This chapter aims to contribute to research on standards and regulation in education, taking as a... more This chapter aims to contribute to research on standards and regulation in education, taking as a point of departure three sets of interrelated policies, core to the globalised educational agenda: policies on competencies and skills, school autonomy and performance-based accountability, representing a new governmental logic founded on the values of efficiency, quality, competitiveness and outcomes. The chapter has a double purpose: first, to make a theoretical contribution to the literature interrogating the new modes of governing schools and curricular knowledge. It does this, by explicating the relationship between the regulative dimension of global policy discourses, embodying the principle of performativity, and the discourses regulating pedagogic practices in local sites, where policies are enacted. Second, to present aspects of a study carried out in the Greek education context, in which policies towards a post-bureaucratic administration regime (school autonomy, national testing, accountability mechanisms) have failed to be institutionalised. Focusing on the Modern Greek Language curriculum and its enactments in demanding school settings, the study illustrates how discourses on inclusion, diffused within the educational field and invading the school space, exert strong control over teachers’ instructional practices. It is argued that developments of Bernstein’s theory of knowledge pedagogisation provide a language to describe the complex ways in which regulative discourses operate in global times, affecting the recontextualisations of curricular policies. The theory thus contributes to the literature on the enactments of globalised education policies and helps explain the diversity of national and institutional responses to such policies.
The following thesis is concerned with what I have termed professional discourse. I have used the... more The following thesis is concerned with what I have termed professional discourse. I have used the term to call attention to two elements. With professional, I have indicated a recent move in educational analysis and research on teachers and other practitioners which represents a shift to a concern with practical activities, a tacit or explicit resistance to theory, and an attempt to displace the cognitive paradigm of research and theorizing. With the notion of discourse, I have indicated that, in order that the as yet limited debate on professional activity be opened up, it has to be linked with the discourse on practice. By the latter, I mean the opposition between practice and theory at the analytical level, and its most recent unfoldings and manifestations. The thesis identifies a vocabulary of practice, implicating such concepts as reflection, repetition, judgment, skill, example, exemplar, and a series of oppositional terms, such as saying/showing, competence/performance, expli...
Doctoral thesis, Institute of Education, University of London., 1991
SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DX194713 / BLDSC - British Library... more SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DX194713 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
This paper explores, from the point of view of critical sociology of education, how discourses on... more This paper explores, from the point of view of critical sociology of education, how discourses on inclusion, re-articulated in specific school settings, affect linguistic literacy curriculum enactments. The study draws on the theory of enactment of Ball and his colleagues, and on Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device. The research data has been produced by semi-structured interviews and classroom observations in six lower secondary state schools in the inner city of Athens, in Greece, with different rate of disadvantaged student population. The data indicates that discourses on inclusion, interpreted in different ways in each school context, affect teachers’ pedagogic practices in ways that tend to reproduce educational inequalities in the most disadvantaged school contexts.
This paper theorises the field of symbolic control and reflects on the critical literature of pol... more This paper theorises the field of symbolic control and reflects on the critical literature of policy studies, exploring the possibilities that the former might offer to the analysis of global policy discourses and their up-take in specific national and local contexts. Starting from the rapidly expanding literature on the ‘globalising’ and ‘globalised’ projects that ‘modern’ nation states have been implementing to ‘manage change’, the paper argues that theories on governance can be developed considerably – theoretically and in terms of their capacity to guide empirical research – through their exposure to Bernstein’s sociological theory of symbolic control and Totally Pedagogised Society. Drawing data from an empirical study carried out in Greece, it explores changes in the field of educational administration towards the systematic implementation of ideas and practices of new public management, evident in processes of the selection, training and professional practice of middle level ...
