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Bernstein's pedagogic device provides a theoretical framework enabling educational researchers to analyze specialized school discourses serving reproductive functions. It specifically illustrates how critical educators can open spaces to challenge the production and transmission of the official curriculum. Based on three educators' praxes in South Korea, this research examines how Bernstein's pedagogic device has challenged the politics of the Rightist multicultural agenda.
Basil Bernstein (1977, 1990/2009, 1996/2000) theorizes how education works as the medium of cultural reproduction by analyzing the nature of pedagogic discourse (see also Apple, 2002; Au, 2008). Bernstein (1990/ 2009) analyzes "the complex of agencies, agents, [and] social relations through which power, knowledge, and discourse are brought into play as regulative devices; discussions of the modalities of control" (p. 134) and explores how systems of public education - the official state agency - selectively locate, distribute, and reproduce official pedagogic subjects. However, Bernstein's aim through the Class, Codes, and Control (1977, 1990/2009, 1996/2000) series was theorizing the possible ways that education can generate defensive and oppositional agencies both in school and at work. Through the theoretical lens of pedagogic device, Bernstein illustrates how educational specialists as "organic intellectuals" in the field of "symbolic violence" can open spaces to challenge dominant social relations in the school curriculum by regulating potential meanings and making pedagogic communication possible.
This research will describe how three critical educators in South Korea have collaborated, creating possible spaces for bringing social change between frames of "discursive gaps" or "potential discursive gaps." The South Korean government has proclaimed that, "A multicultural society has landed!" while expelling migrant workers, providing no appropriate educational programs for migrant students, and cutting off most academic research funding related to multicultural education. The government's regulative discourses on multiculturalism have functioned as an essential device to silence the educational needs of migrant Others.1 Based on tfiree critical teachers' experiences in public schools,2 this research will examine how Bernstein's theory has been in motion in South Korea, creating spaces for hope and possibilities towards critical multicultural knowledge and curriculum.
BERNSTEIN'S PEDAGOGIC DEVICE AND RELATIVE AUTONOMY IN EDUCATION
Bernstein's theory is pivotal as he provides a theoretical framework enabling educational researchers to analyze the specialized discourses mat function as the medium of reproduction of social relations. Departing...