Basil Bernstein, Code Theory, and Education

Women's Contributions

Parlo Singh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351033442
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Over a career spanning forty years, Basil Bernstein produced theoretical models about the workings of educational systems, and how these systems produce social relations of inequality. He was considered by many to be a radical scholar whose work generated enormous controversies. One such controversy was around code theory, specifically restricted and elaborated codes which came to signify—for some scholars—the deficit views of those living in poverty. Bernstein weathered the intensity of the debates around these ideas, spending much of his career vehemently challenging deficit portrayals of code theory, reworking and extending his theoretical corpus with the development of ideas around pedagogic discourse and identity.

The past decade has witnessed a revival of interest in Bernstein's theoretical ideas across fields as diverse as policy studies, sociology of education, curriculum and pedagogy studies, anthropology, linguistics, and social and cultural psychology. This book contributes to the revival of Bernstein's work by examining specifically some women's contribution to this theoretical corpus. The contributions traverse a number of disciplines, building a rich tapestry of concepts to think about education systems and the formation of social minds. Significantly the book tackles the complex matter of how to empirically work with Bernstein's ideas, and so contribute to debates about the nexus between theory and methods. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor & Francis journals or previously published in Taylor & Francis books.

1 Ways of Meaning, Ways of Learning

Code as an explanatory concept

Ruqaiya Hasan

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to offer further empirical evidence in support of Bernstein’s concept of code from the social semiotic perspective of systemic functional linguistics. When the concept of code was first introduced in the 1960s, it was severely criticised by many famous socio-linguists. It will be argued that these socio-linguists failed to understand the significance of language as a meaning potential, and so they also failed to appreciate the inherent relation between meaning and mental development (Holliday, 1975; Vygotsky, 1978). The concept of code is important in any viable theory of mental development which does not hide behind a mythical homogeneity. Human beings develop different forms of consciousness, and code theory offers a detailed and coherent account of both the social origin and the nature of this variation. Infract, the panoramic scope of Bernstein’s sociological theory clarifies the relations of social positioning, coding orientation, communication, and consciousness to learning in official pedagogic sites.

In presenting some of the results of my investigation in variant forms of communication between mothers and their young children, I will show that: (a) the variation is systematic, (b) the nature of the variation needs Bernstein’s code theory for its interpretation, and (c) the fact of variation can only be accounted for by its relation to social positioning.

… codes transform distributions of power and principles of control into pedagogic communication. Codes attempt to suppress contradictions, cleavages and dilemmas in the external order (classification) and set up psychic defences for intra-individual order through the insulation (boundaries) they produce. But code acquisition necessarily entails both the acquisition of order and the potential of its disturbance. (Bernstein, 2000, p.203; original emphasis)

As members of the human species we possess an almost unlimited potential for learning: in this sense, the world is truly our oyster. However, what we actually learn in our lifetime is typically constrained by our social location, a problem that demands explanation: why and how does social location intervene in constraining what is learnt by whom? This question formed an important part of the research agenda in Basil Bernstein’s working life (Bernstein, 1971, 1975, 1990, 2000). Of course, one’s social location is not inalterable, as Bernstein took great pains to point out, but the conditions for such changes are fairly stringent, which may or may not be met. These conditions have little to do with our supposedly ‘innate’ mental capacities: in fact, recent research in the development of human brain reveals that at birth we have yet to acquire a ‘mind’ (Deacon, 1997; Greenfield, 2000; Boncinelli, 2001): our most precious biological assets— the plasticity of our brain and its potential for forming billions of connections—make us uniquely dependent on the social for turning that powerful brain into a usable mind. It thus transpires that the two basic supports of our existence, the biological and the social, are linked by a co-genetic logic, and what forges this link between the two is our capacity for semiosis—for making meanings by the use of shared symbolic systems. Through centuries of evolutionary trial and error, the human brain is predisposed to make sense of symbols and, among the various symbolic systems, language, due to some of its defining characteristics (Deacon, 1997) proves crucial in the enterprise of linking the biological and the social: to gain consciousness, to become a usable mind, the human brain needs experience, and language acts as a uniquely effective, immensely supple means of construing experience by acts of meaning (Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999). So, if we wish to answer our question—why and how does social location intervene in constraining what is learnt by whom?—we will need a theory that is sensitive to the complex interactions of language, culture and consciousness, for although learning is achieved by individual minds, the minds themselves are fashioned socially by means of semiotic mediation, which means largely through discursive interaction.

From this perspective, Bernstein’s code theory is exceptional. For a serious socio-linguist, it is perhaps the only sociological theory that takes the power of language seriously enough to give it a de nite place in his theory; and this theory has been deeply concerned with the relations of culture, communication and consciousness (see, especially, Bernstein, 1971, 1982, 1990, 2000). It thus represents a powerful resource for examining the complex interplay of the factors active in the formation of consciousness and the unequal distribution of knowledge. Developed and refined over decades, it describes on the one hand the dialectic of semiosis and consciousness, and on the other it traces the relevant macro and micro social phenomena, identifying the attributes of the social system that enable social processes. The present paper is not intended as a potted history of the development of Bernstein’s code theory, as excellent and authentic accounts of this can be found in Bernstein (1990, 1996, 2000), which present particularly lucid accounts of how social class, social practice and forms of human consciousness are socio-logically related. My aim in this paper is to show the power of the concept of code in explaining systematic variation in the meanings people habitually mean, an enquiry that was inspired by Bernstein’s writings on the relations of coding orientation to knowledge distribution in modern societies (Bernstein, 1971, 1975).

