Yes, I can hardly believe it but the man is back...Basil Bernstein "jou lekker ding" - not sure how appropriate such a phrase might be on a 'serious' academic blog like this.
But I've come around, decided I need to do the hard intellectual work and deal with a Bernsteinian analysis of students' assessment texts in the academic sites of my research. I know why I shied away from him before - a combination of not having the right support to guide me through the plethora of different ways to understand and use his theories, and not wanting to do the hard intellectual work it takes to see the world through Bernstein's eyes. Strangely, now that I have embraced him again things make sense - I needed an overarching organisational frame to pull together ways of describing the academic context of the research and the pedagogic device offers it to me, along with analytical tools that show potential synergy with academic literacies. In all fairness I have to give a lot of the credit for this cathartic moment to Paul Ashwin and his new book on Analysis Teaching-Learning interactions in Higher Education and MRL for suggesting I read it. He does this brilliant chapter on using Bernstein theories to explain structure and agency in the teaching-learning interaction and I just saw so much connection with my own work. Well its a start anyway and will go a long way to relieve the conceptual framework vacuum headache I've been having since it all went poof!
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