ABSTRACT
Basil Bernstein was and remains a controversial figure in the sociology of education. For many scholars who have immersed themselves in his work, Bernstein was the most interesting and important British sociologist of the late twentieth century (Davies 2001), and his legacy has inspired a thriving tradition of research. To his detractors, however, Bernstein was variously an obscure and unnecessarily difficult writer, a romanticizer of the working class and a theorist of their cultural deprivation. Bernstein himself devoted considerable energy to refuting such criticisms, particularly those which he saw as misunderstanding or misrepresenting his work. He believed that theorization should be led by research, and whether his concepts were difficult or discomforting was secondary to their effectiveness. Rather than simply asserting that education is fundamental to social reproduction, Bernstein aimed to provide an account of precisely how pedagogic communication contributes to the maintenance of class relations. This chapter considers some of the main features of Bernstein’s approach, beginning with the concept of code and its expression in terms of classification and framing. Its later reformulation in terms of discourse is briefly discussed, as marking a shift from the structure of pedagogy to the structure of knowledge. The focus then falls on Bernstein’s understanding of class, including his account of visible and invisible pedagogies as an expression of ideological struggles within the middle class. The chapter concludes with a discussion of recent research which explores radical alternatives to traditional pedagogies.
