From Framing to Normalized Pedagogy: An Empirical Study on the Interaction between Teachers and Students

The code theory, developed by Basil Bernstein, indicates that framing can be viewed as the core element in constituting the phenomenon of cultural reproduction because it is able to regulate the transmission of pedagogical information. Strong framing tends to reinforce the isolated boundary of disciplinary knowledge that can be conceptualized as a vertical discourse because of its systematical knowledge structure. This study assumes that strong framing should be deeply interwoven instrumental rationality. This connection could deprive most teachers’ critical minds so that they would view the normal distribution bell curve of students’ academic performances as a natural outcome. In order to examine the interplay between framing, instrumental rationality and pedagogical action, questionnaires were completed by over 5,000 primary school teachers in Henan province, China, who were stratified sample. The statistical results show that most teachers adopted psychological concepts to evaluate students’ academic performances and, in turn, educational inequity was legitimatized as a natural outcome in the efficiency-led approach. Such efficiency-led minds made them as the agent, producing normalized pedagogy that refers to the connection among psychological concepts, pedagogical actions and cultural reproduction.