I am aware of the various pejorative readings of the code theory, but again this is not the appropriate place to deconstruct them: to my mind, these (mis-)readings told us more about the standards of academic (il-)literacy than they did about the nature of the code theory. For, indeed, the potential of the theory was quite obvious from its early stages (Bernstein, 1965; Halliday, 1973a; Hasan, 1973). Certainly there were problems with the data—the data used in the Sociological Research Unit research was collected via questionnaires and interviews (for some details, see Bernstein (1973)), and so it did not represent naturally occurring language in the contexts of everyday life. The second major point of code criticism was that the linguistic evidence was not valid. Again it is true that much of the lexical and syntactic evidence that was cited (see Bernstein, 1971, 1973, 1975) could not be easily interpreted as decisive instantiation of code varieties. But a thoughtful reading would have conceded that the problem lay largely with the linguistic models, none of which offered any viable resources for the analysis of meaning in discourse, and Bernstein’s code theory is above all concerned with orientation to meaning and with the internalisation of orders of relevance (Bernstein, 1990). If one wished to cite evidence for how coding orientation may activate social subjects’ selection and organisation of meaning, subjects’ judgements of what is or is not legitimate social practice, then clearly counting morphemes and words defined by their grammatical status was not going to be much help. What was needed was the ability to relate grammar and semantics in a non-ad hoc, systematic manner; linguists needed to offer Bernstein a theory of grammar as a resource for meaning. As systemic functional linguistics has shown, it is the nexus of grammar with meaning, as manifested in discourse in social life, that is crucial to the formation of consciousness, and the latter is an essential element both in the reproduction of society and of social change. Meaning is thus critical to the very concept of Bernstein’s code theory. But systemic functional linguists as yet had no coherent theory of semantics, while formal semantics was largely unusable in the analysis of discourse.

To me this situation presented a dual challenge: a challenge to produce a linguistic tool capable of such an analysis of discourse in social life, and a challenge to mount an investigation that would examine whether and to what extent the linguistic form of social interaction was instrumental in the formation of consciousness. In the rest of the paper, I want to present briefly an account of this research. My research project should not be seen as one that explores all the complex relations outlined by Bernstein in the explication of his code theory (Bernstein, 1971, 1982, 1987): this would be a daunting task for any single research effort (see Hasan (1999) as a linguist’s account of the full architecture of Bernstein’s theory). As a linguist, my interest and my training prepared me to explore, that element of the code theory that is concerned particularly with the relation between forms of linguistic communication and forms of consciousness. Accordingly, the major questions that the first phase of my research asked were:

• Q1. Do mothers from different social groups/classes systematically vary in the meanings they habitually mean in talking to their three and a half-year-old children?
• Q2. If the answer to Q1 is ‘yes’, then: (a) does the experience of participation in different semantic varieties manifest itself in children’s own ways of meaning; if so how; and (b) how can these patterns of variation be explained? What is/are the activating factor(s)?

By interrogating the results of the analysis of my data from these points of view, I hoped to be able to show whether variation in forms of communication is particularly responsive to social positioning (Bernstein, 1990), and by comparing the maternal sayings with those of the children, hoped to find some indication whether the active experience of fashions of speaking has any bearing on forms of consciousness. If there is a significant correlation between the semantic styles of the mothers and the children, this could be taken as a confirmation of Bernstein’s claims about codes, communication and consciousness (Bernstein, 1971, 1990, 1996).

Beginning in the mid-1980s, with Carmel Cloran’s able assistance, I directed such a research project over a period of some 6 years, entitled ‘The Role of Everyday Talk between Mothers and Children in Establishing Ways of Learning’ (for details, see Hasan, 1989, 1992; Hasan & Cloran, 1990). As for the tool for analysis, the main inspiration came from the systemic functional model, with its emphasis on meaning and its system-oriented description. Although Bernstein had been working as early as the 1960s with the network representation of behavioural choices in specific contexts such as that of control (Bernstein & Cook-Gumperz, 1973), my own inspiration came from the seminal work of Halliday (1973b) and Turner (1973). The former, in particular, showed how the selection and organisation of meaning can be systematically related to lexico-grammatical resources. It thus served as the starting point for devising a semantic system network, which represents, up to a certain degree of detail, the meaning potential and the grammatical resources for its realisation, available to speakers of English in the environment of everyday discourse. Bernstein’s (1971) early work in the area of socialisation and code varieties suggested that the principles governing systematic variation in the distribution of knowledge had to be inculcated at the early stages of life, where identities are formed, desires acquire legitimacy, and orders of relevance become established. Accordingly, the children selected to participate in my research were quite young (3 years 6 months–4 years old; mean age, 3 years 8 months). The theory stipulated further that underlying the systematic variation in learning are relations of power and control in society: as Bernstein put it:

‘Class relations’ … refer to inequalities i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Ways of Meaning, Ways of Learning: code as an explanatory concept
• 2 Pedagogic practices in the family socializing context and children’s school achievement
• 3 Literacy and Pedagogy in Flux: constructing the object of study from a Bernsteinian perspective
• 4 Explorations in policy enactment: feminist thought experiments with Basil Bernstein’s code theory
• 5 Britton and Bernstein on Vygotsky: divergent views on mind and language in the pedagogic context
• 6 Pedagogic discourse and sex education: myths, science and subversion
• 7 From psychic defences to social defences: Recontextualizing strategies and Klein’s theory of ego development
• Index