So what’s this all about again? Access what?...

For the better part of the last two months I have been wrestling with a conceptual problem. Whether to use, and how to use the theoretical work of Basil Bernstein, to inform my research agenda. I've been struggling not only to understand this theories and concepts, but also how I might want to use it in my own work. On Friday I sent my supervisors a draft document that outlined three possible options on how I might use these conceptual frameworks and how it might impact on my original research agenda and my data collection. Then two things happened – I read some academic literacies work, by UCT academics, Rochelle Kapp and Bongi Bangeni (2009) and critical literacy researchers, Allan Luke and Elizabeth Moje (2009), and I had a conversation with some non-academic people where I tried (miserably) to explain my research agenda. Reflecting on both these events while sitting on a London tube to an inter-university academic literacies forum at the Institute of Education at the University of London on Saturday - it all came together. I had forgotten why I started working in this field in the first place. I was interested in student access to their disciplinary environments – not just surface level access – like getting into the course and then getting mediocre results – but in depth epistemological access – access to the knowledge structures of the discipline, understanding how things work in the discipline and field of practice so that they could challenge, transform and change it – put their own stamp on it, not simply technicians operating one process in a machine that is their professional field, but actors with insight and eventually power to change how things actually work.


I forgot all of this and became bogged down by the specifics of Bernstein, important as his work is to my research; it is only a means to an end. Access and identity needs to be foregrounded in my work. My research needs to answer questions about the implications for access to disciplinary knowledge and how students' literacy practices reflect professional or academic identities, which in turn have particular implications for access to the field of academia or practice. This is a significant realisation and I feel I can move forward with some clear direction. Yay…finally!