Bernstein, educational change, and gendered language

Abstract

This paper focuses on a little known Bernstein concept of ‘gender codes’ developed in the study of schooling, suggesting that schools transmit hidden gender messages though a range of semiotic devices. Initially, the paper shows how Bernstein's 1970s' research provided a novel way of looking at some critical issues current in educational sociology, to address knowledge transmission and socialization across generational and class differences. Bernstein's focus on the ways argumentation shapes class differentiated social relationships gave a new direction that later became part of language socialization research. His work incorporated several disciplinary traditions, social psychology, social anthropology and structural functional linguistics, to answer sociological questions. The study reported here follows in Bernstein's footsteps by focusing on a rarely studied group, that of mature women students who are the first in their families to go to college, and who combine family life, paid work with their academic studies. Using an analysis that focuses on differences in rhetorical style, the paper examines the different ways in which women construct their narrative selves in describing their differing life trajectories. The research suggests that Bernstein's concept of gender codes does not allow for a more changing and dynamic view of gender and intergenerational relations that any current socialization research requires.