Code Theory in Sociology of Education
Bernstein's 'code theory' in the sociology of education has undergone considerable development since the early 1970s and now enjoys a growing influence in both education and linguistics, especially among systemic functional linguistics. Maton & Muller (2007) describe how Bernstein argued that different positions within society, understood in terms of their degree of specialization, have different language use patterns that influence the ability of these groups to succeed in schools. These social positions create, as he later put it, ‘different modalities of communication differentially valued by the school, and differentially effective in it, because of the school’s values, modes of practice and relations with its different communities’ (1996: 91). The notion was codified first in terms of "classification" and "framing", where classification conceptualises relations of power that regulate relations between contexts or categories, and framing conceptualises relations of control within these contexts or categories (1975). These concepts have been widely used to analyze educational contexts and practices and their relations to the dispositions (or coding orientation) brought to education by different social groups.
These concepts raised the question of how different forms of educational knowledge are constructed. Bernstein pointed to the pedagogic device as the cause (see Maton & Muller 2007). This forms the basis of his account of:
- the ordered regulation and distribution of a society’s worthwhile knowledge store (ordered by a set of distributive rules);
- its transformation into a pedagogic discourse, a form amenable to pedagogic transmission (ordered by a specifiable set of recontextualising rules); and
- the further transformation of this pedagogic discourse into a set of criterial standards to be attained (ordered by a specifiable set of evaluative rules).
In Bernstein’s conceptualisation each of these rules is associated with a specific field of activity:
- a field of production where ‘new’ knowledge is constructed and positioned;
- a field of recontextualisation where discourses from the field of production are selected, appropriated and repositioned to become ‘educational’ knowledge; and
- a field of reproduction where pedagogic practice takes place.
Together these three rules and their associated fields constitute an ‘arena’ of conflict and struggle created by the pedagogic device in which social groups attempt to dominate how educational knowledge is constructed:
Groups attempt to appropriate the device to impose their rule by the construction of particular code modalities. Thus the device or apparatus becomes the focus of challenge, resistance and conflict (Bernstein 1996: 193).
As Moore & Maton (2001) describe, having analysed the nature of educational knowledge, and then how knowledge is selected from fields of knowledge production and then rearranged and recontextualised to become educational knowledge, the next question is: what characterises the nature of these fields of knowledge production? Bernstein conceptualises these in terms of 'knowledge structures'. Bernstein defines a "hierarchical knowledge structure" as ‘a coherent, explicit and systematically principled structure, hierarchically organised’ which ‘attempts to create very general propositions and theories, which integrate knowledge at lower levels, and in this way shows underlying uniformities across an expanding range of apparently different phenomena’ (1999: 161, 162), such as physics. A "horizontal knowledge structure" is defined as ‘a series of specialised languages with specialised modes of interrogation and criteria for the construction and circulation of texts’ (1999: 162), such as each of the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences.
Bernstein's code theory has formed the basis for a growing range of studies into knowledge in multiple fields, both inside and outside education and across knowledge production, teaching, and learning (see, for example, Christie & Martin eds 2007; Maton 2000). Work building on his ideas has come to be known as 'social realism' (see Maton & Moore eds 2011) in contrast to 'social constructivism'. A central framework in social realism is Legitimation Code Theory, which draws on the key concepts of Bernstein's code theory.
Read more about this topic: Basil Bernstein, Theory of Language Code
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