Recontextualisation Of Knowledge Research Articles

Basil Bernstein's Theory of the Pedagogic Device and Formal Music Schooling: Putting the Theory Into Practice

This article describes Basil Bernstein's theory of the pedagogic device as applied to school music instruction. Showing that educational practices are not personal choices alone, but the result of socio-political mandates, the article traces how education functions as a vehicle for social reproduction. Bernstein called this process the recontextualization of knowledge: From its point of inception, originally conceived knowledge undergoes changes through selection and filtration processes, eventually becoming curriculum—a relay for certain social and cultural values. Gaps in the recontextualization process allow teachers to place their own individual stamp upon the learning and teaching that occur in their classroom. Teacher–pupil interactions, guided by school-internal processes, lead to school knowledge that is further reproduced by the pupils in particular ways. A teacher's awareness of socially conditioned and habitual patterns of preference and behavior (habitus) may be key to making socially inclusive and emancipatory instructional choices.

Scientific Cultures of Non-Knowledge in the Controversy over Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO): The Cases of Molecular Biology and Ecology

The limits of scientific knowledge are an emerging problem in the debates about technological risk. In an exemplary analysis of the controversy surrounding genetically modified organisms (GMO), we show that the epistemic settings of two involved scientific disciplines – molecular biology and ecology – entail different types of non-knowledge and deal with non-knowledge differently. Both of these "scientific cultures of non-knowledge" are analysed along five criteria: the way of dealing with unforeseen events, the way of dealing with complexity and uncertainty, the temporal and spatial scales of knowledge, the de-and re-contextualisation of knowledge, and the epistemic (self-)reflexivity. The scientific culture of non-knowledge in molecular biology can be described as control-oriented, while that of ecology can be described as uncertainty-oriented. This difference is mirrored in the societal discourses and regulations concerning GMO. A greater variety of cultures of non-knowledge seems likely, which calls for further analysis.