and being the right kind of knower; and, z relativist code (ER–, SR–), where neither specialist knowledge nor particular dispositions are important.
Developing a Language of Description The study used data collected from focus groups, interviews and course documents. There were three main foci of data collection and analysis, exploring: (i) the educational dispositions Chinese students brought with them from their previous experiences; (ii) the nature of the online units they were studying; and (iii) their experiences while studying those units. (i) Three focus groups with 16 Chinese students were convened to explore such students’ educational dispositions. The students were selected from different faculties at the university to help gain a broad understanding of the differing kinds of pedagogical contexts Chinese international students might have experienced in China. The primary focus, however, was not to characterize these educational contexts but rather to explore these students’ ways of characterizing their experiences of such contexts. Participants were asked, for example, to describe what it was like to study in China, their teachers’ expectations of them and their own expectations of their teachers and their courses of study. They were also asked about the factors that had helped them to succeed in their studies. (ii) The study then focused on students undertaking postgraduate online units in the Faculty of Education. To characterize the practices and contexts these students were now studying in, eight teachers of these units were interviewed and their unit outlines examined. In this study, an online unit refers to a study unit that is fully or predominantly delivered online with very little face-to-face contact. (iii) To investigate the outcomes when students’ educational dispositions and the teaching practices came into contact, seven in-depth case studies of Chinese students studying different postgraduate online units in the Faculty of Education were conducted. The students were drawn from various specializations in the faculty, such as Information and Communication Technologies in Learning; Educational Leadership; and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). They were interviewed an average of four times throughout a semester in their native language (Mandarin) about their experiences with their respective online units.
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Table 7.1 Manifestations of the epistemic and social relations in this study (Chen, 2010) Theoretical concept
Degree of emphasis on:
Epistemic relations (ER)
Curriculum
Content knowledge of a study unit
Pedagogy
The teaching of content knowledge
Assessment
Explicit evaluative criteria
Curriculum
Learner’s personal knowledge and experience
Pedagogy
The personal dimension of the learning process
Assessment
Learner’s self-evaluation
Social relations (SR)
To use LCT as an analytical tool for this specific study, a ‘language of description’ (Bernstein 2000) was developed. A language of description, in brief, is a ‘translation device’ that ‘constructs what is to count as an empirical referent, how such referents relate to each other to produce a specific text, and translates these referential relations into theoretical objects or potential theoretical objects’ (Bernstein 2000: 133). The use of a language of description makes it possible to generalize and abstract away from the particularities of the case studied without losing its specificities. As outlined in Table 7.1, epistemic relations are realized in this study as the degree of emphasis on: content knowledge in curriculum; the teaching of content knowledge in pedagogy; and explicit criteria in assessment. The manifestations of social relations are: the degree of emphasis on the learner’s personal knowledge and experience (curriculum); the personal dimension of the learning process (pedagogy); and the learner’s self-evaluation (assessment). Table 7.2 shows the language of description generated. The table was used to code all the data collected. It comprises two sections: the ER section on the left and the SR section on the right. Each ER/SR column is structured so that, when read from left to right, it is a translator of theory into data, and when read from right to left, it is a translator of data into theory. Moving from right to left in each section of the table, the reader can see how data was coded. For example, the participant comment in the ER section that ‘The information in the textbook . . . was what a study unit was all about’ (right column, top of the first row) suggests an emphasis on content knowledge as the basis of legitimacy (middle column, top of the first row), so this was coded as exhibiting a stronger epistemic relation (ER+) with respect to curriculum.
Table 7.2
An external language of description for epistemic and social relations (Chen, 2010) EPISTEMIC RELATIONS (ER) Concept manifested – Emphasis on:
Curriculum
Pedagogy
Assessment
content knowledge
the teaching of content knowledge
explicit criteria
SOCIAL RELATIONS (SR)
Indicators
Example quotes from empirical data
Concept manifested – Emphasis on:
ER+
Content knowledge is emphasized as determining form of legitimate educational knowledge.
The information in the textbook – decided by the teacher – was what a study unit was all about.
personal knowledge and experience
ER-
Content knowledge is downplayed as less important in defining legitimate educational knowledge.
We . . . show them . . . digital repositories that they need to go to in order to access those readings that are relevant to their context.
ER+
Procedures for learning content knowledge are explicit to learners and emphasized as determining form of pedagogy.
[The teacher] extracts the best things from what he or she knows and gives this to you in class, and then offers you instructions on the tasks you need to complete.
ER-
Procedures for learning content knowledge are implicit to learners and downplayed as not significantly shaping form of pedagogy.
The teacher only points out the things you need to read . . . . But as to how to think, how to read and understand, it’s your own business.
ER+
Explicit evaluative criteria are emphasized in judging student performances.
When a Chinese child paints the moon blue, the teacher will correct the child, saying that the moon shouldn’t be blue.
ER-
Explicit evaluative criteria are less significant in judging student performances.
It’s not like learning medicine, you’ve got to get it right [otherwise] the patient will die. It’s not like that. It’s more open to interpretation.
Note: +/– indicates ‘stronger’/‘weaker’
personal dimension of the learning process
self-evaluation
Indicators
Example quotes from empirical data
SR+
Personal experience and opinions are viewed as legitimate educational knowledge.
[Students] actually come with a whole range of background and experience . . . what they need is a framework to download that.
SR-
Personal experience and opinions are downplayed and distinguished from legitimate educational knowledge.
Online discussion is chaotic, and is like you conduct a survey and everyone tells you their opinions. That’s all. It’s different from a class.
SR+
Individual learners’ preferences are explicitly emphasized as determining form of pedagogy.
So negotiate to learn in a way that suits them . . . it’s constructing your own learning in a way that is helpful for you.
SR-
Individual learners’ preferences are downplayed as not significantly shaping form of pedagogy.
Even if your question is brilliant, the teacher still might not answer you because he or she wants to teach something else first.
SR+
Evaluation of legitimacy What’s valid for you and what’s valid of student performances for me are two different things, resides in beliefs of aren’t they? individual learners.
SR-
Student performances are judged against shared criteria external to the learner.
I am a ‘test-taker’. If the teacher doesn’t give me a standard, I don’t know what to do.
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Characterizations of Students’ Formative Educational Contexts The students had experienced a highly insulated curriculum in their previous educational settings in China. As Chris (all student names are pseudonyms) described: When I studied in China, my feeling was that the information in the textbook – decided by the teacher – was what the study unit was all about . . . You gain a wide range of knowledge. Every study unit will touch a little on different issues in that area, and maybe the teacher will highlight a couple of things that are more important. The textbook usually covers everything. [Interview 4] The students felt the learning of content knowledge was emphasized in this curriculum. Anything beyond the boundary of a study unit, such as other forms of educational knowledge and one’s everyday practice, was not considered germane to the learning of the particular subject content in such a context. Emphasis was thus placed on strongly bounded content knowledge, a relatively strong epistemic relation (ER+). In addition, the curriculum appeared to downplay connections between the constituent parts of this content knowledge. For example, while all the students stressed the importance of accumulating a great amount of new information, none spoke of how they learned to connect previously learned knowledge to new knowledge, or whether they were asked to do so. Thus the relatively strong epistemic relation was to atomized knowledge. In contrast, the students rarely considered their professional lives and experiences beyond educational contexts as relevant to those contexts, suggesting personal experience was considered less significant. In other words, the social relation to the knower was downplayed (SR–). In terms of pedagogy, the students viewed the teacher in the Chinese educational context as embodying expert content knowledge and having the ability to teach this knowledge to students through clear procedures. The teacher had explicit control over the selection and ordering of content, the rate at which the learner was to learn this content and student conduct in the learning environment. These instructional practices are realizations of explicit criteria of knowledge, sequencing and pacing rules, and hierarchical rules, which epitomize what Bernstein (1977) termed ‘visible pedagogy’. This strong teacher control shows an emphasis on procedures for learning content knowledge, that is ER+. In contrast, learners were said to be expected to assume self-effacing roles, such as following group pacing and only asking questions when they were sure the questions contributed to the learning of the whole class; for example: Don’t disturb the class. Even if your question is brilliant, the teacher still might not answer you because he/she wants to teach something else first.