Like research assessment exercises, we see the discourse on ‘evidence’ as part of a technology (B... more Like research assessment exercises, we see the discourse on ‘evidence’ as part of a technology (Ball, 2008) through which governance agencies attempt to increase their control over the production and 'use' of knowledge. The changing nature of research, evident in the ‘squeezing out’ of ‘risky’ long term basic research (Bernstein, 2000), has been driven by policy and funding agencies' objectives. Education research, in particular, is becoming more amenable to objectives of funding agencies, especially those of the EU, to promote and monitor its policies in member states. For instance, the EU often reports on evidence-based education policy making by using ‘independent’ studies (e.g., CHEPS, undated), while the centralized coordination of the research process, the technocratic approaches to theory and methodology, the emphasis on results, raise crucial issues concerning the contribution that this kind of research can make in addressing complex educational issues. Against t...
Το αυξανόμενο ενδιαφέρον για την υγεία και την καλή φυσική κατάσταση των πληθυσμών έχει επιφέρει ... more Το αυξανόμενο ενδιαφέρον για την υγεία και την καλή φυσική κατάσταση των πληθυσμών έχει επιφέρει σημαντικές αλλαγές στην εκπαίδευση και έχει μεταβάλει τον ρόλο των εκπαιδευτικών Φυσικής Αγωγής, (Εκ.Φ.Α.). Στην παρούσα εργασία, χρησιμοποιώντας τις θεωρίες των Bernstein και Foucault, μελετάμε τα Προγράμματα Σπουδών των Τμημάτων Επιστήμης Φυσικής Αγωγής και Αθλητισμού αποσκοπώντας στην κατανόηση των επιδράσεων των κωδίκων και των μηχανισμών ρύθμισης της θεμιτής γνώσης για το σώμα στη διαμόρφωση των υποκειμενικοτήτων των Εκ.Φ.Α.
The European Education Policy Space, driven by forces of globalization and discourses on knowledg... more The European Education Policy Space, driven by forces of globalization and discourses on knowledge economy, has been shaped gradually by the involvement of a multiplicity of actors and institutions within the EU, and by using new tools of education governance, as well as utilizing the expertise of various agencies, such as UNESCO, the OECD, etc.. The Open Method of Coordination and, currently, Quality Assurance and Evaluation methods constitute the main technologies for Europeanizing Member States’ educational policies, and for transforming education institutions and systems by measuring and comparing through indicators, numbers and dissemination of information and «good practices» (Grek et al., 2009). Moreover, as research indicates, understanding the relationships between the knowledge which is produced, distributed and used within processes of change, and the actors mediating and intervening at the national/local level, requires the examination of the characteristics of the envir...
Journal of Educational Administration and History, 2015
ABSTRACT This article explores the localisation of the global and European discourse of education... more ABSTRACT This article explores the localisation of the global and European discourse of educational governance in the Greek education system through the changes that have been introduced in the field of education administration since 2009 by the then socialist government. Our research aims to contribute to the critical policy literature on the spreading marketisation and privatisation in the governing of education around the world and in Europe – through the adoption of New Public Management and Educational Leadership models. In developing our theoretical perspective, we use the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and discourse, and in order to conceptualise power and control relations in the organisation, transmission, acquisition, and evaluation of pedagogical knowledge, we draw on Bernstein's theory of symbolic control. Our study has examined how the field of education administration is governed through power and knowledge transformations. We trace these transformations by analysing systematically the pedagogic discourse through which the global governance discourse is relayed and becomes a ‘regime of truth’ within public policy and practice in Greece. We argue that such changes have significant implications for everyday educational practice and for the kinds of knowledge that are considered legitimate, and they may affect educational professionals' subjectivities in fundamental ways.
