In the first part of this book, three main strands were set out which would guide us through it; namely, Ethnography, New Literacy Studies and Bourdieu's theory of practice. The principal tenet of our argument has been that research practice seen from the perspectives of NLS and Bourdieu's work brings fresh insights into classroom language ethnography. The second part of the book then offered a series of practical case examples of classroom practice with a focus on the way language featured in different ways in pedagogic discourse. The aim has been to offer a range of theoretical viewpoints and practical exemplifications. However, such viewpoints and examples should not be seen as relative, as simply another way of looking at pupils, teaching and learning, but as providing a basis for a possible synthesis of the three approaches. At its inception, the book was conceived as an integrated text, rather than as an edited volume and, in this respect, the theoretical and practical chapters converge on a common position. In the two chapters of the present part, that common position is explored.
The sub-title of this chapter is ‘Working at the intersections of theory and practice’. This title was chosen in order to highlight the relationship between the practical contexts in which we are interested and the generalisable statements that may be made about them – and how, why, and in what terms? However, in the course of the chapter, a whole range of other intersections are examined: between pupil/student and teacher; language and literacy; linguistics and ethnography; Bourdieu and New Literacy Studies; and teaching and learning. Suffice it to say that each of these intersections raises issues of theory and practice, but the contention here is that they often converge on the same methodological and epistemological questions. This present chapter takes further just what can be understood when the case examples presented in Chapters 5 to 8 are considered from a theoretical perspective. The next chapter will develop an approach to classroom language ethnography based around Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice, both in technical and philosophical terms. However, first we take a step back and reconsider the theoretical background of taking an ethnographic view in educational research.
Chapter 2 showed just what a multi-faceted approach ethnography can be. Taking its name from anthropological practices in the social sciences, this methodological practice is rooted in a tradition which sets out to examine social phenomena in their natural (naturalistic) environment. In the past, this often involved the study of exotic cultures where religious and social practices were very different from those commonly known in the Western world, for example, Margaret Mead's cultural ethnography of growing up in New Guinea (Mead 2001/1930).
The intention here was to understand such cultures in their own terms from the point of view of an insider as well as to make sense of them from our own world views. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to find a precise definition of ethnography; such definitions vary from the holistic, but vague to the systematic, but prescriptive. For example, Boyle (1994) reports Werner and Schoepfle (1987: 42) as describing ethnography as little more than ‘what ethnographers do’, ‘or as a description of folk’. In contrast, for Hammersley and Atkinson (1993) it arises from the researchers’ participation in people's daily live (p. 2). For Hughes (1992) also, it is the study of a ‘localised group of people’, sharing similar social and cultural characteristics, and should be viewed as both ‘process and product’. Boyle (op. cit.) stresses its holistic and contextual nature, as well as the reflexive element necessary to its practice. These general characteristics can be related to the theoretical perspectives offered in Part I. Moreover, the practical examples in Part II also reflect these descriptors. But, why is such a perspective appropriate for educational contexts, particularly classrooms, and where does language feature in it?
As mentioned in Chapter 4, Bourdieu himself was concerned to understand cultural phenomenon ‘in their own terms’ – that is, ethnographically – but always argued for what he called a ‘socio-genetic’ reading of work; one which offered a way of understanding the historical and cultural forces that gave rise to, and shaped the phenomenon studied. With this is mind, it is worth taking a little time to consider ethnography's relation to educational research in general, and how it emerged as a dominant approach to understanding classroom practice. This discussion will tease out issues of theory and practice on which our own classroom language ethnography can be built. How so?
As mentioned in the Introduction to this book, until the mid-1960s, educational research was dominated by a positivist paradigm. In effect, such educational research as was carried out arose from psychology, and showed a marked preoccupation with measurement and standardisation of both pupils and pedagogy. The dominant language learning theory was based on behaviourism, and on the belief that education was all about induction into the right way of thinking and doing things. The nature and role of theory in education were primary issues. As we saw in Chapter 8, this view of educational research reinforces and reproduces the values and practices of those most dominant in a society. O'Connor's view (1958) of educational theory in the 1950s, such as it was, amounted to seeing it in terms of the dominant normative scientific paradigm: hence as a way of forming, evaluating, and connecting hypotheses which would explain particular educational phenomena. For him, ‘educational theory’ should be judged by the same standards as ‘scientific theory’.
