This text continues the previous blog post: The scene of teaching. A work in progress, a reading of Basil Bernstein’s “Social class and pedagogic practice”
Visible pedagogies, sequencing rules
Visible pedagogies, sequencing rules
22. In a visible pedagogy, it is crucial that a child reads early. Once a child can read, the book is there. The book, in this instance, is the textbook, or its equivalent, some form of set text.
Once a child can read, independent solitary work is possible. The child is introduced into a non-oral form of discourse, the rules of which are at variance with oral forms of discourse. That difference concerns both the symbolic relay (written characters and the verbal structures of the written sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, and so on, and their relation to the graphically encoded utterances and acts being performed) and the content of what is relayed.
In an important sense, Bernstein states, reading makes the child eventually less dependent on the teacher and gives the acquirer access to alternative perspectives.
[23. The centrality of reading and of ‘the written’, prior to the acquisition of writing as a distinct skill, is significant for several reasons.
First, it opens up the path to ‘literacy’. This ‘literacy' is a set of interlinked skills and a form of behaviour. Although instruction, the performative dimension of the transmitter’s role, if we continue with this language of transmission and acquisition-through-reception, is oral, even if this is not the transparent speech of the Rousseauan pastiche constructed by Trifonas from Derrida’s text, the content of the instruction concerns the acquisition of written symbolic forms. ‘Literacy’ requires a grasping of this orality-as-instruction, reading-as-acquisition, the articulation of this orality and reading as a form of learning and the ability to write, as a response to this overall scene of teaching, to demonstrate that one has acquired and internalised the written content, following the oral instruction.
Acquiring that content requires an engagement with the materiality of the relay, the written language, the grammatical structures by means of which it is articulated, the semantic rules by means of which its structures are given value, the performative moves by means of which those values act to position a reader (the reader in the inscription, we might add), and the referential dimension of the text, the worlds, both real (world narratives) and imaginary (narrative worlds), to which the text refers and discursively constructs, and which 'exist' for the reader-in-the-inscription - articulated and interpreted by the reader-of-the-inscription.
The ‘scene of teaching’ imbricates both speech and writing in their conventional senses to form a discursive, multimedia textuality, Derridean ‘writing’ or ‘trace’, the supplement at the core which substitutes as it adds and which requires a grammatography (not a grammato-logy), rather than a structural linguistics or a logical semiotics, to decipher its formal dimensions, and a field of interactivity, a Bourdieuan ‘field’ and ‘habitus’, which arrests that paradoxical, supplementary drifting and forms it into different kinds of material practice.
24. Second, it opens up the path to individuation, or simply to division. Individuation, if it is not simply to operate as an ideological cipher, is a double process: through the process of reading and relating to different perspectives, a distinct position on those perspectives is formed that did not precede the engagement with those different perspectives. One becomes formed as ‘individual’ through ‘inhabiting' a distinctive relationship to a field of others, others for whom one, the putative individual, provides an alternative perspective; and that individuation, as negotiation of a field of inter-relationships, is an going process, with different levels of distinctiveness. Individuation, in other words, is socialised throughout.
Third, it opens the path to a re-thinking and a re-imagining of the ‘scene of teaching’, one which accepts that from the beginning, and in its non-original origin, it has always been a complex oral-written, i.e. mediated, field of interaction, using a mixture of discursive forms, notably the performative (in the form of the jussive enacted through the body of the teacher) and the constative (in the form of the statements held together in the text-book, with the book as a symbolic, cultural form, closing down an otherwise endless drift of paralysing paradoxical injunctions).
In other words, on the one hand, it opens up the ‘body’ of the teacher (the 'transmitter’), as the site of authority, to other forms of materialisation of utterance and authority; and, on the other hand, it opens up the medium of transmission to other media technologies. In so doing, it opens itself differently to the ‘student body’, who no longer simply acquire the transmission in a scene of teaching as shared immediacy, and re-transmit. Hence, the apparent indirection in this text, its dissensual assent, not omitting the sensualism inherent in such bodily practices, although not submitting to the visual commercialisation to which the senses, sensualism and sensuality are currently subjected.
25. Fourth, it opens up a rethinking of ‘the book’ as institutional form and as symbolic form, enabling a re-thinking of the elements that this form holds together in both its institutional dimension and its symbolic dimension.
