Official Pedagogic Discourses and the Construction of Learners' Identities

Abstract

The term ‘official pedagogic discourse’ is derived from the work of British sociologist Basil Bernstein (1924–2000), who used it to categorize state discourses on education as revealed in government policy documents and statements, formal state-approved curricula, inspection and examination criteria. Official pedagogic discourse, Bernstein argues, establishes particular social relations between government agencies and those active in the field of education, including educational researchers and teacher trainers as well as teachers and regional administrators, offering each group more or less status and more or less agency in using different forms of pedagogic discourse, knowledge and practice. Through official pedagogic discourse, he argued, the State constructs boundaries between different subject areas; between different types of pedagogic institution; and between different categories of learner, offering each access to selected forms of legitimate knowledge. It thus not only impacts upon curriculum and classroom practices, but also offers different forms of specialized consciousness, and thus helps to construct different identities for different categories of learners. Of course, in a democracy, government policy is not a single voice, and researchers drawing on the work of Bernstein have drawn attention to the multi-vocal struggle within official discourse itself, as well as the sometimes unpredictable outcomes for practice in the classroom of the convergence with official pedagogic discourse of a range of other (local) pedagogic discourses, themselves drawing on a wide variety of disciplinary fields (such as psychology and sociology), as well as from the ‘craft’ discourses of practicing teachers. This chapter considers the role of official pedagogic discourse as the link between macro social structures and micro classroom interactional processes; or the way in which the ‘outside’ social order is constitutive of the ‘inside’, or learner identity.