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Only ask questions if the teacher wants you to. If the teacher wants to carry on with the lesson, listen. [Rachael, Focus group 3] This pedagogy downplays learners as individual knowers: a relatively weak social relation to the knower with respect to personal control of learning (SR–). Finally, in terms of assessment, students said the measures of achievement in Chinese education were made transparent to learners. In brief, the bases of success were effort, concentration and willingness to withhold one’s subjective views. A significant part of the assessment comprised exams that required correct, textbook-based answers. To achieve the best marks, one needed to study hard and forego personal opinions that conflicted with the standardized answers. The following comment was common in the student focus groups: When I was in China, I never thought the teacher was right all the time, but I couldn’t argue with them. Neither could I argue against things written in the textbook. If I had done so, they would have told me to follow what the textbook said anyway. And if I had written my answers on exams according to what I thought, not the book, they wouldn’t have been standard, right answers. That meant I wouldn’t have got the marks. I couldn’t do anything about it. [Chris, Interview 1] The emphases on learners displaying the content knowledge gained and on explicit evaluative criteria, again show that knowledge was strongly bounded and strongly controlled by the teacher – a relatively strong epistemic relation (ER+). Meanwhile, students’ suppression of their personal views revealed learner performances represent a weaker social relation (SR–). In summary, the students’ experiences of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment in China all manifested a stronger epistemic relation to knowledge and a weaker social relation to the knower – a knowledge code (ER+, SR–). This code was manifested: z in curriculum as an emphasis on content knowledge and downplaying of
personal knowledge; z in pedagogy as an emphasis on the procedures for delivering the teacher’s
expert knowledge about the subject content and downplaying of the personal dimension of the learning process; and z in assessment through explicit criteria for evaluating learners’ states of knowledge and downplaying of evaluative criteria internal to the learner. For these students, the basis of specialization thereby resides in an extensive base of content knowledge and the right procedures for obtaining the knowledge. However, it is a particular kind of knowledge code, one that emphasizes atomized content knowledge.
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Characterizations of Teaching Practices in the Online Units Analysis of the teacher interviews shows a blurring of the boundaries between the subject content in the online units they taught and both other academic knowledge and everyday knowledge. Some teachers referred to this characteristic of their teaching as the ‘authenticity’ of learning. For example, Teacher E explained: The assignments try to be authentic. Now what I mean by that is we try to situate the assignment in the context in which these people work and live. So if they are a TAFE1 teacher teaching cabinet making, then they have to think about how their students are learning that task. If they’re a university teacher teaching science, then they have to think about their students learning science . . . and they have to think about their own learning as well. The teachers emphasized that the curriculum embraced and aimed to accommodate the diverse disciplinary backgrounds of their students. To accomplish this, one teaching strategy was to encourage learners to treat the reading materials as resources rather than compulsory content of a study unit. This meant that there was relatively little core content knowledge students were required to learn in these online units; they were expected to be selective and make their own decisions about the relevance of the readings to their respective interests and practices beyond the educational context. The weaker boundaries between what is considered to be legitimate knowledge in the educational context and what each learner deems to be legitimate knowledge represent a weaker epistemic relation that downplays specialized content knowledge (ER–). The reason why content knowledge was viewed as less important in the online units was that the teachers saw every learner as already possessing a wealth of legitimate knowledge by virtue of their experiences beyond the educational context. One teacher noted, ‘What we don’t often do with our postgraduate students is recognize that they actually come with a whole range of background and experience and baggage and literature, and what they need is a framework to download that’ (Teacher F). Since the boundary separating what is legitimate and what is not resides around each knower, the social relation can be said to be relatively strong (SR+). Another illustration of this stronger social relation is that the teachers stressed that the content knowledge is subject to learners’ personal interpretations. They also stated that the aim of a postgraduate programme was to assist learners in creating their own knowledge rather than teaching them new knowledge. Turning to pedagogy, the constructivist teaching procedures enacted in the online units are characterized by weak sequencing, pacing and hierarchical rules. Teacher B, for example, stated: There was very much a temptation to say, ‘Okay week one, read these and we’ll have a discussion. Week two, read these papers and we’ll have a quiz.
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Week three, read these papers and then your assignment is due.’ . . . They’d [other teachers] have a template of 13 weeks or 14 weeks or whatever . . . And the kinds of learning environments that I create . . . that’s a total anathema, because if you do that you’re moving back into an instructivist kind of mode. So you’re saying this is what I want you to do this week, and this is what I want you to do the next week. So it becomes sequential and it’s directed by the teacher rather than from the student. Constructivist teaching, as Teacher B described it, exemplifies ‘invisible pedagogy’ (Bernstein 1977). It is characterized by the teacher’s weaker control over teaching content knowledge – in other words, the epistemic relation is downplayed (ER–). In discussing their pedagogical relationships with students, the teachers defined themselves as facilitators, most of them stressing that they did not claim expert knowledge of the subject content and thus did not intend to act as a ‘guru’ or ‘sage on stage’. Instead, some identified their relationships with students as a ‘partnership’, in which they assumed the role of a ‘co-learner’ and ‘critical friend’. Consequently, the teachers viewed their principal responsibility as creating and maintaining an environment conducive to learner engagement. In this environment, direct instruction was of little significance. Again, the epistemic relation with respect to the teaching of content knowledge was downplayed (ER–). To maintain an environment that encourages learner engagement, the teachers provided support to guide students to accomplish their tasks, including responding to individual questions and organizing online discussion activities. The teachers also emphasized it was the learner’s responsibility to utilize the support. As one teacher summed up: ‘I think you need to guide in some way, provide some form of pathway [but] if students don’t want to use your pathway let them go their own path, but at least you’ve provided them with some assistance’ (Teacher G). For example, the teachers generally believed that peer interaction is valuable and enhances learners’ online presence, thereby helping to create a learning community. However, students’ participation in online discussions was often non-mandatory in these online units. This recurrent emphasis on learner choice and self-determined, individualized pathways can be characterized as exhibiting a relatively strong social relation to the knower (SR+). In terms of assessment, both teacher interviews and unit outlines indicate that the predominant forms of assessment were through what teaching staff termed ‘authentic tasks’, so-called because it is claimed they reflect real-life complexity and are therefore relevant to the learner (Savery and Duffy 1996), as well as various projects and personal reflections. All three methods, it was claimed, required learners to form associations between the content knowledge and their own real-life contexts. As there are potentially a wide variety of such contexts, this assessment approach downplays criteria that could be used to
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directly compare learners’ performances. Put another way, the assessment recognized multiple legitimate performances. As one teacher explained: ‘It’s not like learning medicine, you’ve got to get it right [otherwise] the patient will die. It’s not like that. It’s more open to interpretation’ (Teacher G). Explicit evaluative criteria, therefore, were considered to be less important in judging student performances, so the epistemic relation characterizing the assessment was downplayed (ER–). Instead, the teachers valued students’ abilities to construct individualized knowledge and to reflect on their own learning as the bases for achievement in the online units. A typical statement based on this view is: What I want to know is how much you, the student, can make the connections between your beliefs and your theory, your beliefs and your practices and can you share that with me and justify it. [Teacher C, emphasis added] In other words, the social characteristics of the learner form the basis of legitimate insight in this educational context. According to the teachers, an ideal learner in this context has particular attitudes and personal traits. These attitudes relate to enthusiasm about being there and willingness to explore, take risks and seek help, as well as to participate and share. As for personal traits, an ideal learner is independent, self-directed, confident and reflective. Primacy is thus given to dispositions of the knower – a relatively strong social relation (SR+). It is a particular kind of stronger social relation, one that refers to the knower’s attitude of wanting to engage in the learning context, rather than an innate or cultivated disposition, or other socially-based categories such as social class, gender or ethnicity. Overall, the constructivist instructional strategies the researched teachers preferred can be characterized as a weaker epistemic relation and a stronger social relation – a knower code (ER–, SR+). This code was realized: 1. in curriculum as downplaying of content knowledge and emphasizing personal knowledge based on learners’ professional and everyday experiences; 2. in pedagogy as downplaying the teacher delivering the subject content and structuring student learning, and emphasizing the need for self-regulated learners to create and co-construct knowledge; and 3. in assessment as avoiding explicit evaluative criteria and emphasizing knowers evaluating themselves based on their own criteria. The knower code that specializes these online units is a particular kind, which emphasizes the knower being simultaneously a personalized, individualized and socializing knower. He or she is a personalized knower in the sense of the knowledge, and an individualized and socializing knower in relation to the activities he or she does. To be specific, knowledge is constructed by each knower on the basis of his or her personal context and experiences through highly individualized
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tasks. Along with this emphasis on the knower’s individuality, the teachers articulated the educational value of knowers socializing and sharing perspectives in a learning community. However, since there was a lack of strong control through instructional procedures to foster knowers’ interactions in the community (participation was non-mandatory), it can be said that a greater emphasis is placed on the learner being an individualized than being a socializing knower.
