Pedagogy, discourse and identity

1. Pedagogy, discourse and identity Steve Lerman

2. Structure • The linguistic turn from mid-20th century • Power, control • Identity

3. Wittgenstein: • Use gives life to signs • Do I understand the word ‘perhaps’? • Rule following and going beyond • Isn’t understanding deeper? • Understanding is not a mental process

4. The problem of power and control • Boundaries • Recognition • Permeability • Traversibility • Effects on students from different social groups

5. Power Classification (boundaries) Collection/integrated Control Framing (boundaries) Localised/specialised Power and control

6. Dear Design Team,We are about to launch a new product onto the market. The product is a new breakfast cereal and we are looking for a design for the box which will contain the cereal. There are several important criteria for the box:it must have a volume of 120cm3 to contain the amount of cereal we want to include in one unitit must be easy to stack on shelves in a supermarket and easy for customers to handle.We would like the design of the box to be an appealing shape and one that prospective customers will find attractive

7. We would like the box to be as cheap to produce as possible, so we are looking for a design which does not use too much card.If you would like to win the contract for this work please supply us with a brief report which should include your design for the box (including a scale drawing of the net of the box) and the reasons for the choices your team has made. We are looking forward to receiving your report and hope that we can work with you in the future.

8. Theory of production and reproduction • Forms of control (invisible/visible pedagogy) • Separating the localised from the specialised (Cooper & Dunne) • Recognition and realisation rules • Schools are middle class by definition: disadvantage reproduced • Principle of recontextualisation – play of ideology (making choices) • Language: elaborated and restricted codes

11. From Vygotsky and Luria I absorbed the notion of speech as an orienting and regulative system (Bernstein, 1971, 122-3)I came to the study of language by a diverse set of routes driven by the inadequacy of sociology to provide an orientation. I drew on the work in U.S. cultural anthropology, Russian work on speech as an orienting and regulative system (Vygotsky and Luria)…(Bernstein, 2000, p. 145)

12. It is not the consciousness of men (sic) that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness (Marx, 1859, 328/9)

13. Culture, language and meaning precede us. We are born into a world already formed discursively. The reality or otherwise of the world or the certainty of our knowledge of it are not the issue: the issue is that we receive all knowledge of the world through language and other forms of communication. What things signify is learned by us as we grow into our cultures, the plurality arising from the multiple situations that constitute us: gender; class; ethnicity; colour; religion, and so on. (Lerman, 2001, p. 91)

14. Plurality of identities • Local identities • The project of the self (Giddens, Beck, Bauman..) • Ethnographies (e.g. Boaler, Bibby, Bartholomew etc.) • What function pedagogy?

15. Never-ending fragmentation of voice studies. The task is to give an account of their production in discursive practices.In particular the encouragement of an appropriate school-mathematical identity