New Trends in Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries - Selected Papers Presented at the 2nd Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries - Proceedings of the International Conference on QQML2010, 2011
ABSTRACT This paper draws on a research study which explores the reasons behind young people&... more ABSTRACT This paper draws on a research study which explores the reasons behind young people' choice of Library and Information Science as a field of study, and traces their education careers within the existing higher education departments in Greece. In particular, it focuses on some data and findings in order to illustrate the thesis that subject choice is a complex social process, and to discuss theoretical and methodological implications. The problematic of the study has been developed with reference to the theories of Bourdieu and symbolic interactionism, and the core concept guiding the work, that of an educational career, provides the possibility for theorising in an integrated way students' LIS choice and their educational trajectories prior to and within the LIS institutions. Data was collected through a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, and the analyses relied on quantitative and qualitative methods and techniques. The construction of specific analytical tools, namely the Educational Career Index and the Divergence Index, were used to identify internal differentiations in the sample of students, and to interpret their educational decisions. Developing ways for organising data and the constant interrogation of the data through the theoretical concepts, and vice versa, were used to elaborate the argument about the social character of students' educational choices and trajectories. One important finding of the study is the association observed between the different groups identified in the sample and the reasons attracting each of them to Library and Information Science. Another interesting finding relates to the students' transformations, and the trajectories they plan, which seem to be dependent on their possibilities to capitalise on the available resources, relative also to the institutional habitus of the department in which they study. We shall discuss these two findings with reference to three interview cases, two of which are typical and conform to the quantitative part of the study, the other being recalcitrant vis-à-vis our main hypothesis. We shall thus have the opportunity to discuss, how the particular theoretical choices made in this study as well as the combination of quantitative and qualitative data analysis have helped in the illumination of the research problem.
Cultural Perspectives on the Mathematics Classroom, 1994
The context for much — though not all1 — learning and problem solving in mathematics is the mathe... more The context for much — though not all1 — learning and problem solving in mathematics is the mathematics classroom at school. To talk about the culture of the classroom is already a move away from “scientific” views which would see the important functions and activities of the classroom as able to be directed according to their criteria of rationality, of understanding, and of what is to count as knowledge. The questioning of these views has had diverse effects: sometimes, a complete rejection of them, unveiling in the process the power relations that such claims to scientificity (e.g, the claim of mathematics to universal applicability) support; at other times, the recognition that the condition of any tradition, including the scientific, is a more or less unified meaning which keeps getting heard anew and reformulated. In this second view, what supports and delimits the possibilities of teaching and learning is the culture of the classroom. This culture is what makes the activities and the tasks, e.g. problems to solve, meaningful — in one way or another.
... is located between this frame and the frame of scientific knowledge and its recontextualised ... more ... is located between this frame and the frame of scientific knowledge and its recontextualised version of school science. ... Thus, we could again distinguish between two views. ... to the first (Figxtre 2), the factors which contribute to effective teaching are the teacher, the pupil and the ...
Abstract The information sector is a dynamic disciplinary and professional field, located in a fl... more Abstract The information sector is a dynamic disciplinary and professional field, located in a fluid social and technological environment. The educational choices of students in library and information science (LIS) departments is an important aspect of the process through which they construct their ambitions, plans, and future capabilities, and so research on students' choices and their educational careers as social processes is also important. Through a detailed consideration of case study accounts of students from LIS departments in Greece, the argument for the importance of social and cultural factors in the formation of students' identity is advanced. Data were collected in two research phases using a questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews. Analysis of data demonstrates the complexity of the process of making educational choices, revealing how individual, family, social, and institutional factors interrelate with the ways young people cope with contingencies, and with social and personal relations. How these complex influences facilitate or impede students' trajectories within higher education institutions is also shown, as well as how they act upon the construction of their pedagogic identities. Of considerable significance is the finding that students from lower social class backgrounds tend to form pedagogic identities that are fragile. By contrast, students from families with significant amounts of cultural and social capital are in a position to exploit the academic and social resources of institutions, and to construct embedded identities with a strong scientific basis. More research is needed to illuminate how LIS departments could develop mechanisms to reduce such discrepancies.
International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 2005
This paper explores pre-school pedagogic practices related to science, and argues for the relevan... more This paper explores pre-school pedagogic practices related to science, and argues for the relevance of sociology of education for such exploration. It also argues that this approach has a wider applicability in analysing the effects of changes in education policy on (pre) school practice. A basic characteristic of pre-school organization in many western societies for many decades has been its play-like activity. This has required teachers to structure the experiences of young children by acting upon the contexts of learning rather than the ...
