‘We are Textbook Badnekais!’: A Bernsteinian Analysis of Textbook Culture in Science Classrooms

Abstract

This article is an empirical study of science teaching practices using a Bernsteinian framework. It provides a comparative analysis through ethnographic examination of pedagogic recontextualisation in different school types—government, private unaided and international. Bernstein drew attention to the process of pedagogic recontextualisation and pointed out two interacting fields within it—the official recontextualisation field (ORF) and the pedagogic recontextualisation field (PRF). This article examines the textbook culture that is found in most of the schools and argues that it arises from the PRF. The differences in the pedagogic discourse within science classrooms are shown to arise from the interactions between the ORF, the PRF and the school context. The relative strengths of classification and framing within the pedagogic discourse is one of the key variants across the different types of schools. Control over students was highest in government schools, present to a lesser extent in the private school and least visible in the international school, indicating that poor children were perceived as requiring more disciplining. Poor children were also constructed as passive and probably unwilling/undeserving recipients of worthwhile knowledge, whereas affluent children were seen as capable of discursively constructing this knowledge. The knowledge to be transmitted within the government schools was kept distinct from everyday knowledge, thus indicating strong classification between knowledge to be learnt within the school and knowledge outside school. The pedagogic discourse experienced by students from government schools in conjunction with systemic problems results in creating an educational disadvantage for these students.