Students’ Experiences of Constructivist-inspired Pedagogies in the Online Context Analysis of the seven case studies of Chinese students studying the online units indicates that the weaker epistemic relation characterizing the curriculum was experienced negatively by the students. For example, the students considered solitary reading was not adequate to help them learn because they were unsure whether their own understanding and interpretations of the content were correct or ‘on the right track’. For example, one summarized the effect of solitary reading for her as follows: There are still so many things that I’m not sure about . . . It’s not like you ask me something, I can tell you exactly what it is. If you ask me something now, I can only tell you what it is according to . . . my understanding. This is the best I can do, and I don’t think this means I’ve learned well. [Vivian, Interview 6] The students also dismissed peer discussions online as ‘pointless’ and ‘chaotic’ as their teachers often did not provide conclusive comments at the end of a discussion or verify whether the information contributed by their peers was legitimate. One said: Even if I got a reply from my classmate, it’s unlikely that the teacher would post a message afterwards to confirm whether what my classmate said was correct or not. So in this situation . . . I still don’t know whether the answer is correct. I can only rely on my judgment to see if the reply makes sense, or to compare all the replies I get, which is still not definite. [Vivian, Interview 2] As a result, many said they only read the postings that had attracted feedback from their teachers. In short, the students did not see what they obtained through solitary reading and peer discussions – two major learning activities in their online units – as legitimate educational knowledge. They experienced content knowledge as being unbounded and uncontrolled in the online units. Simply put, they experienced a lack of knowledge (ER–) in the learning environment. The students also expressed feelings of insecurity, anxiety and dejection over this vacuum of knowledge.
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In addition to experiencing an absence of content knowledge, the students struggled to cope with the curricular emphasis on merging everyday and educational knowledge. Some did not think their personal experiences or contexts were of importance to their education in Australia. Clearly, these students could not recognize the legitimacy of the weaker epistemic relation – that is, they did not possess the recognition rules for this form of curriculum. Other students showed they possessed these rules, but they did not have the realization rules. For example, when attempting to draw on their everyday knowledge, this latter category of students experienced difficulties and feelings of inferiority because they thought their experiences beyond the educational context were inadequate. Under these circumstances, the students reported two strategies for coping with the requirement of using everyday knowledge in their assignments: (1) ignoring the requirement and carrying on preparing their assignments as if they were traditional argumentative essays; and (2) trying to fulfil the requirement by manufacturing superficial links between the content knowledge and their experiences. Both strategies suggest that the students did not legitimize their personal experiences. They thus experienced the curriculum as involving a relatively weak social relation (SR–). With respect to the teaching approach employed in their online units, the students did not view invisible pedagogy as a legitimate form of pedagogy. They said they were provided with reading materials and deadlines for the assessment tasks, but then left alone to learn without much guidance by their teachers. ‘This type of learning is self-study,’ one student summarized, ‘you read the readings provided for you. Then you think on your own, and then write essays’ (Megan, Interview 2). This was often experienced negatively by the students, who saw weak sequencing and pacing rules as teaching without a systematic plan. The following response is typical of many: I feel that teachers do not teach in online classes. They raise a lot of questions for us to discuss. What do they teach us? They teach us nothing. They ask us to think, but what if I can’t think of anything? I can sit there thinking all day, not sleeping at all, but I still can’t think of anything. So I don’t think they are teaching me. [Vivian, Interview 3] This perceived absence of the teacher was experienced by all seven students as a lack of structure, procedures and explicit guidelines for learning content knowledge. Put another way, the weaker epistemic relation characterizing the pedagogy (ER–) was felt to be a lack, a deficiency rather than offering freedom or empowerment. Moreover, none of the students experienced being involved in a learning community in the online environment. They repeatedly stated that they went through the online units individually. For example, one said he felt as if he was the only student in his class and so doubted whether he was learning at all
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(Chris, Interview 6). That the students did not become part of the learning community exemplifies an experience of a relatively weak social relation (SR–). Inextricably linked to this issue is that while the students said they longed for a sense of belonging to their classes, they all reported lacking sufficient incentive to participate in online discussions with their peers. The main reason was they lacked confidence in the authority of peer perspectives. As previously noted, the students did not consider the information exchanged in peer discussions to be valid educational knowledge. In other words, they did not see their peers as legitimate knowers (SR–). Feeling that they were studying in an environment empty of legitimate knowledge (such as explicit and strongly bounded content knowledge) and legitimate knowers (teachers as authorities on the subject), the students articulated emotions of loneliness, isolation and abandonment, and in a number of cases, desperation and depression. The following quote is by a student whose experience was among the worst. This student constantly complained about feeling ‘isolated’ and ‘like a hermit’ throughout the semester: I feel very lonely. Every morning, as soon as I wake up, I log on to the class Web site, while all my roommates go to the uni. I stay at home, reading the messages the whole morning, doing the reading the whole afternoon, and writing the whole evening. In the afternoon, they come back from the uni. I feel like a hermit at home. I have no contact with people, and no one knows what I’m doing . . . no one sees me. [Vivian, Interview 3] Finally, as with their experiences of the curriculum and pedagogy, the students’ experiences of the assessment approach in their online units were also negative. They expressed considerable concern about a lack of specificity in the evaluative criteria, and most of them felt the descriptions of the assessment tasks and requirements were ‘ambiguous’. One student, for example, found it difficult to work when the guidelines were not explicit. She argued, ‘[students] are like producers. We produce goods as required. You [teachers] need to give us the standards’ (Jennifer, Interview 5). Consistently, the students also voiced frustration at not being able to obtain clear instructions from their teachers when they approached them for help. In effect, the students experienced the weaker epistemic relation characterizing the assessment (ER–) as hampering their capability to perform well on their assignments. In the students’ descriptions, most of the characteristics of a successful learner in their online units related to academic abilities, such as the abilities to read extensively, conduct a literature review and write in the academic genre. Unanimously, they stated that the key to attaining a good mark was to demonstrate in their assignments the knowledge they gained by addressing all the issues raised in the teacher’s explanation of the assignment topic. One said with certainty: ‘When the teacher marks your assignments, they mark your response to each of
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the questions they want you to answer’ (Diana, Interview 3). On the other hand, individual thinking, in relation to their interpretations of an assessment task and their evaluation of their own performances, was of little significance. Personal opinions of the content knowledge were also seen as less important, and often suppressed by the students if these opinions were at odds with those they discovered in the literature. In fact, some said the content of their assignments was usually not their opinions but ideas they ‘combined and synthesized’ from the readings (Rita, Interview 3). Clearly, the students’ understanding of the basis of success in the online units and their corresponding coping strategies are indicative of an experience of a weaker social relation (SR–). To summarize, the constructivist teaching practice enacted in the online units did not have an enabling or empowering effect on these students’ learning. On the contrary, the students in this study felt marginalized by this pedagogical approach. First, they did not see the curriculum as having sufficient content, the pedagogy as involving systematic teaching procedures or the evaluation as having clear criteria. In short, they experienced an absence of anything knowledge-related: a relatively weak epistemic relation (ER–). Secondly, although the online units required learners to use and create personal knowledge, the students did not view this as legitimate educational knowledge and thus did not do so. In addition, they did not participate in the learning communities or recognize their peers as legitimate knowers, both of which they were expected to do in the online units. The students, therefore, experienced a lack of empowerment or legitimacy as knowers: a relatively weak social relation (SR–). In other words, they experienced the knower-code (ER–, SR+) learning environment as something else: they recognized the lack of knowledge (though not positively) but could not recognize or realize the need to substitute this with their own experiences, and, in turn, felt illegitimate as knowers. In short, they did not experience the code underpinning their online units as a knower code but rather as a relativist code (ER–, SR–), an absence of legitimacy. This relativist-code experience, compared by one student to a ‘vacuum’, is empty of legitimate knowledge or legitimate knowers. Unable to base their success in the online units on either the knowledge gained or their social positions and experiences, the students felt in limbo, not knowing what to do or what direction to take. The impact of this form of pedagogy included feelings that they were learning very little and a string of concomitant negative emotions lasting through the students’ entire experiences of their online units.