This chapter aims to contribute to research on standards and regulation in education, taking as a... more This chapter aims to contribute to research on standards and regulation in education, taking as a point of departure three sets of interrelated policies, core to the globalised educational agenda: policies on competencies and skills, school autonomy and performance-based accountability, representing a new governmental logic founded on the values of efficiency, quality, competitiveness and outcomes. The chapter has a double purpose: first, to make a theoretical contribution to the literature interrogating the new modes of governing schools and curricular knowledge. It does this, by explicating the relationship between the regulative dimension of global policy discourses, embodying the principle of performativity, and the discourses regulating pedagogic practices in local sites, where policies are enacted. Second, to present aspects of a study carried out in the Greek education context, in which policies towards a post-bureaucratic administration regime (school autonomy, national testing, accountability mechanisms) have failed to be institutionalised. Focusing on the Modern Greek Language curriculum and its enactments in demanding school settings, the study illustrates how discourses on inclusion, diffused within the educational field and invading the school space, exert strong control over teachers’ instructional practices. It is argued that developments of Bernstein’s theory of knowledge pedagogisation provide a language to describe the complex ways in which regulative discourses operate in global times, affecting the recontextualisations of curricular policies. The theory thus contributes to the literature on the enactments of globalised education policies and helps explain the diversity of national and institutional responses to such policies.
The following thesis is concerned with what I have termed professional discourse. I have used the... more The following thesis is concerned with what I have termed professional discourse. I have used the term to call attention to two elements. With professional, I have indicated a recent move in educational analysis and research on teachers and other practitioners which represents a shift to a concern with practical activities, a tacit or explicit resistance to theory, and an attempt to displace the cognitive paradigm of research and theorizing. With the notion of discourse, I have indicated that, in order that the as yet limited debate on professional activity be opened up, it has to be linked with the discourse on practice. By the latter, I mean the opposition between practice and theory at the analytical level, and its most recent unfoldings and manifestations. The thesis identifies a vocabulary of practice, implicating such concepts as reflection, repetition, judgment, skill, example, exemplar, and a series of oppositional terms, such as saying/showing, competence/performance, expli...
Doctoral thesis, Institute of Education, University of London., 1991
SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DX194713 / BLDSC - British Library... more SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DX194713 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
This paper explores, from the point of view of critical sociology of education, how discourses on... more This paper explores, from the point of view of critical sociology of education, how discourses on inclusion, re-articulated in specific school settings, affect linguistic literacy curriculum enactments. The study draws on the theory of enactment of Ball and his colleagues, and on Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device. The research data has been produced by semi-structured interviews and classroom observations in six lower secondary state schools in the inner city of Athens, in Greece, with different rate of disadvantaged student population. The data indicates that discourses on inclusion, interpreted in different ways in each school context, affect teachers’ pedagogic practices in ways that tend to reproduce educational inequalities in the most disadvantaged school contexts.
This paper theorises the field of symbolic control and reflects on the critical literature of pol... more This paper theorises the field of symbolic control and reflects on the critical literature of policy studies, exploring the possibilities that the former might offer to the analysis of global policy discourses and their up-take in specific national and local contexts. Starting from the rapidly expanding literature on the ‘globalising’ and ‘globalised’ projects that ‘modern’ nation states have been implementing to ‘manage change’, the paper argues that theories on governance can be developed considerably – theoretically and in terms of their capacity to guide empirical research – through their exposure to Bernstein’s sociological theory of symbolic control and Totally Pedagogised Society. Drawing data from an empirical study carried out in Greece, it explores changes in the field of educational administration towards the systematic implementation of ideas and practices of new public management, evident in processes of the selection, training and professional practice of middle level ...