The leading exponent of ‘scientific theory’ was, of course, the Austrian Karl Popper (1967), who argued that the strength and the descriptive power of any theoretical statement lay not so much in proving it to be ‘correct’ but by the degree to which it could be ‘falsified’; in other words, that it could generate statements that could be shown to be wrong. Everything else was supposition or worse, myth. Here, knowledge advanced as hypotheses were falsified, leading to further refined hypotheses. But what did this look like for education? Clearly, little in a functioning classroom has any degree of certainty or uncertainty that would satisfy the scientific Popperian criteria since what occurs there rarely has descriptive rigour against which underlying processes can be assessed; rarely is it predictive with any degree of confidence.
The philosopher Paul Hirst (1967) noticed this in the mid-1960s and, in his subsequent arguments, laid the basis of what we now know as the ‘foundation disciplines’ in education: its history, sociology, psychology and philosophy. Since a cultural understanding of educational contexts must surely include something of the social, historical, mental, and philosophical – not to mention other underlying political dimensions – such foundation disciplines would each feature in any ethnographic perspective. In this way, an ethnographic approach could be seen to have operated symbiotically across the foundation disciplines.
As early as 1967, the anthropologist Del Hymes had given us the idea of a ‘linguistic event’ and saw, in contradiction to Chomskyan linguistics, that there were ‘rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless’ (Hymes 1967). This view implied a socio-cultural reorientation to language and language learning. It is not surprising therefore that the ‘new’ sociology of education referred to in Chapter 4 focused on how language functioned as a means to construct classroom knowledge rather than simply on the measurement of performance, intelligence, etc. A similar historical reorientation led to the recognition and inclusion of local perspectives, individual biography, and personal trajectories in the contextualisation of the objects of study in educational research. Meanwhile, philosophy increasingly took on ‘the Post-modern Condition’ with its heightened sense of reflexivity, relativity, and understanding of linguistic signs and signifiers as arbitrary in nature. For ethnographers such as Clifford and Marcus (1986), anthropologies were to be ‘read’ in terms of ‘politics and poetics’; and, moreover, this was to apply not simply of those being studied, but to the researcher themselves. Even psychology took on a social constructivist temperament via the existential applications of such writers as R.D. Laing (Laing 1966 and 1971). This thumbnail sketch shows the qualitative leanings that educational research adopted for much of the last quarter of the twentieth century; in other words, educational research became ethnographic in one form or another.
As noted above, the philosophy of man in the twentieth century in many ways became the philosophy of language; linguistics metaphors such as ‘discourse’ and ‘signs’ were used increasingly to describe socio-cultural phenomena. However, this convergence disguises a fundamental opposition at the heart of these trends: that which existed between the social and the psychological. This tension can be found everywhere across the social sciences. Even in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1966/1916), we detect a paradox: on the one hand, Saussure's work served as grounding principles for modern linguistics, with their focus on psychological process; on the other hand, philosophers adopted the very same Saussurian principles in their development of postmodernism as the guiding principles for a contemporary philosophy of man.
A similar tension was present in classroom language research where, during the 1960s and 1970s, there was a collision, in language terms, between a structural-grammar approach to language learning, and thinking dominated by behaviourism where educational research and practice focused on classroom linguistic events. For first language learning (L1), this amounted to a continuing preoccupation with literacy interpreted as skills and techniques, especially in reading and writing. For second language learning (L2), a grammar translation methodology dominated pedagogy. During the 1960s, two things impacted on this opposition, so that a blurring of the boundaries between the social and the psychological occurred, but in a way that left the tensions between the two unresolved and, to some extent, implicit. The first was the Chomskyan revolution (Chomsky 1968), and with it the notion that language was not only an innate property of the brain – physiologically based – but that there existed a natural Language Acquisition Device that could be access through pedagogy. The second was the socio-cultural reorientation that was taking place in the social sciences, and with it the rise of naturalistic methods of investigating educational contexts. Hymes’ restatement (op. cit.) of Chomskyan competence as communicative competence is a good example of attempts to socialise the psychological. This point has serious ramifications for the theoretical perspectives, which subsequently guided classroom language ethnographies. The work of researchers such as Barnes et al. (1969), referred to in Chapter 4, still sought to find answers to questions of language and learning in the structure and form of language itself. Open and closed questions, Flanders’ teacher talk law of two-thirds (Flanders 1965) and the ‘I-R-F’ sequences of Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) are, essentially, about language and its use. In this sense, and despite being rooted in real classroom contexts, an internalist view of language was adopted rather than attempting to construct language learning as a series of socio-cultural events, with all that implies in terms of agency and context. This tradition continues to this day in all studies, which explore classroom discourse in terms of the structure of language itself without considering it in relationship to its social and cultural provenance including both teachers and pupils. Even where a more socio-cultural perspective on classroom discourse was taken – for example, in the chapters in Knowledge and Control, referred to in Chapter 4 – the focus was on the language event itself. For example, Keddie (1971) was interested in the way that teachers’ pre-formed views of pupils’ abilities shaped interactions between them to the extent that they could be transcended. She argued that the language classroom, and language in the classroom, were thus prone to a kind of miscommunication that could be eradicated by a more informed approach on the part of teachers, and which could lead to the restructuring of subsequent pedagogic discourse.