Analysis: A ‘Code Clash’ and Invisible Knower Code The study drew two conclusions based on these findings. First, there was a ‘code clash’ (Lamont and Maton 2008) between the educational dispositions the
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students brought to the online learning context and the teaching practices in this context. Secondly, these students were unable to detect the code regulating the online environment because the knower code underpinning this environment is intrinsically invisible.
Code Clash According to Lamont and Maton (2008), there can be a clash between the legitimation code characterizing the way a student thinks and acts and the legitimation code characterizing the student’s educational context. Every educational practice or context is dominated by a specific code which embodies the unwritten ‘rules of the game’. However, not everyone is able to recognize or realize these rules. For those who cannot, this ‘code clash’ may make it difficult for them to achieve success, resulting in a sense of alienation and boredom and rejection of the educational context. The students in this study perceived the constructivist pedagogic practice in their online units as one that did not teach them content, principles, procedures or methods. In other words, they felt an absence of anything disciplinary, or non-disciplinarity. They also thought this teaching approach did not help them establish and maintain relationships with the teachers and their peers. It appeared that not being taught explicitly the appropriate ways of acting and communicating in this learning context, the students responded to the context by utilizing what they had already known. That is, they responded to an environment specialized by a knower code with the strategies they had previously developed in their formative, knowledge-code educational context. For example, in terms of curriculum, these students interpreted personal experience and knowledge as formerly gained knowledge, which they equated to ‘old’ knowledge. They argued that recycling old knowledge was not a good use of their time when studying in Australia, and so they continued to write their assignments by focusing on supplying content knowledge and demonstrating their understanding of the content by referencing the literature. In pedagogy, rather than demonstrating active engagement in their learning by taking control of their own learning processes and being involved in the learning communities, the students did exactly the opposite to what was expected of them: they detached themselves from the learning context and, in turn, became less visible. The code clash in pedagogy marginalized these students, which is an opposite effect to the aim of learner empowerment intended by constructivist teaching techniques. In relation to assessment, the teachers stated they expected students to negotiate with them when assessment requirements did not suit their situations. The students, however, construed negotiating with their teachers as an indication of their own incapacity to meet requirements.
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The Intrinsically Invisible Knower Code The knower code underpinning the constructivist teaching strategies in the online units rendered two important things invisible to the students in this study: (1) the knowledge to be taught and learned; and (2) the knower code itself. In relation to the invisible knowledge, the students did not know what they were trying to learn in the learning environment that used this form of pedagogy. For instance, they did not know what they were supposed to accomplish by bringing personal experience or by maintaining an online presence. Neither did they know how the flexibility of this form of education contributed to their learning, or what their teachers were teaching them. Although many of the students might have heard from their teachers the rationale for adopting this constructivist teaching approach, or read about it in the unit outlines, it appeared that they could not comprehend exactly what they were expected to do. To put it another way, they were unable to recognize the required performance in this context. The findings of the research suggest that this inability by the students to recognize the required performance in the online context was because the knower code underpinning the teaching practice did not make the knowledge to be taught and learned explicit to the students. This is illustrated clearly by the students’ experience of an absence of knowledge in their online units, as well as by the teachers’ use of implicit evaluative criteria and their shared belief in multiple legitimate performances. Indeed, the teachers said they avoided using direct instruction in the online units, which is characteristic of constructivistinspired pedagogies. Rather than teaching knowledge and skills to learners by virtue of explicit instruction, constructivist approaches are held by their proponents to help learners develop knowledge and skills tacitly by placing them in what are described as rich environments that provide authentic and complex learning tasks (Duffy and Cunningham 1996; Grabinger and Dunlap 1995; Herrington et al. 2005). It is expected that in order to complete these tasks, learners will actively explore the environments in ways they consider most appropriate for themselves. However, empirical data from this study shows that in giving learners this degree of ‘freedom’ to explore, both the teacher as a teacher and the knowledge the students are intended to learn (or ‘construct’) can be rendered invisible to students. Furthermore, the knower code itself, which governed the teaching practices in the online units, was also invisible to the students. Constructivist teaching does not set explicit rules of how learners should engage in their learning. In simple terms, learners are not expected to approach their tasks in particular ways. However, the data suggests the teachers did consider certain forms of learner engagement to be more appropriate than others, but did not make this explicit to the students. The study argues this was because the knower code represented by constructivist pedagogy is intrinsically
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invisible – to teach its ‘rules of the game’ explicitly would be to contradict the principles of the pedagogy. In particular, the study found that a key unwritten ‘rule of the game’ in constructivist educational practice is the notion of learner presence, which means that learners demonstrate their engagement with their past and current experiences, as well as within and beyond the educational context. Associated with this notion is an emphasis on a personalized, individualized and socializing knower as the basis of distinctiveness and authority in this learning context. However, constructivist teaching requires that this key rule of the game remain implicit in order to allow learners to explore the learning context in the ways they find appropriate. For example, the fundamental principle of invisible pedagogy, which describes the constructivist teaching practice in this study, is that instructional procedures do not follow pre-determined stages regulated by time, but by learners’ individual development. This principle, in fact, contains a hidden rule: the learner is expected to externalize his or her learning to the teacher so that the teacher can give personalized interpretation, evaluation and diagnosis. As Bernstein (1977: 121) writes, ‘the greater range of [the learner’s] activities, the more of him [sic] is made available to the teacher’s screening’. According to this tacit rule, to receive maximum ‘teaching’ from the teacher, it was imperative for the students in this study to participate in as many activities in the online learning context as possible. In other words, the students were expected to create and maintain their visibility in the online environment even though this was not compulsory. Nevertheless, in adhering to the notion of learner choice, the teaching practice did not announce the maintenance of online visibility as a rule of the game. Since the knower code underpinning constructivist-inspired pedagogies cannot show itself, it takes a learner pre-equipped with the ‘right’ dispositions to be able to appreciate and benefit from this instructional approach. To be specific, this approach requires a learner who has the ‘right’ attitude and personality or has already been socialized into the form of behaviours compatible with this form of teaching (Maton 2004).
