Knowledge-building

Educational studies in Legitimation Code Theory

Karl Maton, Susan Hood, Suellen Shay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317372875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Education and knowledge have never been more important to society, yet research is segmented by approach, methodology or topic. Legitimation Code Theory or 'LCT' extends and integrates insights from Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein to offer a framework for research and practice that overcomes segmentalism. This book shows how LCT can be used to build knowledge about education and society. Comprising original papers by an international and multidisciplinary group of scholars, Knowledge-building offers the first primer in this fast-growing approach.

Through case studies of major research projects, Part I provides practical insights into how LCT can be used to build knowledge by:

- enabling dialogue between theory and data in qualitative research

- bringing together quantitative and qualitative methodologies in mixed-methods research

- relating theory and practice in praxis

- conducting interdisciplinary studies with systemic functional linguistics

Part II offers a series of studies of pressing issues facing knowledge-building in education and beyond, encompassing:

- diverse subject areas, including physics, English, cultural studies, music, and design

- educational sites: schooling, vocational education, and higher education

- practices of research, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment

- both education and informal learning contexts, such as museums and masonic lodges

Carefully sequenced and interrelated, these chapters form a coherent collection that gives a unique insight into one of the most thought-provoking and innovative ways of building knowledge about knowledge-building in education and society to have emerged this century. This book is essential reading for all serious students and scholars of education, sociology and linguistics.

1 Legitimation Code Theory

Building knowledge about knowledge-building

Karl Maton

A practical theory

‘“Data! Data! Data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay”’ (Conan Doyle 1892/1981: 268). Sherlock Holmes thereby declared a desire to neither proclaim without evidence nor assume the facts will speak for themselves. In contrast, research into education and society all too often falls for this false dichotomy of speculation or description. Despite Kant’s famous argument of 1781 suggesting theory without research is empty and research without theory is blind, the two frequently remain divorced or, at best, not on speaking terms. Researchers often seem faced with concepts that make sense until encountering the reality of data and empirical studies that lack explicit conceptual frameworks. Theory remains freely-floating, unable to fully connect with data; empirical descriptions remain mired in minute particulars, unable to reach beyond the specificities of their objects of study. Moreover, this is not the only forced choice faced by researchers of education and society: qualitative or quantitative methodologies, analysing practices or shaping them, generalizability or depth, humanism or science, behaviour or meaning, and so on. Typically presented as jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive, false dichotomies abound. It is as if above the entrance to the field is inscribed the legend ‘EITHER-OR’ and in crossing the threshold one must leave behind any possibility of ‘BOTH-AND’.

Such dichotomous thinking is deeply debilitating to knowledge-building about education and society. At the level of individual studies it gives rise to segmentation not only between theory and the data it purports to explain or the practice it aims to transform but also between potentially complementary frameworks, and between potentially complementary methodologies for enacting those frameworks. A perceived demand to make monotheistic choices leads researchers to prematurely renounce possibilities for explanatory power. At the level of the intellectual field, dichotomous thinking encourages the proliferation of strongly-segmented micro-fields, each addressing a discrete topic typically defined by various combinations of education sector (vocational, higher, etc.), institutional level (school, university, etc.), subject area (music, physics, etc.), and disciplinary approach (‘sociology of …’, ‘educational linguistics’, etc.). Further, this endemic exceptionalism recurs geographically: each national system, by virtue of some unique characteristic, is held to require its own, strongly-bounded field of research. The resulting fragmented specialisms are often unable to speak to one another, negating the possibility of cumulatively building knowledge across disparate phenomena and through time. In short, disciplinary, theoretical, methodological and substantive sectarianism is driving segmentalism within the study of education and society.

