LCT(Specialisation)

LCT(Specialisation) is based on a premise that all disciplines use certain discourses and languages to stake their claim to status, recognition and position within higher education, and that these discourses serve to ‘legitimate’ these disciplines’ claims to status, recognition and position. These claims to legitimation, though, are based on deeper, often invisible understandings of the underlying principles of the knowledge structure of the intellectual field in question (Maton 2007). Actors and discourses within these intellectual fields, out of which the educational disciplines and knowledge structures are drawn, are ‘selected and recontextualised on the basis of a principle emanating from the knowledge structure, knower structure or…neither or both’ (Maton 2007: 92). If we can understand the discursive practices of the intellectual fields as structures that select, position and empower actors and discourses in different ways, then we can address the generative ‘principles underlying these practices…in terms of their legitimation codes of specialisation’ (Maton 2007: 93). This is important, in this

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study, because the specialisation code of the discipline has direct influence on curriculum design and also on approaches to pedagogy, and what is included and excluded in the pedagogic relationships between students and lecturers.

There are two parts to the Specialisation dimension of LCT that have been included in the conceptual toolkit for this study: specialisation codes and knowledge-knower structures. These will be discussed in the following two sub-sections, and these will demonstrate the ways in which these parts of Specialisation relate to the focus of this study.

6.1.1 Specialisation codes

Specialisation codes provide this study with a tool for thinking about and analysing the organising principles that form the basis for claims to legitimacy within the disciplines. The specialisation codes subsume and extend on Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing, discussed earlier in this chapter. Essentially, LCT’s argument is that what Bernstein was coding using classification and framing in his work is the epistemic dimension of knowledge – he is coding knowledge. What is sidelined, as section 5 pointed out, is a coding of knowers. Knowledge is always ‘social’, in the sense that it is always made by someone, about something and for someone else. Bernstein’s work does not imply that there are no knowers, but he does not make them a focus of his theorising which was more concerned with understanding the structuring and structures of knowledge in the fields of production in his later work. Thus, Specialisation subsumes educational ‘knowledge codes’, as it terms Bernstein’s use of classification and framing, to examine relations within and to knowledge, and calls this dimension the ‘epistemic relation’ (ER) of knowledge, but it recognises a ‘social relation’ (SR) as well, which allows this coding process to take account of both knowledge and knowers (Maton 2007: 93).

LCT argues that the strength of classification and framing can be altered according to ‘what can be legitimately described as’, for example, ‘“cultural studies” and ‘who can legitimately claim to be doing “cultural studies”’ (Maton 2000b: 85, emphasis in original). These two sets of relations are ‘two distinct dimensions of [the] pedagogic discourse’ (Maton 2000b: 86), rather than two different discourses. Maton, in developing his conceptions of these two dimensions, referred to them as two ‘co-existing but analytically distinguishable’ sets of relations which he termed the ‘epistemic relation’ and the ‘social relation’. The former refers to what is being studied (the ‘object’ of study) and the latter refers to who is studying it (the ‘subject’ of study) (Maton 2000b: 85).

Using this analytical distinction between the epistemic and social relation, LCT conceptualises ‘codes of legitimation’ or specialisation codes as they are termed (Maton 2000b, 2013a). These

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are empirical codes which can be used as both a theoretical and analytical base for getting at and describing the principles underlying both the field of production and the field of reproduction. LCT argues that by ‘varying independently the relative strengths of classification and framing for the social relation (SR) and the epistemic relation (ER)’ (Maton 2000b: 86), four possible specialisation codes can be developed. LCT uses plus and minus signs as Bernstein does to refer to weaker and stronger classification and framing. The four codes can represent points on a compass and a great deal of variation can be found within this compass or Cartesian plane (see Figure 2.3 below). The + and – are borrowed from Bernstein to show the relative strengthening and weakening of classification and framing in the four codes. As there is possibility for much variation, it must be acknowledged that the strengths of relations are ‘relative’: stronger and weaker (Maton 2013a: 9).

Figure 2.3 Specialisation codes represented in a Cartesian plane (Maton 2007: 96)

The codes on the top left and bottom right are termed a knowledge code (SR- ER+) and a knower code (SR+ ER-) respectively, based on where the emphasis is placed in terms of the stronger classification and framing (Maton 2000b: 86). With a knower code (bottom right) the disposition or the ‘gaze’ of the knower is emphasised, and this disposition can be ‘innate’, learned or ‘resulting from the knower’s social position’ (Maton 2007: 97). Elsewhere this code is defined as being legitimated on the basis of 'extra-personal procedures providing access to knowledge of a distinct, constructed object of study, but on the basis of a distinct subject of study, the “knower”' (Maton 2000b: 87). Thus the underlying principles of this code privilege who is learning the knowledge, their personal, professional or social attributes and attitudes. English, for example, is a subject of study which privileges the attributes, attitudes and positions

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of students towards their texts and how they read and interpret the texts rather than the texts themselves.

A knowledge code (top left) can be defined as prizing ‘possession of knowledge as the basis of specialisation’ (Maton 2007: 97). Elsewhere Maton (2000b: 86) claims that discourses that exhibit this code are legitimated with reference to 'specialised and unique knowledge of a discrete object of study'. Thus the underlying principles privilege the methods and procedures in the field and what the knowledge is; for example in Physics what is privileged is the knowledge of Physics, the concepts and also the methods and procedures for doing research and for producing knowledge. Who physicists are as people is less privileged.

The code on the top right is referred to as an elite code, where both the attitudes and dispositions of the knowers as well as the knowledge procedures are important, for example in Music (Maton 2000b), where to be proficient one needs to have an innate disposition or talent for playing an instrument as well as technical proficiency learned through mastering skills and techniques. Finally, the code on the bottom left is referred to as a relativist code, where neither are particularly emphasised, meaning that there is neither privileging of procedure, skill or technique nor innate dispositions or attitudes over one another (Maton 2000b).

The second part of Specialisation that this study will draw on in looking at pedagogic practices in the classrooms or lecture halls is knowledge-knower structures, encompassing ‘gazes’ very briefly.