Conclusion Many proponents of constructivist-inspired pedagogies claim these pedagogies, coupled with online learning, are especially suited to adult learners because adult learning is triggered and facilitated by their life experiences (Eastmond 1998; Huang 2002; Sieber 2005). The teaching staff described in this chapter expressed similar beliefs about adult learners, asserting that their postgraduate students throve in learning contexts in which constructivist instructional procedures were enacted. The empirical evidence gathered, however, challenges this generalized assumption. Contrary to claims made by constructivist theorists and researchers (Johnson and Johnson 1996; Milhauser 2006; Savery
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and Duffy 1996; Wilsonand 1997), the students discussed in this chapter: did not feel they were involved in generating knowledge through personal interpretations and negotiating meanings with their peers; did not develop ownership of their learning; and did not eventually become ‘reflective practitioners’ ready to apply changes to their own environments in order to test their new beliefs. Instead, they felt marginalized and in a state of chaos, uncertainty and limbo. As noted at the outset of this chapter, the research findings discussed here are not confined to Chinese students in Australia. The studies mentioned earlier suggest that students in South Africa, the United States, Portugal and Australia have experienced similar difficulties with constructivist-inspired pedagogies. Hence, we would argue, the experience of a code clash identified in the research is not exclusive to Chinese learners. We would conjecture that this experience may extend to all social groups whose educational dispositions are characterized by knowledge codes. Finally, it should be emphasized that we are not arguing that the knower code itself, or constructivist teaching itself, is the problem. Rather, we argue that teaching practice based purely on a knower code requires pre-equipped learners for it to work. It requires the right kind of knower, one whose dispositions enable the display of being a personalized, individualized and socializing knower, for these capacities are not explicitly identified or taught. The findings of previous studies also suggest that this pedagogy suits learners with significant prior knowledge or experience of the subject content, so that the lack of explicit knowledge or direct instruction is not experienced as a vacuum, whatever code dispositions they bring (e.g. Gabriel 2004; Milhauser 2006). Without the ‘right’ knowers, constructivist teaching practice in the online context may lead to a relativist-code learning experience, an experience of non-disciplinarity with consequences of disempowerment, alienation and marginalization, the very opposite to its aims and intentions. Above all, this study shows that generalized claims about the ways students (or particular groups of students) learn or the effects of a form of pedagogy must always be treated with scepticism. As we discussed at the outset, educational practices involve the meeting of two histories or logics: the dispositions brought by students from their prior experiences and the nature of the educational context. Understanding how different forms of knowledge and pedagogy shape educational experiences and outcomes thus requires a relational approach capable of theorizing the logics or underlying principles of both, and how they relate, in order to more fully understand what form of teaching and learning is required for which students and in what contexts.
Note 1.
The acronym ‘TAFE’ means a ‘Technical and Further Education’ institution; this is a tertiary institution offering a range of courses in trades such as hospitality, hairdressing, carpentry and so on.
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References Australian Education International. (2009), International Student Enrolments in Higher Education in 2008. Research Snapshot, No. 49. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Retrieved 27 July 2009, from http://aei.gov.au/AEI/PublicationsAndResearch/Snapshots/49SS09_pdf Bernstein, B. (1977), Class, Codes and Control. Volume 3. Towards a Theory of Educational Transmissions (2 nd ed.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. — (2000), Pedagogy, Symbolic Control, and Identity: Theory, Research, critique (revised ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Bourdieu, P. (1996), The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chen, R. T.-H. (2010), Knowledge and Knowers in Online Learning: Investigating the Effects of Online Flexible Learning on Student Sojourners. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wollongong, Australia. Duffy, T. M. and Cunningham, D. J. (1996), Constructivism: Implications for the design and delivery of instruction, in D. H. Jonassen (ed.), Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology: A Project of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. New York: Macmillan Library Reference USA, 170–198. Eastmond, D. V. (1998), Adult learners and Internet-based distance education. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 1998(78): 33–41. Gabriel, M. A. (2004), Learning together: Exploring group interactions online. Journal of Distance Education 10(1): 54–72. Grabinger, R. S. and Dunlap, J. C. (1995), Rich environments for active learning: A definition. ALT-J 3(2): 5–34. Gunawardena, C. N., Ortegano-Layne, L., Carabajal, K., Frechette, C., Lindemann, K. and Jennings, B. (2006), New model, new strategies: Instructional design for building online wisdom communities. Distance Education 27(2): 217–232. Herrington, J., Reeves, T. C. and Oliver, R. (2005), Online learning as information delivery: Digital myopia. Journal of Interactive Learning Research 16(4): 353–367. Hoadley, U. (2007), The reproduction of social class inequalities through mathematics pedagogies in South African primary schools. Journal of Curriculum Studies 39(6): 679–706. Huang, H. M. (2002), Toward constructivism for adult learners in online learning environments. British Journal of Educational Technology 33(1): 27–37. Johnson, D. W. and Johnson, R. T. (1996), Cooperation and the use of technology, in D. H. Jonassen (ed.), Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology. New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1017–1044. Lamont, A. and Maton, K. (2008), Choosing music: Exploratory studies into the low uptake of music GCSE. British Journal of Music Education 25(3): 267–282. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lubienski, S. T. (2004), Decoding mathematics instruction: A critical examination of an invisible pedagogy, in J. Muller, B. Davies and A. Morais (eds), Reading Bernstein, Researching Bernstein. London: RoutledgeFalmer, 108–121. Maton, K. (2000), Languages of legitimation: The structuring significance for intellectual fields of strategic knowledge claims. British Journal of Sociology of Education 21(2): 147–167.
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— (2004), The wrong kind of knower: Education, expansion and the epistemic device, in J. Muller, B. Davies and A. Morais (eds), Reading Bernstein, Researching Bernstein. London: RoutledgeFalmer, 218–231. — (2007), Knowledge-knower structures in intellectual and educational fields, in F. Christie and J. R. Martin (eds), Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives. London: Continuum, 87–108. — (2010), Progress and canons in the arts and humanities: Knowers and gazes, in K. Maton and R. Moore (eds), Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education: Coalitions of the Mind. London: Continuum, 154–178. — (in press), Knowledge and Knowers: Towards a Realist Sociology of Education. London: Routledge. McAlpine, I. (2000), Collaborative learning online. Distance Education 21(1): 66–80. Milhauser, K. L. (2006), The voice of the online learner, in A. D. Figueiredo and A. P. Afonso (eds), Managing Learning in Virtual Settings: The Role of Context. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Inc, 219–235. Moore, R. and Maton, K. (2001), Founding the sociology of knowledge: Basil Bernstein, intellectual fields and the epistemic device, in A. Morais, I. Neves, B. Davies and H. Daniels (eds), Towards a Sociology of Pedagogy: The Contribution of Basil Bernstein to Research. New York: Peter Lang, 153–182. Morais, A. and Neves, I. (2001), Pedagogic social contexts: Studies for a sociology of learning, in A. Morais, I. Neves, B. Davies and H. Daniels (eds), Towards a Sociology of Pedagogy: The Contribution of Basil Bernstein to Research. New York: Peter Lang, 185–221. Morse, K. (2003), Does one size fit all? Exploring asynchronous learning in a multicultural environment. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks 7(1): 37–55. Rose, D. (2004), Sequencing and pacing of the hidden curriculum: How indigenous learners are left out of the chain, in J. Muller, B. Davies and A. Morais (eds), Reading Bernstein, Researching Bernstein. London: RoutledgeFalmer, 91–107. Savery, J. R. and Duffy, T. M. (1996), Problem based learning: An instructional model and its constructivist framework, in B. G. Wilson (ed.), Constructivist Learning Environments: Case Studies in Instructional Design. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications, 135–150. Sieber, J. (2005), Misconceptions and realities about teaching online. Science and Engineering Ethics 11(3): 329–340. Smith, P. J., Coldwell, J., Smith, S. N. and Murphy, K. L. (2005), Learning through computer-mediated communication: A comparison of Australian and Chinese heritage students. Innovations in Education and Teaching International 42(2): 123–134. Sweller, J. (2009), What human cognitive architecture tells us about constructivism, in T. M. Duffy and S. Tobias (eds), Constructivist Theory Applied to Instruction: Success or Failure? New York, NY: Routledge, 127–143. Tam, M. (2000), Constructivism, instructional design, and technology: Implications for transforming distance learning. Educational Technology & Society 3(2). Retrieved 1 May 2008, from http://www.ifets.info/journals/3_2/tam.html Tu, C.-H. (2001), How Chinese perceive social presence: An examination of interaction in online learning environment. Educational Media International 38(1): 45–60.
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Wilson, B. G. (1997), Reflections on constructivism and instructional design, in C. R. Dills and A. J. Romiszowski (eds), Instructional Development Paradigms. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications, 63–80. Zhao, N. and McDougall, D. (2008), Cultural influences on Chinese students’ asynchronous online learning in a Canadian university. Journal of Distance Education 22(2): 59–80.
