This chapter has positioned the research ontologically as being as CR and has then moved on to discuss the key substantive theories of Bourdieu, Bernstein and how these developed into LCT. LCT was discussed as both the substantive theory that accounts for the structure of knowledge in a curriculum and as the analytical framework which is used to interrogate the data, as will be briefly returned to in the next chapter. There is a need, in concluding this chapter, to briefly discuss why NLS, which orientates the study’s concerns with literacy practices, as discussed in Chapter One, was not used as an analytical frame in its own right.
Despite literacy being irrefutably linked to knowledge in NLS research, there are limitations in the literature concerning the relationships between fields of knowledge and the nature of academic literacy practices. As noted in Chapter One, HE learning involves adapting to “new ways of knowing: new ways of understanding, interpreting and organising knowledge” (Lea and Street, 1998: 157), and so it makes sense that properties of knowledge-producing fields, and their principles and procedures (Maton and Moore, 2010) need foregrounding in our understanding of how students acquire (or fail to acquire) the requisite literacy practices. This is because knowledge, though seen as an integral part of the social practices approach to literacy, has not had as much attention as identity and other cultural practices in the NLS research. NLS has not focused on knowledge-knower structures, their different forms and modalities and generative principles (Maton, 2007), though it has indicated that the context is key to the development and privileging of certain literacies. Even though NLS engages with the notion of students adapting to new knowledge and sees itself as“rooted in conceptions of knowledge” (Street, 2003: 77-78), little explicit attention is given to the intrinsic features of knowledge.
Studies are starting to link NLS conceptions of literacy as localised practice and LCT. Humphrey and Robinson (2012) reported on a toolkit developed for academic literacies to be used by all teachers. They examine the high stakes reading and writing texts and the teacher’s role as literacy expert to provide quality teaching of
texts. They conclude that abstract ideas need unpacking with concrete examples but also repacking by abstracting away from the concrete into generalised understandings (Humphrey and Robinson, 2012) in teaching of texts.
NLS does not expand much on how knowledge is constituted and so any relationships between the fields of knowledge forms and academic literacies remain uninterrogated. It tends to foreground the contextual and views reading and writing as making sense only when studied in the context of social and cultural practices of which they form part (Barton, 1994; Gee, 2000; Heath, 1983; Street, 1994). NLS has foregrounded student experiences as they make sense of university meaning making (Coffin and Donahue, 2012). This is done through ethnographic studies with in-depth interviews where students and lecturers reflect on academic writing in an autobiographical account of the interviewer’s language and literacy learning, study of institutional documentary data and student textual data and observation (Coffin and Donahue, 2012). Coffin and Donahue (2012) argue that if a challenge is made to knowledge making and practices within HE such as the one NLS makes, this challenge needs to be premised on an understanding of knowledge building, and the reasons for it being privileged as well as how it is being privileged. That would mean drawing on theories of sociology of education and knowledge. This may help with the operationalisation of how NLS perceives practices. My study is informed by NLS as orienting framework and is an attempt to focus on knowledge to build on the conceptualisations of literacy within NLS.
As there seems to be little engagement in NLS theory with the ‘how’ of uncovering the ways of knowing of academic disciplines, an analytical tool such as LCT’s Specialisation Codes can help to give a better understanding of the underlying knowledge forms and its literacy practices. Specialisation Codes would equip outsiders to knowledge such as literacy specialists with a valuable tool to gain insight into knowledge forms and its literacy practices. Differing forms of knowledge give rise to different literacies, literacy practices are localised, ideological and therefore differing knowledge forms should at least in part underpin different literacy practices. A voice silenced by notions of social constructions is thus knowledge in NLS and hence the analysis of PMA knowledge can be taken up via LCT Specialisation Codes to see if it will tell me anything about the literacy practices that are valued in the PMA programmes.
Though this study foregrounds knowledge, and I have argued that this is a significant blindspot in much NLS research, it needs to be noted that knowledge alone is not responsible for emergent literacy practices. Because education happens in what Critical Realists call ‘an open system’ (Archer et al, 1998), a number of causal mechamisms are at play in any social context. The causal mechanisms of knowledge structures, focused on in this study, are but one set of structures at the level of the real leading to the events and experiences in the PMA Diploma and Degree programme. Contextualised mechanisms that play a role might include the institutional relationships, context and authority as they are embedded in and interact with diverse student academic literacy practices (Lea and Street, 1998). These mechanisms also include disciplinary relationships, for example, student and teacher identity and student-teacher relationships as the interaction between teachers and students is “a social practice that affects the nature of the literacy being learned and literacy ideas held by the participants, especially the new learners and their position in relations of power” (Street, 1994: 78). Furthermore, teacher pedagogical approaches in reading and writing practices and the difficulty of teachers in making the tacit dimension of disciplinary discourses (ways with words) explicit and leading to opaque language (Gee, 1990; Heath, 1983; Jacobs, 2007a; Street, 1994) also impact on literacy practices.
Though these critical understandings of literacy as social practice also need foregrounding in knowledge-knower structures, my study focus is specifically on theorising lecturer understanding of curriculum knowledge and its localised literacy practices as these play an important role shaping possibilities for students (McKenna, 2004). Lecturers are key recontextualising agents (Shay, 2011) as they select what counts as PMA knowledge and they therefore wield enormous power.