Browsing by Subject "sociology of education"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Open Access
    Curriculum formation: a case study from History
    (Taylor & Francis, 2011) Shay, Suellen
    Drawing on the work of Bernstein and Maton and using a case-study approach, this study explores the formation of an undergraduate history curriculum at the University of Cape Town. This article focuses on two periods of curriculum formation referred to as history as canon and history as social science. With respect to these two curriculum periods the findings reveal the privileging of different kinds of historical educational knowledge, as well as the promotion of different student identities. The article also argues for the need for a more fine-grained conceptual framework for the study of knowledge and curriculum in higher education. The article concludes by highlighting the importance of this kind of research as pressure for curriculum reform intensifies in South Africa.
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    Disciplinarity in question: comparing knowledge and knower codes in sociology
    (Taylor & Francis, 2012) Luckett, Kathy
    This paper contributes to understanding why curriculum design in a discipline with a horizontal knowledge structure is difficult, time-consuming and contested. A previous paper on the same case study in one sociology department reported that students who had completed the general sociology major found it lacking in coherence. To illustrate the problem, I selected two third-year sociology courses, Urban Studies and Diversity Studies, and set out to compare and contrast how knowledge claims are made and legitimated in these two discourses. The paper also has a methodological focus – to demonstrate the potential of systemic functional linguistics as a method of discourse analysis that can complement and deepen a sociological analysis – Bernstein's sociology of education and in particular his concept of 'grammaticality'. I seek to make explicit the basis for knowledge claims in these two sub-disciplines and then to investigate how this 'grammar' is built into criteria for assessing students. The long-term goal of this project is pedagogic – to understand how academic discourses work, in order to contribute to the development of more coherent curricula and visible pedagogies with explicit assessment criteria, for the enhancement of teaching and learning. The analysis shows that the 'grammars' of these two academic discourses (in the same discipline, sociology) are based on different ordering principles: they are based on different ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions. The analysis also shows that the respective 'grammars' do 'get into' the assessment criteria, although in a contextually contingent manner. The paper concludes by suggesting that the use of SFL as a method of discourse analysis within a social realist sociology of education framework proved to be fruitful and worthy of further development, particularly for education development work where the quest to make explicit the criteria for producing a 'legitimate text' is critical.
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    Making gazes explicit: facilitating epistemic access in the humanities
    (Springer, 2014) Luckett, Kathy; Hunma, Aditi
    This paper addresses the problem of curriculum design in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and more specifically the challenge of designing foundation courses for first-generation or 'disadvantaged' learners. Located in the social realist school of the sociology of education studies that builds on the legacy of Basil Bernstein, we emphasise the importance of knowledge and understanding the principles that generate 'what counts' in particular courses and disciplines. In order to operationalise this, we used Maton's Legitimation Code Theory to uncover the knowledge/knower structures in eight first year courses in four of the most popular majors in a Faculty of Humanities. Our data sources were curriculum documents and exam papers in particular. The findings are presented and the 'codes', 'gazes, and 'lenses' for each set of courses delineated. The findings are being used to inform the design of a set of curriculum and pedagogic interventions that aim to offer powerful ways of knowing to novices in the Humanities and Social Sciences.