Potential of crossing the pedagogic midline to advance understanding of Bernstein’s visible and invisible pedagogic practices

Abstract

British sociologist Basil Bernstein’s theorisations of pedagogic practice have inspired education research at the micro-level of the classroom; however, there is some limitation so far as understanding educators’ pedagogic impact on learners’ text production in the early years. Specifically, this limitation concerns how educators can craft a careful mix of explicit and implicit pedagogies to stimulate modes to produce text including spoken, written language or visual images, melded with oral, visual and audio meaning making modes. This paper seeks to describe how a pedagogic mix can occur by advancing the theoretical term crossing the pedagogic midline. This paper draws on findings from design-based research in an exploratory case study of an Australian Preparatory classroom. Using a qualitative orientation, data were generated from video and audio recordings and text production artefacts by five-year-old Kyrie and six-year-old Klay. The paper argues for educators to carefully craft pedagogies to make known the complexity of what it means for learners in the early years to produce text and, ontologically speaking, to [re]position learners as active contributors to, and creators of, their text production experience.