ABSTRACT
Bernstein’s (2000) notion of the pedagogic device provides an alternative to the ‘academic tribes and territories’ thesis (Becher 1989; Becher and Trowler 2001) for conceptualising the relations between disciplinary knowledge practices and teaching–learning processes in higher education (Ashwin 2009). Whereas the academic tribes and territories thesis emphasises the centrality of disciplinary knowledge practices in producing curricula and shaping the kinds of work that students produce for assessment, the pedagogic device suggests that these are just one set of the many factors that shape the students’ experiences of studying at university. In this chapter, we use material from our ESRC-funded Pedagogic Quality and Inequality in University First Degrees Project 1 to present a case study of how disciplinary knowledge practices are turned into curricula, and how these curricula relate to the sociological knowledge that first year undergraduate students develop in four departments teaching sociology and related disciplines in UK universities.