Chapter 8
Discipline and Freedom in Early Childhood Education Susan Feez
Introduction The term discipline, in its etymology and everyday use, evokes both the structuring of knowledge into distinct specializations and the structured regulation of behaviour. The word itself derives from disciple, one who follows a revered teacher in order to learn from that teacher’s knowledge and powers of selfregulation, often in the hope of achieving a transcendent freedom. In the domain of pedagogy, however, the term ‘discipline’ has often come to represent the restriction of freedom in relation to both what is learned and how it is learned. The provenance of the negative view of disciplinarity in the domain of pedagogy parallels the history of ideas underpinning educational reform movements that advocate ‘progressive’ approaches to education. While considerable variation can be found in the pedagogies that have emerged in the name of educational reform in this and earlier centuries, progressive pedagogies are described collectively as being child-centred, democratic, developmentally responsive and attuned to the experience and creative potential of individuals, as elaborated canonically by Cremin (1961). Furthermore, progressive pedagogies tend to be contrasted with ‘traditional’ approaches linked with the advent of mass schooling at the time of the Industrial Revolution and represented as autocratic, narrow, unresponsive and inequitable. Inhumane classroom practices associated with traditional pedagogy were perceived by many educational reformers to have been generated by the discipline which both structured knowledge and forced children, willing or not, to learn it in a prescribed way. The rejection of disciplinarity became institutionalized, especially in the early childhood sector across the English-speaking world, through the influence of official documents, such as the Plowden Report (1967), which promoted a model of pedagogy in which children had increased freedom to choose what to learn and how to learn it, while teachers were cast more peripherally in the role
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of facilitator. Such an approach, it was thought, would enable all students to become successful, independent and creative learners. An analysis by Bernstein (1975: 116–145) of this type of early childhood pedagogy foreshadowed, however, that the retreat from disciplinarity had the potential to generate educational outcomes that were not universally favourable. While the rejection of disciplinarity by educational reformers has always been contested, in recent decades critical evaluations of progressive pedagogies, and their consequences for students from early childhood to tertiary education, have gained momentum (e.g. Bernstein 2000: 169–170; Bourne 2003; Christie 2004; Delpit 1988; Egan 1997, 2002; Freebody, Martin and Maton 2008; Muller 2001, Chen et al. this volume). Expanding on Bernstein’s initial reservations, these criticisms build the argument that attempts to dismantle discipline structures in educational contexts over the twentieth century have merely succeeded in making these structures less visible, but not in reducing their social and intellectual power. Where discipline structures in educational contexts have been rendered less visible, there is evidence that valued educational outcomes become less accessible for many, especially those at greatest initial social disadvantage. (See Chen et al. and Exley and Singh, this volume, for related discussions.) In other words, the retreat from disciplinarity has proven, in Bernstein’s words, to be ‘a superficial solution to an obdurate problem’ (1975: 135). In the first decade of the twentieth century the distinction between traditional and reformist pedagogies was still fluid, and the social sciences that would eventually fix this distinction were only just emerging from their formative periods. During this decade Maria Montessori, an Italian physician, designed an early childhood pedagogy in which liberty is considered to be inseparable from discipline, both in the sense of what should be learned and how it should be learned (Feez 2010). The pedagogy continues to flourish, using Montessori’s original blueprint, in all parts of the world, albeit at the margins of mainstream educational practice and subject to periodic buffeting caused by the shifting status afforded traditional and progressive pedagogies in the surrounding culture (Lillard 2005: 328–332). This chapter will view the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of Montessori practice through the lens of Bernstein’s sociology of pedagogy in order to investigate more closely the unification of liberty and discipline in Montessori pedagogy. In this way, themes of knowledge and disciplinarity, the central concerns of this book, will be reconsidered in the context of early childhood education. To design her pedagogy, Montessori, very systemically and deliberately, drew on her own cultural heritage, the organization of the disciplines in the European universities of her time, an organization derived from the medieval distinction between linguistic knowledge and abstract knowledge of the physical world and mathematics, and still familiar today to those educated in the European tradition (Bernstein 2000: 8–9). How she recontextualized disciplinary knowledge in her pedagogy will be explored by analysing three
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layers of Montessori practice: the setting, the resources and activities and the social relations. In order to establish the basis and rationale of these three layers, some account will be given of the important influences that shaped Montessori’s thinking about pedagogy.
Modalities of Pedagogic Practice Different ‘modalities of pedagogic practice’, Bernstein (2000: 100) argues, are generated by ‘variation in the strength of classification and framing values’, which, in turn, are markers of the degree of ‘visibility’ of the pedagogy. Strong classification, highlighting the divisions between and within disciplines, and strong framing, in which control of what is learned and how it is learned remains with the teacher, are features of a visible pedagogy. Pedagogies become more invisible as the distinctions between elements and types of knowledge and between the roles of teachers and students are less strictly maintained (Bernstein 1975, 2000). A glare of publicity typically surrounds the two extremes of pedagogic practice: the strongly classified, strongly framed ‘visible’ pedagogies associated with what is considered to be traditional education and the weakly classified, weakly framed ‘invisible’ pedagogies associated with progressive education. The glare generated by these extremes, whether real or imperfectly recalled, too often blinds educators to more tempered modalities that become possible when the potential of the far richer ‘pedagogic pallet’ elaborated by Bernstein (2000: 56) is exploited. A more tempered modality of pedagogic practice is exemplified in ‘genre-based’ literacy pedagogy (Christie and Unsworth 2005; Feez 2002; Martin and Rose 2008), a pedagogy characterized by ‘waves of weak and strong classification and framing as appropriate to different stages of [the] pedagogic cycle’ (Martin 1999: 143). A comparable ‘mixed pedagogy’, in which the relative strength of classification and framing is varied strategically, has been shown by Morais et al. (2004: 75) to support ‘successful scientific, social and affective learning’. The claim that Montessori pedagogy interweaves liberty and discipline suggests a modality of practice in the region between the two extremes of pedagogic practice. A study of the modality of Montessori pedagogic practice, therefore, has the potential to expand our understanding of the possibilities this region offers educators. The analysis of elements of Montessori practice in this chapter uses a metalanguage that combines Bernstein’s framework of pedagogic potential with Vygotsky’s social psychology and Halliday’s linguistics to account not only for the sociological, but also for the psychological and semiotic, in pedagogic practice. Each of these specialized disciplines – sociology of education, social psychology and systemic functional linguistics – as Hasan (2005: 130) demonstrates, is distinct, with a distinct object of study, yet permeable enough to enable interconnection, thus enhancing the usefulness of each specialization.