This book contributes to avoiding false dichotomies and overcoming segmentalism by illustrating an approach – Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) – that enables both the exploration of knowledge-building and the cumulative building of knowledge. Since LCT emerged at the turn of the century the framework has evolved into a multidimensional conceptual toolkit (Maton 2014b). Research enacting the framework is growing exponentially.¹ Its integrative potential is illustrated by education, where the theory is serving as a basis for empirical studies:

• into diverse practices (research, curriculum, teaching, learning, evaluation, attitudes, beliefs, identities, etc.);

• across the disciplinary map (from physics to ballet, engineering to jazz, educational technology to journalism);

• in all forms of institution (schools, vocational colleges, universities, etc.);

• at different levels of analysis (education system, discipline, institution, course, classroom, single text, individual wording, etc.);

• across national contexts (African, Asian, Australasian, European, North American, Scandinavian and South American countries);

• with other approaches (including numerous models, systemic functional linguistics and critical realism); and

• using a range of methods (such as qualitative interviews, quantitative surveys and documentary analysis).

As this diversity of topics, complementary frameworks and methodologies suggests, studies enacting LCT are animated less by a command to choose ‘either-or’ and more by pluralistic engagement with possibilities for generating greater explanatory power. To paraphrase Pierre Bourdieu, social research is something much too serious and too difficult to allow ourselves to mistake rigidity – ‘the nemesis of intelligence and invention’ – for rigour and thereby deprive ourselves of potential resources (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 227). Consequently, where the segmentation of much educational research affords only a fragmented account of education, studies enacting LCT are building on one another to embrace a growing range of issues (Maton 2014b: 196–217). They speak to each other through the theory. The framework thereby enables the possibility of a more integrated account of education.

LCT is being used not only to interpret the world in various ways but also to change it. Concepts from the framework reveal different dimensions of what Bourdieu called the ‘rules of the game’: the bases of achievement underlying social fields of practice. Such bases are often unwritten and unspoken, they ‘go without saying’ in ways that, when accessible only to actors from specific backgrounds, generate social inequality. By making such organizing principles visible, LCT enables these bases of achievement to become accessible to more actors, promoting social justice. They can be taught and learned, or changed. Accordingly, LCT concepts are being embedded, both explicitly and tacitly, within transformed and transformative practice, such as pedagogy and professional development.² Furthermore, uses of LCT are not confined to education. Studies are exploring and shaping diverse social fields of practice, including law (Martin et al. 2012), museums (Carvalho 2010), theatre (Hay 2014), and armed forces (Thomson 2014). It thus also holds open the possibility of generating an integrated account of society.

A guide to Knowledge-building

The rapidly-growing body of work enacting LCT is helping to overcome segmentalism in understanding education and society – it contributes towards knowledge-building. The current volume, Knowledge-building, illustrates how LCT enables such research and practice. Specifically, the book is structured into two main parts that offer complementary insights. Part I represents a kind of ‘primer’ in using LCT concepts in research and praxis by analysing projects that overcome false dichotomies between theory/data, quantitative/qualitative, theory/practice, and different disciplines. Part II provides a series of empirical studies, within and beyond education, that illustrate the explanatory power of the framework. Together, they offer insights into how research is enacting LCT across a diverse range of issues.

For the reader new to LCT, Knowledge-building can serve as an entry point on its own. This chapter introduces the framework and summarizes key concepts used in the book; each chapter briefly defines the concepts being enacted; and an ‘architectural glossary’ in Chapter 12 describes how concepts interrelate within the framework. Nonetheless, this book also builds on its precursor volume, Knowledge and Knowers (Maton 2014b). That volume delineated more of the conceptual framework and at greater length. It also demonstrated how LCT cumulatively builds knowledge by extending and integrating existing ideas within concepts that enable greater fidelity to more phenomena with improved cohesion and economy. However, space precluded extensive discussion there of the processes for putting the concepts to work. As I shall discuss, LCT is a practical theory of practice. Concepts can be enacted in empirical studies to engage in genuine dialogue with data and embedded within transformed practices to generate praxis. In Knowledge and Knowers showing how this can be done was but touched upon and discussion of studies was necessarily limited. In Knowledge-building the processes and products of enacting LCT in research move more to centre stage.