Like research assessment exercises, we see the discourse on ‘evidence’ as part of a technology (B... more Like research assessment exercises, we see the discourse on ‘evidence’ as part of a technology (Ball, 2008) through which governance agencies attempt to increase their control over the production and 'use' of knowledge. The changing nature of research, evident in the ‘squeezing out’ of ‘risky’ long term basic research (Bernstein, 2000), has been driven by policy and funding agencies' objectives. Education research, in particular, is becoming more amenable to objectives of funding agencies, especially those of the EU, to promote and monitor its policies in member states. For instance, the EU often reports on evidence-based education policy making by using ‘independent’ studies (e.g., CHEPS, undated), while the centralized coordination of the research process, the technocratic approaches to theory and methodology, the emphasis on results, raise crucial issues concerning the contribution that this kind of research can make in addressing complex educational issues. Against t...
Το αυξανόμενο ενδιαφέρον για την υγεία και την καλή φυσική κατάσταση των πληθυσμών έχει επιφέρει ... more Το αυξανόμενο ενδιαφέρον για την υγεία και την καλή φυσική κατάσταση των πληθυσμών έχει επιφέρει σημαντικές αλλαγές στην εκπαίδευση και έχει μεταβάλει τον ρόλο των εκπαιδευτικών Φυσικής Αγωγής, (Εκ.Φ.Α.). Στην παρούσα εργασία, χρησιμοποιώντας τις θεωρίες των Bernstein και Foucault, μελετάμε τα Προγράμματα Σπουδών των Τμημάτων Επιστήμης Φυσικής Αγωγής και Αθλητισμού αποσκοπώντας στην κατανόηση των επιδράσεων των κωδίκων και των μηχανισμών ρύθμισης της θεμιτής γνώσης για το σώμα στη διαμόρφωση των υποκειμενικοτήτων των Εκ.Φ.Α.
The European Education Policy Space, driven by forces of globalization and discourses on knowledg... more The European Education Policy Space, driven by forces of globalization and discourses on knowledge economy, has been shaped gradually by the involvement of a multiplicity of actors and institutions within the EU, and by using new tools of education governance, as well as utilizing the expertise of various agencies, such as UNESCO, the OECD, etc.. The Open Method of Coordination and, currently, Quality Assurance and Evaluation methods constitute the main technologies for Europeanizing Member States’ educational policies, and for transforming education institutions and systems by measuring and comparing through indicators, numbers and dissemination of information and «good practices» (Grek et al., 2009). Moreover, as research indicates, understanding the relationships between the knowledge which is produced, distributed and used within processes of change, and the actors mediating and intervening at the national/local level, requires the examination of the characteristics of the envir...
Journal of Educational Administration and History, 2015
ABSTRACT This article explores the localisation of the global and European discourse of education... more ABSTRACT This article explores the localisation of the global and European discourse of educational governance in the Greek education system through the changes that have been introduced in the field of education administration since 2009 by the then socialist government. Our research aims to contribute to the critical policy literature on the spreading marketisation and privatisation in the governing of education around the world and in Europe – through the adoption of New Public Management and Educational Leadership models. In developing our theoretical perspective, we use the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and discourse, and in order to conceptualise power and control relations in the organisation, transmission, acquisition, and evaluation of pedagogical knowledge, we draw on Bernstein's theory of symbolic control. Our study has examined how the field of education administration is governed through power and knowledge transformations. We trace these transformations by analysing systematically the pedagogic discourse through which the global governance discourse is relayed and becomes a ‘regime of truth’ within public policy and practice in Greece. We argue that such changes have significant implications for everyday educational practice and for the kinds of knowledge that are considered legitimate, and they may affect educational professionals' subjectivities in fundamental ways.