Symbolically, in Derridean terms, it opens up the book to the field of 'writing'. However, it opens this Derridean sense to a further understanding of the field of writing as a field of performative social engagement, in which individuation takes place as a relational act, from which re-articulated collectivities can be assembled, not on the basis of 'natural' instinct or or 'natural' characteristics but on the basis of iterated engagements with social personas. Equally, though, this field of 'writing' practice does not take place within a restricted sense of the linguistic. If it is language, it is a complex form embodied and mediated materialisation.
Institutionally, it opens the book to the institutions of publishing, or making public or sharing, and to the institutions of archiving, or collecting and curating, and the changes that each of these domains are undergoing, affecting awareness, recall or remembering and the practices of historiography.
26. Finally, it opens up a re-thinking of the ‘digital’ as a process of re-embodiment, not as a process of dis-embodiment. The body never has been simply corporeal, or rather inter-corporeal, to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, but also inter-subjective, i.e. a network of complex social positions, statuses, qualities and significations, the inter-subjective itself articulating various forms of imaginary, virtual identities (ego cogitos, rational selves, imaginary selves).
Reading, in other words, may introduce a multitude of dilemmas for the capable reader, the ‘acquirer’ and the acquisition process - what can be taken upon the self and into the self and what can be reproduced by the self authentically. This is not limited to extending reading to other texts, outside the text-book, and to accepting other perspectives. In short, their reading may take 'acquirers' beyond the scene of teaching as shared immediacy (non-shared, not-immediate, not present) and, while still learning, their learning may be incapable of return to or validation within that scene.
For the scene of teaching, in the form of an imaginary shared immediacy, can there be an outside of the text-book? For learning, there certainly is.]
27. To return to Bernstein, he asserts that those children who are unable to meet the sequencing rules as they apply to reading become more dependent on the teacher and upon oral forms of discourse.
Bernstein here introduces a further aspect of sequencing rules: the relationship between local meanings, defined as the here-and-now and the context-dependent, or rather immediate-context-tied, for all meanings are context-dependent, and the less local or more distant, the there-and-then, less immediate-context-tied. Bernstein uses the phrase ‘context-independent’, but it is rather a case of more or less immediate or more or less mediated because, as noted, all meanings are context-dependent.
28. Bernstein explains that, in pedagogic terms, this distinction refers to the acquisition of context-tied operations, on the one hand, and to the operation and understanding of principles and their application to other situations already experienced and to new situations that have note previously been experienced.
In visible pedagogies, the local, immediate-context-tied operations come early in the sequence, while understanding and application of more abstract, less-context-tied, but still context-dependent, principles comes later in the sequence; and fully grasping the principles, qua abstracted principles applicable in several or many situations, comes even later in the sequence.
29. It is here that Bernstein’s axiomatic, taxonomic discourse turns to social class. Thus, he reasons syllogistically that if children cannot meet the requirements of the sequencing rules, and get caught up in the repair system, then these children are constrained by the local, immediate-context-tied skills, a world of facticity, as Bernstein calls it.
He inserts in the middle of this syllogism, although it is not a necessary part of its logic but a matter of empirical concern, these children are often children of the lower working class, including other disadvantaged groups.
30. Contrariwise, children who can meet the requirements of the sequencing rules will eventually have access to the principles of their own discourse. Crucially, although Bernstein does not say so explicitly, they will understand the principles whereby they will be able to generate contexts which determine the meanings of utterances and actions that occur within that frame.
These more capable children are more likely, Bernstein states, to be middle class and are more likely to come to understand that the heart of discourse is not order but disorder (or, rather, the maintenance of order in the midst of disorder or the overturning of one order for another), not coherence but incoherence (or, rather, that it is a struggle to be or become coherent, and that this struggle is continual), not clarity but ambiguity (not single, simple meanings but multiple meanings intricately reticulated with one another, adding to and displacing one another) and that the heart of discourse is the possibility of new realities (rather, the generation of new contexts determinate not just of the meanings enacted within them but of the possibilities for legitimate meaning-production).
31. Bernstein is left with a problem. If the middle class have grasped this potential at the heart of discourse, the possibility, as he puts it, of creating new realities, why are they not demonstrating in practice those capabilities, bringing into being new realities.
The answer, Bernstein argues, “must be” that socialisation into a visible pedagogy tries to ensure that its discourse is safe rather than dangerous, that it does not stray, we might say, into “that dangerous supplement”, the marginal addition, that substitutes.
Thus, for Bernstein, a visible pedagogy deforms the children, as students, of both the dominant and the dominated social classes. A visible pedagogy distributes different forms of consciousness according to the social class origin of acquirers, forms of consciousness that evolve from the sequencing rules.