Part I: The craft of LCT

Part I of this book comprises four chapters in which research practice is foregrounded in reflexive analyses of major studies. They are somewhat unusual in focus, revealing what is typically hidden in published research: how finished products are reached. Moreover, they do so in an unusual fashion. Rather than discussions of method abstracted from research, each chapter reveals how theory, method and data were intimately related within the unfolding context of a real research study. However, rather than descriptive travelogues of the journey of a project, each chapter analyses the practices whereby the research was conducted, drawing lessons for future studies. These chapters thereby contribute to making visible the craft of LCT and making more available the gaze that guides research practice that is appropriately using the framework.

As indicated by their main titles, Part I chapters address how to enact LCT in: qualitative research (Chapter 2), mixed-methods research (Chapter 3), praxis (Chapter 4), and interdisciplinary research (Chapter 5). These issues are concretely addressed through discussion of the processes shaping major research studies into: the effects of constructivist pedagogy on student experiences (Chapter 2); low uptake of school music qualifications and the differential integration of educational technology in classrooms across the secondary school curriculum in the largest one-to-one laptop programme yet conducted (Chapter 3); the creation of mobile e-learning environments for informal learning contexts, such as museums (Chapter 4); and knowledge-building in secondary school History and Biology classrooms (Chapter 5).

At the same time, as indicated by their opening motifs, each chapter discusses how to use LCT to transcend a false dichotomy underlying segmentalism. Chapter 2 charts the processes unfolding through a qualitative research study for creating a ‘translation device’ that enables genuine dialogue between theory and data. Chapter 3 illustrates how to integrate qualitative and quantitative methodologies by tracing the evolution through mixed-methods studies of an instrument that embeds LCT concepts into the heart of quantitative data collection and analysis. Chapter 4 re-analyses the processes underlying the creation of ‘languages of enactment’ that embed LCT within practice to enable ‘informal learning of principled knowledge’. Chapter 5 describes the strategies evolved through an interdisciplinary research project that enacted LCT and systemic functional linguistics in complementary analyses of shared data. I should emphasize, however, that each chapter offers insights beyond its specific focus. For example, describing how a quantitative instrument was evolved in Chapter 3 reveals characteristics of LCT of relevance to research using any method, and discussing interdisciplinary research in Chapter 5 involves strategies that are applicable to studies using LCT only. Throughout Part I the focus is thus on explicating the craft of LCT, the principles underlying the practical processes shaping research projects, to enable future studies of different issues to contribute to knowledge-building.

Part II: Composing with LCT

Part II of the book shifts emphasis from processes towards products of research. These six chapters are more than mere ‘applications’. LCT is an explanatory framework rather than any specific substantive account and, as Archer (1995: 6) states, ‘an explanatory framework neither explains, nor purports to explain, anything’. Concepts and conjectures – the framework and outcomes of its enactment within specific studies – are not identical. LCT invites use to generate explanations and such use is anything but passive. As Bourdieu argued:

… just as music may be made not to be rather passively listened to, or even played, but to open the way to composition, so scientific works, in contrast to theoretical texts, call not for contemplation or dissertation, but for practical confrontation with experience; to truly understand them means to activate in relation to a different object the mode of thought they express, to reactivate it in a new act of production, just as inventive and original as the initial one.

(Bourdieu 1996: 180)

LCT is, metaphorically, music made to open the way to composition. Rather than recitals of a score, the chapters of Part II thus offer six examples of composition. They demonstrate the creative nature of research that involves the selection, assembly and enactment of concepts into uncharted waters. This recontextualization of elements of the framework may, in encounters with the specificities of objects of study and mediated through the dispositions of researchers, rework the concepts to capture, where successful, something new but essential for that study. Such shifts in meaning can then ‘speak back’ to the theory, potentially highlighting the need for conceptual refinement or new developments.

The chapters of Part II thus illustrate the active a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Legitimation Code Theory: building knowledge about knowledge-building
• PART I A practical theory: putting Legitimation Code Theory to work
• PART II Knowledge-building in education and beyond: studies enacting Legitimation Code Theory
• PART III Resources for knowledge-building
• References
• Index