ABSTRACT
Bernstein has said that the recontextualization of segments of horizontal discourse in the content of school subjects does not necessarily lead to more effective acquisition and is usually confined to ‘less able’ students, reducing vertical discourses to ‘a set of strategies’ to improve functioning in the everyday world of work and home (1999: 169). His own writings contain relatively few ‘examples’ and are often seen by students as abstract, theoretical and ‘difficult’ to read. In his terms this could be regarded as a mark of respect for the reader, since Bernstein has also argued that the ‘pedagogical frame is relaxed to include everyday realities . . . usually with the “less able children” whom we have given up educating’ (Bernstein 1971: 215). Others who have worked within or around the Bernsteinian tradition have argued that the everyday can have an important role to play in formal schooling if it is used to provide an entrée into the formal, rather than as a means to limit certain students to the intellectual culs-de-sac of manual work and domestic life (Dowling 1993, 1998; Ensor 1999; Muller and Taylor 1995; Taylor 1999).