New Trends in Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries - Selected Papers Presented at the 2nd Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries - Proceedings of the International Conference on QQML2010, 2011
ABSTRACT This paper draws on a research study which explores the reasons behind young people&... more ABSTRACT This paper draws on a research study which explores the reasons behind young people' choice of Library and Information Science as a field of study, and traces their education careers within the existing higher education departments in Greece. In particular, it focuses on some data and findings in order to illustrate the thesis that subject choice is a complex social process, and to discuss theoretical and methodological implications. The problematic of the study has been developed with reference to the theories of Bourdieu and symbolic interactionism, and the core concept guiding the work, that of an educational career, provides the possibility for theorising in an integrated way students' LIS choice and their educational trajectories prior to and within the LIS institutions. Data was collected through a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, and the analyses relied on quantitative and qualitative methods and techniques. The construction of specific analytical tools, namely the Educational Career Index and the Divergence Index, were used to identify internal differentiations in the sample of students, and to interpret their educational decisions. Developing ways for organising data and the constant interrogation of the data through the theoretical concepts, and vice versa, were used to elaborate the argument about the social character of students' educational choices and trajectories. One important finding of the study is the association observed between the different groups identified in the sample and the reasons attracting each of them to Library and Information Science. Another interesting finding relates to the students' transformations, and the trajectories they plan, which seem to be dependent on their possibilities to capitalise on the available resources, relative also to the institutional habitus of the department in which they study. We shall discuss these two findings with reference to three interview cases, two of which are typical and conform to the quantitative part of the study, the other being recalcitrant vis-à-vis our main hypothesis. We shall thus have the opportunity to discuss, how the particular theoretical choices made in this study as well as the combination of quantitative and qualitative data analysis have helped in the illumination of the research problem.
Cultural Perspectives on the Mathematics Classroom, 1994
The context for much — though not all1 — learning and problem solving in mathematics is the mathe... more The context for much — though not all1 — learning and problem solving in mathematics is the mathematics classroom at school. To talk about the culture of the classroom is already a move away from “scientific” views which would see the important functions and activities of the classroom as able to be directed according to their criteria of rationality, of understanding, and of what is to count as knowledge. The questioning of these views has had diverse effects: sometimes, a complete rejection of them, unveiling in the process the power relations that such claims to scientificity (e.g, the claim of mathematics to universal applicability) support; at other times, the recognition that the condition of any tradition, including the scientific, is a more or less unified meaning which keeps getting heard anew and reformulated. In this second view, what supports and delimits the possibilities of teaching and learning is the culture of the classroom. This culture is what makes the activities and the tasks, e.g. problems to solve, meaningful — in one way or another.
... is located between this frame and the frame of scientific knowledge and its recontextualised ... more ... is located between this frame and the frame of scientific knowledge and its recontextualised version of school science. ... Thus, we could again distinguish between two views. ... to the first (Figxtre 2), the factors which contribute to effective teaching are the teacher, the pupil and the ...
Abstract The information sector is a dynamic disciplinary and professional field, located in a fl... more Abstract The information sector is a dynamic disciplinary and professional field, located in a fluid social and technological environment. The educational choices of students in library and information science (LIS) departments is an important aspect of the process through which they construct their ambitions, plans, and future capabilities, and so research on students' choices and their educational careers as social processes is also important. Through a detailed consideration of case study accounts of students from LIS departments in Greece, the argument for the importance of social and cultural factors in the formation of students' identity is advanced. Data were collected in two research phases using a questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews. Analysis of data demonstrates the complexity of the process of making educational choices, revealing how individual, family, social, and institutional factors interrelate with the ways young people cope with contingencies, and with social and personal relations. How these complex influences facilitate or impede students' trajectories within higher education institutions is also shown, as well as how they act upon the construction of their pedagogic identities. Of considerable significance is the finding that students from lower social class backgrounds tend to form pedagogic identities that are fragile. By contrast, students from families with significant amounts of cultural and social capital are in a position to exploit the academic and social resources of institutions, and to construct embedded identities with a strong scientific basis. More research is needed to illuminate how LIS departments could develop mechanisms to reduce such discrepancies.
International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 2005
This paper explores pre-school pedagogic practices related to science, and argues for the relevan... more This paper explores pre-school pedagogic practices related to science, and argues for the relevance of sociology of education for such exploration. It also argues that this approach has a wider applicability in analysing the effects of changes in education policy on (pre) school practice. A basic characteristic of pre-school organization in many western societies for many decades has been its play-like activity. This has required teachers to structure the experiences of young children by acting upon the contexts of learning rather than the ...
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