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A Social Semiotic Metalanguage for Exploring Development and Pedagogy Montessori (1982 [1949]: 165–166) describes human development as a process of adaptation triggered by the intersection of each child’s developmental potential with the material and social environment. A metalanguage for exploring this idea is found in Vygotsky’s genetic account of the evolution of human consciousness, which brings together ‘the natural and the social’ through the concept of semiotic mediation (Hasan 2005: 107). The means of human adaptation in Vygotsky’s account are the ‘tools’ humans use to mediate their engagement with the environment. Physical tools enable humans to shape, and master, the material environment. Semiotic tools, or signs, enable humans to use meaning to interact in the social environment and to gain mastery over their own actions. Changes in the means of mediation trigger critical developmental steps, or turning points. Vygotsky applied this idea to human development across three integrated genetic domains (Wertsch and Tulviste 2005: 65). 1. Across evolutionary time, the domain of phylogenesis, the critical step in human development is the use of physical tools by primates to change their external physical world. 2. Across historical time, in the domain of socio-cultural genesis, the critical step in human development is the use of signs by humans to change their social and psychological environments. In other words, a turning point was reached when humans began using signs, or semiotic tools, to interact with their external social world and their internal psychological world. 3. Within the span of one lifetime, the domain of ontogenesis, the critical step is the interweaving in childhood of two strands of development, the initial, or elementary, biological strand and the later, or higher, socio-cultural strand. In ontogenesis there are a number of transitional forms between ‘the elementary and higher functions’, transitions relating to the development of symbolic activity, from speech to the use of signals and finally signs (Vygotsky and Luria 1994 [1930]: 148). Developing symbolic activity, a function of the collaboration between children and adults, frees a child’s consciousness from the spatial and temporal limits of the immediate material environment. The fourth term in this series, microgenesis, was never used by Vygotsky, but was used by neo-Vygotskian scholars (e.g. Wertsch 1985: 54–55) to label the domain in which Vygotsky (1978: 68) worked when observing and recording the ‘process in flight’ of children’s development, that is, children’s activity within the timeframe of minutes or hours. Elements of Montessori pedagogic practice can be interpreted in Vygotskian terms as semiotic mediation which sparks critical steps, or turning points, in the development of everyday and disciplinary knowledge within the domain of microgenesis. Disciplinary knowledge is valued by
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Vygotsky (1986 [1934]: 171) because it systematizes concepts for children, making them amenable to ‘conscious and deliberate control’. The detail of microgenetic semiotic mediation in Montessori pedagogy can be explored using a social semiotic approach. This approach focuses on meaning and text, enabling an analysis that goes ‘beyond action into interaction’, as Hasan (2005: 146) argues. Elements of social semiotics most relevant to an exploration of Montessori practice include: 1. a language-based theory of learning in which language is identified as the means through which ‘experience becomes knowledge’ (Halliday 1993: 94) and learning is conflated with the freeing of language ‘from the constraints of the immediate environment’ (Halliday 1978: 29), a theory which augments Vygotsky’s concept of semiotic mediation 2. a metalanguage to describe the meaning relations within the multimodal configurations of objects, movement and language that comprise Montessori learning resources, and the use of text as the unit of analysis (Halliday 2004). The ‘dialectic of the social and the semiotic’ (Hasan 2005: 33) is foregrounded in the sociology of pedagogy proposed by Bernstein (2000). Just as language imposes order and centres of relevance on an otherwise undifferentiated mass of potential thought and experience, in Bernstein’s model, pedagogy imposes order and centres of relevance on the otherwise undifferentiated mass of potential knowledge, activating a system of principles through which knowledge is given reality in learning contexts. Most relevant to the present discussion is Bernstein’s metalanguage for describing: 1. contrasting categories of knowledge: – everyday commonsense knowledge, organized segmentally on the basis of context-dependent horizontal meanings, and close to a specific material base – abstract, specialized educational knowledge, organized hierarchically and systematically as vertical meanings enabling the extension of consciousness in time and space beyond the immediate physical world 2. the recontextualization of knowledge as pedagogic discourse, which is both regulative and instructional 3. the distinction between visible and invisible pedagogies. In her exploration, using Bernstein’s framework, of different forms of semiotic mediation reflecting the variety of socio-cultural contexts in which learning takes place, Hasan (2004a) notes that, in Western cultures, the most valued domains of knowledge, hierarchically organized and distanced from a specific material setting, are not mediated equitably by schools for students from all social groups. Montessori pedagogy, in contrast, was initially designed to
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mediate valued domains of discipline knowledge specifically for socially disadvantaged children.
Montessori Pedagogy in its Historical Context In Rome during the late 1890s Dr Maria Montessori was a newly graduated doctor specializing in the fields of paediatrics and psychiatry. She was both clinician and social reformer concerned with improving the material circumstances and health of patients living in extreme poverty, in particular women and children. As well as campaigning for the abolition of child labour, she developed an educational programme for children who, at that time, were labelled ‘deficient’. The interventions she devised helped many of these children to pass public examinations and, thus, to be given a chance at independent and productive lives. This work sparked her interest in the relation between pedagogy and child development in general. By the first decade of the new century Montessori’s aim was to develop a science of pedagogy with the human child as her object of study. In schools at that time children were forced to sit still and silent in class. In Montessori’s view, observing immobile children to collect pedagogical data was as futile as observing mounted butterflies to collect entomological data. For this reason, Montessori (1964 [1909]: 28) chose as her object of study the ‘spontaneous manifestations of the child’s nature’. While she argued that schools should be more humane, Montessori’s reasons for insisting children should be free to engage in spontaneous activity were, however, more methodological than an expression of the progressivist tradition associated with Rousseau, whose views on liberty in education she described as ‘impractical’ and ‘vague’ (Montessori 1964 [1909]: 15). Montessori’s methodological approach was echoed two decades later when Vygotsky (1986 [1934]: 13) shifted the focus of his experiments to ‘socially laden activity’ (Kozulin 2005: 103). Montessori’s experimental pedagogy was first implemented in 1907 at a school for tenement children in Rome. The children were offered a ‘mixed’ pedagogy made up of a range of carefully designed activities, strongly classified in terms of what the children were learning and strongly framed in the sense that the teacher’s presentation was the standard for how each task was to be performed. The children, however, were free to choose the activities that interested them most and to work with each activity where and for as long as they wished, within the constraints of the school room and school day; in other words, the framing in terms of activity selection, sequence and pacing was weak, as were the distinctions between the spaces available to teacher and children, especially when compared with typical classrooms of the time. In a few months the children were able to regulate their own behaviour, and carry out everyday tasks, such as washing, dressing and cleaning up (context-dependent segmentally organized knowledge). They also began to work with context-independent
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hierarchically organized knowledge, including grammar and mathematics, with apparent ease and enjoyment. This experiment in pedagogy has been duplicated in many Montessori schools around the world since that time.
The Enlightenment Origins of Montessori Pedagogy Montessori achieved her apparent miracle by returning to the pedagogical tradition she had adapted to teach ‘deficient’ children. This tradition originates with a contemporary of Rousseau, the French Enlightenment philosopher Condillac who, like many in Paris at the time, visited a school where deaf mutes were taught to speak (Knight 1968; Lane 1976: 23–25). The method used was sensory-based and interactive, thus blurring the teacher-student distinction. Nevertheless, disciplinary knowledge, specifically knowledge about grammatical categories, was used to teach students the force of different words, that is, the function of different words in meaning-making. Control of how to represent this knowledge remained with the teacher (Séguin 1971 [1866]: 24), suggesting a strongly classified pedagogy. Combining his observations at the school with Enlightenment empiricism (Knight 1968), Condillac argued that the senses are the doorways to knowledge, but the transition from sensory experience to knowledge can only be achieved using signs (Culler 1985: 68). Signs not only free humans from dependence on immediate sensory experience, they enable control of attention and memory, reasoning and imagination. Liberty for Condillac, therefore, includes the intentional use of socially shared signs, an idea which is missing in the liberty Rousseau allows his imaginary child, Emile, but which re-emerges two centuries later in Vygotsky’s concept of semiotic mediation and Halliday’s language-based theory of learning. Condillac’s description of ‘a body of knowledge’ as a system with ‘mutually dependent parts, derived from a single principle successfully expanded’ (quoted in Knight 1968: 52) in which the data of empirical experience are organized and explained in conventional ways using language, also resonates with Bernstein’s explanation of vertical knowledge structures. Condillac applied his ideas in a pedagogy in which sensory means were used to capture a child’s attention in playful, interactive ways that blurred adult-child roles. Language was used to control the child’s attention, in other words, to control what was learned (Knight 1968). In 1914 a contemporary and influential critic of Montessori noted, with disapproval, that ‘Condillac attributed the whole of man’s ideas to social intercourse’ and for this reason, he argued, it was Rousseau who should be used as inspiration for new education in the twentieth century (Boyd 1914: 45). Rousseau’s child, however, is left alone to make choices based on impulsive responses to immediate experience, as were the twentiethcentury children placed in settings inspired by this story. In such settings development is, notionally, shaped by ‘sentiment’ from within, so adult-child roles, and what is to be learned and how, are not made clear. In the Condillac
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tradition, in contrast, liberty is a function of social interaction; it is framed by social conventions expressed in language, conventions which emerge from the distinctions we attend to, initially, in everyday life. In other words, development is shaped by social life, from outside, a view elaborated in Bernstein’s sociology of pedagogy.
