Review Essay: Basil Bernstein (1996). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity

Abstract

This paper reviews Basil Bernstein’s (1996) book Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity, focussing specifically on the usefulness of Bernstein’s concepts for an analysis of curricular justice in schooling. The review details five concepts from Bernstein’s model and demonstrates the relevance of these to analyses of equity policies and curricular justice in Queensland schools. These five concepts include: (1) classification and framing; (2) instructional and regulative discourse; (3) recontextualisation; (4) micro-politics of curricular justice and (5) pedagogic models. The paper also links theory to empirical data demonstrating how the Bernsteinian theoretical corpus is illustrative of adaptive theory – simultaneously cumulative and evolving, macro and micro, deductive and inductive.