Class Codes And Control The Structuring Of Pedagogic Discourse

Illustrating the effect of class relationships upon the institutionalizing of elaborate codes in the school, the papers in this volume demonstrate the evolution of the concepts discussed.

This volume, the fifth in the series developing Bernstein's code theory, presents a clear account of the developments of this code theory and shows the close relation between its development and the empirical research to which the theory has given rise.

This book represents part of an ongoing effort to understand the rules, practices, agencies and agents which shape and change the social construction of pedagogic discourse. It draws together and re-examines the findings of the author's earlier work.

Education, Inequality and Social Class provides a comprehensive discussion of the empirical evidence for persistent inequality in educational attainment. It explores the most important theoretical perspectives that have been developed to understand class-based inequality and frame further research. With clear explanations of essential concepts, this book draws on empirical data from the UK and other countries to illustrate the nature and scale of inequalities according to social background, discussing the interactions of class-based inequalities with those according to race and gender. The book relates aspects of inequality to the features of educational systems, showing how policy choices impact on the life chances of children from different class backgrounds. The relationship between education and social mobility is also explored, using the concepts of social closure, positionality and social congestion. The book also provides detailed discussions of the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein, two important theorists whose contributions have generated thriving research traditions much used in contemporary educational research. Education, Inequality and Social Class will be essential reading for postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students engaged in the study of education, childhood studies and sociology. It will also be of great interest to academics, researchers and teachers in training.

First Published in 2002. This single-volume reference provides readers and researchers with access to details on a wide range of topics and issues in the sociology of education. Entries cover both national and international perspectives and studies, as well as tackling controversial points in education today, including gender inequality, globalization, minorities, meritocracy, and more. This is a key, one-of-a-kind resource for all educational researchers and educators.

Ideology is so powerful it makes us believe that war is rational, despite both its brutal means and its devastating ends. The power of ideology comes from its intimate relation to language: ideology recruits all semiotic modalities, but language is its engine-room. Drawing on Halliday’s linguistic theory – in particular, his account of the “semiotic big-bang” - this book explains the latent semiotic machinery of language on which ideology depends. The book illustrates the ideological power of language through a study of perhaps the most significant and consequential of our ideologies: those that enable us to legitimate, celebrate, even venerate war, at the same time that we abhor, denounce and proscribe violence. To do so, it makes use of large multi-register corpora (including the British National Corpus), and the reporting of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by Australian, US, European, and Asian news sources. Combining detailed text analysis with corpus linguistic methods, it provides an empirical analysis showing the astonishing reach of our ideologies of war and their profoundly covert and coercive power.