The Nineteenth-century Antecedents of Montessori Pedagogy Condillac’s thinking inspired the nineteenth-century doctors, Jean Itard and Edouard Séguin, whose ideas are the foundation of Montessori pedagogy. Itard, famously, taught Victor, a child abandoned in a forest at about the age of 4 during the French Revolution and found some 8 years later. Itard argued that the child suffered from cultural loss, which could be redressed through education. Victor suffered from impaired perception, being unresponsive to hot or cold, or even the crack of a pistol. He did respond, however, to the crack of a walnut shell because this sound meant food, and approximated, therefore, a sign (Itard 1972 [1801]: 105–111). Itard created a homelike environment for the child and responded to and extended his wants, needs and interests playfully by ‘fabricating things, sights, and sounds to serve as vehicles of instruction’ (Lane 1976: 95). ‘Whenever his wants [were] concerned’, Itard (1972 [1801]: 127 n8) wrote, ‘his attention, his memory, and his intelligence seemed to raise him above himself’, an early foreshadowing of Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development, the region of potential development extending beyond a learner’s present level of functioning. Beginning with strong sensory contrasts meaningful to the child, for example, the softness of cooked potatoes compared with hard uncooked ones, and warm bath water compared with cold, Itard (1972 [1801]: 144–147) incrementally expanded and refined the range of distinctions the child found meaningful, including distinctions with cultural significance beyond the immediate sensory base, for example, the contrast between the sounds of a drum and a bell and contrasts between sounds of the language. Sensory mediation of experience, carefully sequenced in a shared social context, thus, led Victor towards the mediation of experience through signs. As signs took over, Victor abandoned the sensory cues. Observing that disorder (weak classification and weak framing) in the external environment made Victor distressed and disoriented, Itard (1972 [1801]: 152– 179) drew outlines above hooks in the child’s room to help him remember where objects belonged. The abstracted outlines highlighted the distinctions between objects and, thus, helped Victor organize them independently. Itard later used wooden shapes and matching outlines to teach Victor geometric shapes and letters of the alphabet. Eventually, Itard devised a series of activities based on grammar categories to teach Victor to read and write. The grammar categories were analogous, at a higher level of abstraction, to the outlines drawn above the hooks in Victor’s room. In other words, grammar categories,
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categories of disciplinary knowledge, were used by Itard as semantic outlines, a type of memory aid, to help Victor attend to, order and interpret meaning in written language. Despite making remarkable progress under Itard’s tutelage, Victor never developed to the extent considered normal for a child his age. Itard reasoned that, in the forest, the child had passed through critical developmental periods which he could not exploit because of social isolation. This idea is the basis of the Montessori concept of sensitive periods, periods of heightened sensitivity and interest during which small children are able to make social and cultural advances unconsciously and with relative ease, for example, learning language. After these periods have passed, the individual must acquire the same ability consciously, with greater effort and less perfectly, for example, the learning of a second language in adulthood. The Montessori concept of the sensitive period is cited by Vygotsky (1986 [1934]: 189) as the starting point for his more theoretically developed concept of the zone of proximal development. Later in the nineteenth century Itard’s ideas were applied by Edouard Séguin in schools for educating children diagnosed as ‘idiots’. Séguin placed these children in caring, homelike settings with freedom of movement and games to play. The games led the children from ‘isolation to sociability’ (Séguin 1971 [1866]: 209) by teaching them to control their physical movement, as a foundation for self-regulation, and to refine sensory perception, as a foundation for intellectual development. Perception, in Séguin’s view, can be artificially augmented, not only through physical but also through social means, to overcome biological, spatial and temporal limits. Just as spectacles, telescopes and microscopes extend the visual sense beyond the limits of impairment and the immediate visual field, knowledge systems, such as mathematics and grammar, can mediate and extend perception to overcome social limits. For example, following Itard, Séguin designed grammar games in which children attended to categories of meaning they would later use as semantic outlines to support first steps in reading. In other words, Séguin (1971 [1866]: 199) used disciplinary knowledge to augment perception and help overcome developmental limits. To present disciplinary knowledge to the children, Séguin represented it in the form of manipulable concrete objects, combined with a naming lesson in three parts, and supplementary pictures and labels. In this way, the children experienced the vertical meanings of disciplinary knowledge in multimodal, redundant forms, ‘their name written, printed, and pronounced, their images printed and carved’ in order that ‘the first ideas may be forced through the senses into the mind’ (Séguin 1971 [1866]: 182). Séguin’s multimodal learning resources, the prototypes of Montessori materials, were deployed in microgenetic instructional sequences in which children gradually abandoned the redundant concrete modes as they mastered the abstract meanings. Séguin (1971 [1866]: 291) called these sets of resources ensembles, a term used by Butt (2004: 227–228) to describe, from a social
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semiotic perspective, the multimodal semiotic resources teachers use to help students move from ‘local action towards human culture in general’. An ensemble is designed around a critical abstraction (Butt 2004: 231) which can be ‘recontextualised in a number of intellectual contexts and still retain its degree of fit’. A critical abstraction has two orientations: one external where the abstract concept is represented in a local, commonsense form and one internal where the knowledge is ‘denaturalised’ to reveal ‘the conventional arrangements which underpin our intellectual tools’ (Butt 2004: 233). Séguin’s approach, and its interpretation by Montessori, were judged by Montessori’s contemporaries working in the tradition of Rousseau as atomistic and lacking in creative and intellectual freedom (e.g. Boyd 1914; Dewey and Dewey 1915). Within two decades, however, Vygotsky (1993 [1932]: 218), when writing of ‘the profound intuition’ of Séguin ‘that the source of idiocy is solitude’, argued that, for both ‘retarded’ and ‘normal’ children, ‘the developmental path . . . lies through collaborative activity, the social help of another human being, who from the first is his mind, his will, his activities’. The social help Séguin provided was delivered in an environment in which children had considerable freedom and interpreted the activities as games. The help was embodied in manipulable, interactive multimodal ensembles of resources, calibrated into sequences in which each activity increased incrementally the control of movement and level of concentration required, alongside increasing perceptual and intellectual demand. The design of the ensembles was shaped by the knowledge structures of the culture, structures which ordered the children’s experience in ways that enabled them to regulate their own behaviour, including movement and attention, and from that point, to organize and augment their perception and thinking in culturally meaningful ways. It was this approach that Montessori (1964 [1909]; 1965 [1916]) elaborated into the pedagogic practice that continues to be implemented in Montessori schools today.
Liberty and Discipline in Montessori Pedagogy Montessori educators claim that liberty and discipline are inseparable in Montessori pedagogy, both in what is taught and how it is taught. The modality of this practice can be described in terms of configurations of classification and framing values varying independently in three layers: in the physical setting, in the design of resources, activities and instructional sequences and in social relations. Liberty in Montessori early childhood settings is a configuration of weak classification and framing values. Children are free to move around, work and rest in all areas of the setting, both indoor and outdoor. There are, hence, no boundaries between teacher’s space and children’s space and between indoor and outdoor space. Montessori settings are designed for multi-age groups, for
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example, 3 to 6 years or 6 to 9 years, weakening the boundaries and the framing of social relations between age groups. Wherever possible, the boundaries between settings for younger and older groups are also porous, enabling younger children to take ‘an intellectual walk’ (Montessori 1965 [1916]: 5) and older children to review earlier work. In addition, children choose their own workspace, work companions and activities; they are free to work on an activity as long as they wish during a 3-hour span of unscheduled time, minimizing interruptions to self-chosen activity. Accordingly, control of space, social relations, activity selection, time allocation and pacing is largely with the children. Discipline, in contrast, is a feature of the design of the physical space, the design and location of the resources, and the sequences of activities, which together embody a complex of very strong classification and framing values. The physical space is divided into clearly designated areas, one area for each knowledge domain. There is only one of each set of resources, and these are placed on low, open shelves in fixed sequences of increasing challenge and complexity. In this way the framing of the learning sequence is strengthened, while, on the open shelving, the strongly classified and framed knowledge structures intersect with the weak framing of activity selection. The design specifications of the multimodal resources are extremely precise, ensuring knowledge is represented accurately. Many resources include a designed-in control of error, allowing children to evaluate their own progress while also framing their choices. Precision also frames the lessons in which children are shown how to use the resources. The teacher models the use of the resources explicitly in routines executed with such care and deliberation they can seem choreographed. Each lesson has its own name and is clearly separated from the preceding and subsequent lessons in a pre-determined instructional trajectory. Each object in a lesson has a specified and separate role in pre-determined activity sequences and final arrays. During lessons teachers will often pause momentarily between movements in order to maintain the separation between each step in a sequence
