Totally Pedagogised Societies. Sociologies of the Pedagogic Communication of Knowledges

Basil Bernstein (2000: 365) asks: ‘How real is the contemporary pedagogic panic’? And then suggests that a new sociological project might ‘focus on the diverse sites, generating both claims for changes in knowledge forms and displacement of and replacement by new forms, creating a new field of knowledge positions, sponsors, designers, and transmitters’ (2000: 368). Bernstein’s ideas have been the springboard for an analysis of: (1) the intellectual field of the new sociology of education (Moore, 2013; Young & Muller, 2010); (2) the possibilities of a social realist project on knowledge (Moore, 2013) and geographies of knowledge (Pasias & Roussakis, 2012); (3) the transformation of teachers’ work (Robertson, 2013) and teacher professionalism (Beck, 2012); (4) the bio-politics of education and health policies (Evans, 2012); and (5) lifelong learning and new apprenticeship discourses (Gerwitz, 2008; Poulet, 2010).

Our paper aims to build on this work in two ways. First, we undertake a meta-analysis of the research literature drawing on Bernstein’s concept of the totally pedagogised society, as well as  literature forging a new direction for the sociology of education on the basis of Bernstein’s work. Second, we distinguish between (1) knowledge codes – the structuring of curricula and (2) pedagogic codes – the structuring of specialised communication for teaching. In so doing, we propose an alternative intellectual trajectory for the sociology of education.  Specifically, we are interested in analysing new modes of global governance through pedagogic communication devices taken up in a range of formal and informal agencies to construct 24/7 spaces of learning, particular modes of learning engagement, and pedagogic identities. Our objective here is to simply lay out the possibilities for developing a sociology to examine new modes of pedagogic governance and the new spatial and temporal configurations of new pedagogic modes (see Tyler, 2001).