ABSTRACT
The author outlines the field of critical curriculum studies and making a number of points about how Bernstein both drew from their insights as well as interrogated their key assumptions. Bernstein was developing his theoretical apparatus at a time of significant paradigm shifts in the ways in which educational and social issues were approached. Bernstein's notion of the pedagogic device foregrounds the social relations that work at sustaining education systems and their curricula. For Bernstein the pedagogic device constitutes the relay or ensemble of rules and procedures through which knowledge is converted into pedagogic communication and instantiated in the privileging text or official knowledge of the school curriculum. Because the process of recontextualization impinges potential of all pedagogic communication, that is the potential knowledge available to be transmitted and acquired, the device functions as a symbolic regulator of political consciousness. The pedagogic recontextualization at both schools proceeds in very different ways and take aim at producing distinct competencies and consciousnesses.