A similar substantive intent, albeit implicit, underlies a more social constructivist approach to language learning, for example, in the perspectives adopted from the Soviet psycholinguist, Lev Vygotsky (see Vygotsky 1962, 1978). As noted in Chapter 4, Vygotsky developed a ‘dialectical’ approach to the tension between the social and the psychological in which nothing appeared in the internal, without first appearing in the external. The limit of how far this could take place was regulated by the notion of the ‘Zone of Proximal Development’: the position where optimal teaching and learning could take place. Indeed, it was the responsibility of the teacher to pitch a lesson appropriately within a child's ZPD. Thought and language were intimately connected with the primary cognitive act, where the child engages with the world – both socially and materially. Control was a key feature of this developing engagement: control of self, others and objects. A seminal text, Common Knowledge (Edwards and Mercer, 1987), was intent on taking this further by highlighting the meta-structures of language events in the classroom, as the way in which knowledge and understanding are shared between teachers and pupils, and pupils with each other. In later work, and under the influence of Bruner (1986), the teaching within the ZPD was ‘re-invented’ as ‘scaffolding’. This analytic metaphor itself conjures up the image of support and structure, and was interpreted as such. Mercer (1981) himself emphasises the way that pupils are supported through scaffolding provided by the teacher, and even ‘brought back on line’ when they stray.
Such social constructivist approaches are no less ‘normative’ than the structural-grammar methods of the previous decades. Essentially language events, and the way they mediate teaching and learning, are interpreted from a normative functionalist point of view which, no less than classical functionalism, sees them in terms of prescribed ways of thinking and doing things with words. Standard values and norms in language are therefore the order of the day, all of which are seen as necessary skills and prerequisites for the (linguistic) health of society. This is what Street (1984) was implicitly criticising with his call to New Literacy Studies (NLS): contra literacy as an autonomous realm into which pupils need to be inducted, and promoting an understanding of literacy as a socio-historical construction constituted through language events played out by specific individuals in particular learning contexts . Much of the rest of this book is about the realisation of this understanding of literacy.
So, NLS was important because it broke away from a view of literacy as a series of independent technical skills and developed researchers’ understanding of it as an ideological construct, as one that was contingent on historical practices. However, such an ideological approach cannot be without a theoretical foundation and guiding principle, and thus conceptual tools to guide practice. Such tools imply and impose their own narrative, which have important ramifications for what we think, indeed, what we can think, about literacy events. Heller (2008: 51), for example, is not alone in arguing that there is a paradox at the heart of NLS – one met earlier in this chapter. On the one hand, it wishes to avoid any view of literacy as socially and cognitively developmental because, as a term, it runs the risk of universalising its subject and of falling into a kind of social neo-Darwinism akin to the normative functionalism described above. On the other hand, NLS seems no less wedded to a form of Vygotskyan social constructivism which focuses on the interplay between an individual and their context, the psychological and the social, purely in and through the mediation of language form. Language cannot – as in the autonomous approaches to literacy – be seen simply as a ‘foundational mode’ of thinking, rather, it is to be understood as historically located and embedded in actual social relations. It is in this respect that Bourdieu can be particularly useful. Indeed, it might be argued that, in contrast to many of the other chapters in Knowledge and Control, where Bourdieu focuses on academic discourse he is less interested in the phenomenology of classroom interactions. Rather, he sets out to highlight the need to analyse how classrooms, and thus pedagogic knowledge, is constructed as a previously given within and across fields. The accent here is not so much the actuality of classroom discourse, although this is needed as a practical exemplification of process, but on how it is shaped and formed by external conditions, which themselves are to be articulated as a ‘social structuration’ within existing relations of power. In effect, it can be argued that Bourdieu was more focussed on structural relations between individuals (pupils and teachers) and the fields that surrounded them, and on the consequences that these relations had for what is thought and how, than on the actuality of classroom discourse and its levels of (mis)communication (see Hardy 2010 for a recent example.) As we have stressed in this book, for Bourdieu, literacy can only be a question of legitimate language; that is, what is consecrated, who is sanctioned to speak – and how, at any particular place and time – and the values that mediate literacy events. In this, literacy is best understood in terms of the relational structures between individuals and the field itself.
