Abstract:
This paper examines issues of pedagogical power through recourse to both Basil Bernstein’s (2001) theory of the totally pedagogised society (TPS) and data collected in two school – university partnership projects. The first of these projects involved a partnership with 12 schools, all situated in low socio-economic contexts in an urban region in Queensland, Australia. The second project involved a partnership with an elite, independent school in a regional Queensland city. This paper explores the problematic of new assemblages of pedagogic governance around knowledge innovation, high stakes testing, and professional identities in these different contexts. Bernstein’s concept of the TPS has been used extensively in the sociology of policy studies to examine neo-liberal educational discourses specifically around (1) teacher professionalism, (2) health and physical education, and citizenship education curriculum, (3) learning society, knowledge society, and lifelong learning, and (4) supranational testing regimes. Much of this literature has a critical focus, raising concerns about: (1) concepts of trainability and life-long and life-wide learning; and (2) new instruments of governance designed and administered by supranational organisations (OECD, World Bank) such as international tests (PISA, TIMSS) and teacher surveys (SABER, TALIS). Moreover, this research has pointed to the ways in which new modes of pedagogic governance are generating an anxiety driven teaching profession driven to continuously retrain, renew for life; with teaching performance measured against high stakes international testing regimes. This paper takes a different theoretical – empirical take on pedagogical power. It argues that Basil Bernstein never suggested that there was a totally pedagogised society. Rather, he hypothesised that ‘the more abstract the principles of the forces of production the simpler its social division of labour but the more complex the social division of symbolic control’ (Bernstein, 1990: 133). Bernstein’s work did not suggest a reductionist, closed position heralding a dystopian vision of pedagogic governance. Rather, his theory of the TPS was centred on a problematic – how outer symbolic formations become part of the inner self/habitus through the mediational agency of pedagogy. He hypothesised that the growth of agencies and agents in the field of symbolic control would generate a diversity of discursive codes, as well as systems for relaying these codes. He predicted that pedagogical devices would play an increasingly important role not only in social cohesion, but also the formation of individuality, diversity and difference.