Interpreting the vignettes in terms of relationships with forms of knowledge

I will now consider the vignettes and my discussion of them so far in terms of the definition that I have already outlined of the ‘relationship with knowledge’. I have characterised this concept as the way in which students experience disciplinary knowledge and how they come to engage with that knowledge. In order to start to interpret the vignettes in terms of relationships with knowledge, I will explore in more detail the forms of knowledge encountered in my discussion in terms of the notions of ‘relevance’ and of ‘real life’ knowledge. It is argued that it is possible to initially identify three broad categories of knowledge: students’ or teachers’ owned knowledge, everyday knowledge and formal school knowledge.

I refer to the first type of knowledge as ‘students’ owned knowledge’, which may include knowledge of everyday life and may relate to students’ interests. Defining ‘owned knowledge’ is not straightforward, however, as Paechter notes:

The characterisation of owned knowledge is problematic, if only because it has generally been defined solely in terms of what is usually seen as its opposite, that pertaining to the school.

(Paechter, 1998: 170)

Paechter’s distinction between ‘owned knowledge’ and what others would term ‘non- school knowledge’ or ‘everyday knowledge’ is a useful one. The reason for this, as Paechter points out, is because it identifies a sub-set of what other accounts may refer to as ‘non-school knowledge’ in the sense of ‘everything else’. Thus, Paechter proposes that ‘students’ owned knowledge’ relates to the life interests and students’ knowledge which “positions its possessor as an acting subject, able to use his or her own knowledge in a dynamic way” (Paechter, 1998: 174).

The notion of ‘owned knowledge’ also overlaps to some extent with the notion of ‘funds of knowledge’ (e.g. Gonzales et al., 2005). The emphasis in this literature is on the knowledge and discourses that students experience outside of school, and as Moje (2008: 342) remarks, the construct of funds of knowledge “has been broadly taken up to mean any knowledge that children and youth construct outside of school”. This aligns with Paechter’s definition as it refers to knowledge that students ‘construct’, but this definition is less explicit than Paechter with her reference to students’ agency. Work in this area examines points of convergence or conflict between home and school knowledge, for example Gutiérrez’s notion of the ‘third space’ which bridges between the counter-scripts of students’ everyday lives and the official scripts of their

classrooms (Gutiérrez et al., 1995). These discussions also appear to resonate with the work of Tochon (2000).

Students’ owned knowledge, then, can be characterised as non-school knowledge, but, following Paechter it should also be distinguished from merely everyday knowledge, the second form of knowledge that I identify. In terms of my vignettes, I suggest that the students’ knowledge of texting is a case of owned knowledge. This is the knowledge that originates from students’ interests and one which, in line with Paechter’s discussion, allows them to use it in a dynamic way. This can perhaps be seen as a counterpoint to the teacher’s owned knowledge of abbreviations which she was using to control the classroom activities.

The third form of knowledge that can be identified in my vignettes is ‘formal school knowledge’. I have already referred to Bernstein’s (1971) characterisation of this knowledge as ‘uncommonsense’ knowledge. This is the knowledge which is used in school: knowledge which may also be controlled by the teacher for the purposes of disciplinary control. It might include both academic and vocational knowledge which has been recontextualised (Bernstein, 1990) for use within the school or college. It is, perhaps, what Martin & Veel (1998) refer to as the knowledge which, in order to exist in the school, must be:

in a form that allows the roles of the ‘teacher’ and the ‘taught’ to emerge. It must be divisible into the time units allocated (lessons, weeks, terms, years, primary, junior secondary, senior secondary, etc.). … Most importantly, it

must be able to exist in a form that can be assessed, so that the students can be distributed across a spectrum from ‘successful’ to ‘nonsuccessful’.

(Martin & Veel, 1998: 84 in Sharma & Anderson, 2009: 1262)

In relation to the vignettes, the formal school knowledge is described in the curriculum which underpinned the teaching observed. In the ‘wrong letter’ example, this could have been the literacy or employability skills that the teacher was hoping to develop or the knowledge of business practices and IT word processing skills for the teacher in the texting example. Formal school knowledge is aligned with the ‘school subject’ as it is understood in the classroom. It is important to note that although this knowledge may be based upon a specific curriculum it is also ‘made’ in that context – it is also acted upon by teachers and students. Bloomer (1997: 2) points out that “[s]tudents and teachers ‘make’ rather than ‘take’ their roles and the making of the curriculum is their essential business”.

It has been suggested that three different types of knowledge may be discerned within the vignettes: owned knowledge, everyday knowledge and formal school knowledge. An important educational problem may be the way in which knowledge which can be said to exist in one form may be transformed into another form, or, in other words, the way in which forms of knowledge articulate (Ensor & Galant, 2005). For example, how does formal school knowledge become owned knowledge, and indeed, is it reasonable to suppose that such a transformation is possible? Furthermore, how does formal school knowledge – the school subject – relate to disciplinary knowledge?

If transformations between forms of knowledge are possible, it appears that they are likely to be critical to the way in which knowledge is experienced in the school context or, in my terms, to the way that relationships with knowledge develop. When writing about academic disciplines, Moje (2008) asserts that they:

are no different as discourse communities than are students’ everyday home discourse communities or peer group discourse communities. They are not immutable, they are not unchangeable. And they are not simply bodies of knowledge to be handed down from expert to novice.

(Moje, 2008: 342)

This raises two critical issues which will be examined in more detail in chapter 3. First, it signals an association with social justice issues and the different ideological perspectives on how the ‘indigenous’ knowledge of different social groups is valued in educational systems. Second, it raises questions about the basis upon which different types of knowledge may be characterised and categorised.

In relation to the current chapter, it is possible to observe that a key strategy which employed in policy and practice to achieve these processes of transformation involves the notion of ‘relevance’. The idea of relevance is bound up in what is construed as the degree of relatedness of school knowledge to students’ interests (its nature as owned knowledge) and also to particular contexts. ‘Relevance’ as it is done, therefore, is intended to mediate between these forms of knowledge.

2.4 A model for forms of knowledge within an educational