ABSTRACT
This chapter derives its impetus from the interface between two research traditions within the sociology of education. Since the 1960s school effectiveness studies have shown social-class background constraints on educational achievement (e.g. Coleman et al., 1966; Rothstein, 2004). However, classroom studies conducted within a Bernsteinian frame are starting to demonstrate how schools can make a difference through modes of pedagogic practice that interrupt the reproduction of educational inequality and lead to the success of all students (e.g. Morais, 2002; Rose, 2004). Muller and Gamble (in press) summarise such pedagogies as mostly characterised by strong framing over external selection and evaluation criteria and weak framing over pacing and teacher-pupil relations. Our own data (Gamble, 2004; Hoadley, 2005) supports these findings, especially strong framing over evaluative criteria, but does not allow unequivocal endorsement of claims that only weak framing over teacher-pupil relations facilitates entry of working-class students into the verticality1 of school knowledge. Here, predominantly theoretically, we interrogate the potential, inductive capacity of positional modes of control, acknowledging shifts in the way Bernstein conceptualised regulative order (Singh, 2002; Davis, 2005a, b; Muller, 2006) and a reading of some of his earlier work which connects these shifts to corresponding changes in homes, schools, curricula and classrooms. This has led us to understand why it is that personal and positional control relations that emanate from his early sociolinguistic thesis have become the standard interpretation of hierarchy in the classroom, even though there are other versions of regulative order at the level of school and curriculum, as delineated in the pedagogic device. What we are suggesting here is consideration of the potential of positional modalities in the induction of working-class learners into the verticality of school knowledge. It is particularly the Durkheimian foundations of the expressive order of schools, linked to Mary Douglas’s (1970) interpretation of personal and positional modes of control, that lead us to view positional modes of control (i.e. strong framing over teacher-pupil relations),
recognised by working-class students from their home backgrounds, as a necessary condition for initial induction into verticality. We start this interpretation with a discussion of different conceptions of the regulative order in Bernstein’s work from the 1960s to 2000.
