Abstract
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.
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Notes
This faculty includes Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts disciplines.
The analyses are work-in-progress and currently exclude student scripts—which will be used to triangulate our data analysis in the next phase of the project.
Albeit acknowledging Bernstein’s insistence on a ‘discursive gap’ between the Field of Production (research) and the Field of Recontextualisation (curriculum) (Bernstein 2000).
The best methods we have found that are compatible with the social realist approach are those of the Sydney school of functional linguistics (e.g. Martin and Rose 2003).
The imposition of knower codes that require particular dispositions and subjectivities in a post-colonial context is a topic for another paper.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Karl Maton from the University of Sydney for his informal feedback in a conference presentation on which this article is based.
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Luckett, K., Hunma, A. Making gazes explicit: facilitating epistemic access in the Humanities. High Educ 67, 183–198 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-013-9651-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-013-9651-7