ABSTRACT
For more than 40 years, the work of Basil Bernstein has provided vital insight into the relationship between schooling and social inequality. With the emergence of new theoretical developments that draw a close connection between language (in all the complexity of its uses in school) and recent shifts in prevailing educational objectives, values and practices,1 the relevance of Bernstein’s work has increased. Bernstein’s dual (cognitive and sociological) perspective on language fosters an understanding of how schools often confront pupils from working-class backgrounds with situations that prove difficult and may even discourage them from learning and, particularly, from developing and using forms of language which can activate and enable access to new forms of (previously “unthinkable”) knowledge and cognitive aptitudes. In retrospect, it is surprising that the debates generated by Bernstein’s work (particularly his work in the sociology of education and the sociology of language) have tended to focus so little on his conception of language (which was particularly innovative at the time). They have focused rather on issues that are chiefly ideological or, indeed, on the relatively secondary (though often pertinent) critique of the relations drawn between certain linguistic elements and thought operations in Bernstein’s description of sociolinguistic codes. In the context of education, language cannot be reduced to its value as an instrument of social domination and marking or to its function as a symbolic and cognitive “tool” that cannot be mobilized equally by pupils in so far as it is largely connected with their primary socialization in the home and community. Nor can language be reduced merely to its pragmatic functions, which may be studied through the analysis of conversational exchanges – even if, in view of current pedagogical practices, the construction of knowledge in schools and classrooms depends on these exchanges. Yet it is precisely by considering together the various and constantly interacting dimensions of language that we can gain an understanding of the processes through which language can undertake one of the most important roles in the construction of educational difficulties for some pupils and, hence, in the construction of educational inequalities. This is particularly the case if it is
assumed that the enunciative possibilities encountered by pupils play an integral role in their construction as individual and distinct subjects, i.e. as social subjects and subjects of educational and non-educational learning. The democratic challenge (i.e. the democratization of education and access to knowledge) is at the heart of the issue addressed in this chapter. In short, I aim to explore the extent to which the evolution of educational practices examined in their social context and within the context of the effective practice of teaching tends to favour the individuation and school acculturation of a socially situated subject. A greater understanding of these issues may be gained from considering the theoretical similarities between Vygotsky’s psychological conceptualizations of the relations between language and thought and Bernstein’s sociological theories of language and language use in the context of socialization. The connection between Vygotsky and Bernstein is useful for theorizing and analysing teaching practices and pedagogic discourse as well as the resources that are thus constructed and that are (or are not) made accessible to students. More specifically, it makes possible an understanding of how intersubjective productions (i.e. the discourse generated between different actors within the classroom) are liable to become intrasubjective resources fostering new linguistic (and, consequently, cognitive) possibilities for pupils. These resources and possibilities are required by pupils in order to learn, to conceive of knowledge and learning, and to produce reflexive discourses or texts that demonstrate this knowledge. For some pupils, these resources and possibilities do not reflect the language they already know and use in the ordinary everyday context of non-educational life. Therefore it is the proximity between psychological and sociological conceptualizations, and what this proximity offers to an analysis of the language and linguistic conditions of class work, which help to make clear why certain class practices may be inadequate for the purpose of developing new linguistic and cognitive aptitudes. Bernstein’s analyses and concepts are useful for examining jointly issues surrounding the practical use of knowledge, forms of control and, therefore, pedagogy, as well as the role of language and its connection to the two former domains. Bernstein’s latest book (2000) focuses more specifically on the inherent connections between the cognitive and social significance of issues – such as educational forms, the conception of knowledge (and, in particular, the transition from “knowledge” to “competence”), and the nature of the “pedagogic” discourse and types of interaction generated in the classroom – that are usually approached by each of these perspectives separately and without recognition of the inherent connections between them. The connection Bernstein draws here, then, is both innovative and heuristic. In making this connection, he provides crucial insight for understanding not merely the heterogeneity of the factors contributing to inequality but also, and perhaps above all, for understanding the significant cohesion of the forms and components of the pedagogic situation in terms of their effects of cognitive and cultural domination, particularly when these forms and
components are implemented by and on pupils from working-class backgrounds. The different elements constituted by forms of discourse, classification and framing (in other words, the formal articulation of knowledge and the objects of knowledge, the mechanisms by which they are there to be seen and worked upon, the language exchanges that “carry” them, etc.), as they relate (or not) to the ordinary and “everyday” practices of some pupils can serve to distance them from the targeted knowledge. The opacity of the resulting situations (i.e. the classroom learning situations thus constructed) takes no account of the linguistic and cognitive skills, habits and attitudes of these pupils that may hinder learning and access to discourses of knowledge as sites of the “unthinkable” (i.e. knowledge of what is not “already there”) and to new cognitive possibilities and the elaborations and re-elaborations of knowledge necessary for realizing them. Based on my research findings, I hypothesize in this chapter that the cohesion outlined above plays a determining role in the construction of inequalities. In short, by highlighting the interactions between cognitive, sociological and pedagogic perspectives, Bernstein’s theoretical framework provides the basis for a close analysis of linguistic issues in (and of ) the school and, therefore, of the issue of the democratization of education and access to knowledge. The different models developed by Bernstein are particularly helpful in illuminating the role of schooling in constructing social inequalities, where education is effectively carried out in alignment with certain class practices on a daily basis and where the school is conceived as an institution responsible for shaping and diffusing values and conceptions of social subjects, knowledge and learning. The heuristic value of Bernstein’s work is clearly all the greater in light of his conception of “enhancement”. He states: “Enhancement is not simply the right to be more personally, more intellectually, more socially, more materially, it is the right to the means of critical understanding and to new possibilities” (Bernstein 2000, p. xx). This conception confers significance to school learning and to the acquisition of new linguistic and cognitive aptitudes, and it is precisely from the perspective of the supposed functions of school outlined here that the following analyses need to be understood. In continuing these introductory remarks, I would like to emphasize another (and not the least) of Bernstein’s contributions: the possibility his theoretical framework provides for giving a general and generic value to descriptions of data drawn from particular situations. This dimension is rare in current research in the human and social sciences. Bernstein inscribes micro-level (situational) data within a macro-sociological framework and his analyses thus acquire the substance which the significant contextualization of current qualitative research tends to remove. Because of a constant oscillation between empiricism and theory, his work stands as an example of what research in the social and human sciences needs to amount to in order to construct and incrementally develop knowledge pertaining in particular to the social and educational world.
