Bernstein, Bloom and the analysis of pedagogy in South African schools - Wayne Hugo et al

Bernstein was interested in understanding not what was relayed in pedagogic encounters but the actual relay itself. He focused on the medium rather than the message of pedagogic communication. This concentration on the medium of pedagogy rather than its message enabled an understanding of how inequality was reproduced in British schools where the message being transmitted was tolerably the same across schools. However, in some of the South African schools in our study, two main issues arose that gave our use of a classification and framing analysis an uncomfortable gloss. Firstly we found consistent evidence for a complete failure in pedagogic relay and secondly, when relay did happen, the content of the message being relayed was often of an abysmal quality. The conceptual and analytical tools offered by Bernstein did not allow us to work in detail with the second of these issues - the quality of the message. In order to do this, we turned to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy. The Bloomian analysis is all about the levels of complexity within the message transmitted and this gave us a seemingly neat analytical combination where Bloom honed in on the complexity of the message and Bernstein on the pedagogic medium the message is carried within. This paper explores how we grappled with the intersection of these two analytical tools when analysing pedagogy and assessment in South African classrooms.
From: Journal of Education, Vol. 43, 2008