ABSTRACT

Our analytic purpose is to illuminate the dynamics of a process of collaborative curriculum development in a Department of Journalism and Media Studies (JMS) officially opened in 1970 at a ‘research intensive’ (Boughey, 2009) university in South Africa. Bernstein (1996, 2000) argues that recontextualisation processes, whether within official (ORF ) or pedagogic recontextualising fields (PRF ) create discursive gaps that constitute spaces for the play of ideologies. In a field such as JMS, as elsewhere, university lecturers operate within fields of knowledge production as: researchers and producers of media; pedagogic recontextualisers in their curriculum developer roles; and as reproducers as they teach. This creates complex dynamics, especially when they endeavour to collaborate as recontextualisers. The university was committed to the promotion of democracy foregrounded in the South African context through provision of:

Higher education that serves the purposes of democracy [and] helps to lay the basis for greater participation in economic and social life more generally . . . By creating opportunities for social advancement on the basis of acquired knowledge, skills and competencies, higher education also enhances equity and social justice.