This section has highlighted some of the tensions to be found at the intersections of the social and the cognitive, between teaching and learning, with NLS and Bourdieu's theory of practice. These oppositions are explored further, in both this chapter and in Chapter 10, in terms of the practical case examples given earlier in the book. Before this discussion, the way and extent to which theory features in these debates is reconsidered.
In the previous section, I referred to the nature of theory and contrasted its ‘scientific’ and ‘educational’ forms. Behind my present discussion is the question: what is the form and role of theory in the perspectives under consideration? Is there a theory of New Literacy Studies? What are the ‘theoretical’ aspects of Bourdieu's ‘theory of practice’? How does theory feature in ethnography? Most importantly, what are we to understand by ‘theory’ in our proposed ‘classroom language ethnography’?
In a Popperian view of ‘scientific theory’, it was not just that theory should be judged in terms of the extent to which it can be falsified, but that what resulted from such an approach was seen as ‘objective knowledge’; that is, ‘knowledge without a knowing subject’. Popper argued for an understanding of our surroundings in terms of what he called three worlds: World 1 was the world of physical objects; World 2 that of subjective impressions, and, World 3 was the world of objective truth which was dependent neither on physical manifestation nor subjective assertion. For Popper, even if every living creature on the Earth disappeared, the boiling point of water would continue to be 100 degrees centigrade. Such objective reality was beyond observation or interpretation. As noted earlier, the view of early philosophers of education with respect to theory was not dissimilar; especially in a psychologically based paradigm which concentrated on psychometric measures. Here, there is a direct, linear and one-way relationship between theory and practice, as shown in Figure 9.1.
The simple relationship shown in Figure 9.1 was soon eclipsed by Hirst (1967) with his view that ‘educational theory’ occupied a special place between the science of the normative foundation disciplines (sociology, philosophy, psychology and history) and actual classroom practice. For Hirst, it was not so much that ‘educational theory’ could not match the criteria which were to be fulfilled to be recognised as ‘scientific theory’ but that the latter misrepresented and undervalued the place of theory in education. Educational theory according to Hirst could (and should) provide ‘principles of practice’ (pedagogy) for education through a deeper grasp of the nature of learning, the values which underpinned it, and the background context in which it took place. Just as physics and chemistry drew on mathematics to develop theoretical positions, so educational theory could draw on the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, history and sociology to develop an understanding of what to do in practice. Thus, principles for educational action could be justified according to the findings and rationale of such foundation disciplines. In other words, theory's role was to tell practice what to do, or at least to provide a principled framework. When these inter-relationships are represented diagrammatically, ‘justifying educational principles’ provide mediation between the foundation disciplines and classroom practice (see Figure 9.2).
FIGURE 9.1 The direct relationship of theory to practice
The autonomous view of literacy as generic skills and competences which was outlined earlier in this book, is an example of this type of educational theory; in that, a certain way of defining reading and writing, based on experimental tests, is used to conceptualise what it is to read and write in terms of certain skills and techniques, and to construct an appropriate classroom teaching methodology designed to make sure that pupils learn them. Here ‘justifying educational principles’ (JEP) about literacy skills and competence are used to ‘tell teachers how to teach’ literacy.
The relationship between behaviourism (theory) and audio-visual/lingual approaches (practice) to the teaching of modern foreign languages in the 1960s and 1970s offers another example of normative educational theory justified by foundation disciples. More recently, the National Literacy Strategy (DfES 1998) which was implemented as government policy in the UK in the 1990s and 2000s adopted a certain approach to reading – phonics as opposed to real books – which was predicated on a particular theoretical view of reading and how one should therefore be taught to read (See Figure 9.3). These examples illustrate two important features of this discussion: first, the contested nature of theory; second, the way it can operate in the field to determine actual classroom practice. Nonetheless, this form of theoretical knowledge is not the only type of knowledge operating in classrooms and educational contexts. A more complex, if highly abstract view of theory, that of the German social philosopher Jürgen Habermas, shows that this view of knowledge is only partial. For Habermas, one form of knowledge was indeed ‘normative,’ what he termed ‘nomothetical’ (see Habermas 1987, 1989). However, this form of knowledge was to be contrasted with other forms, such as the ‘critical’ and the ‘hermeneutic’ – the former revealed underlying socio-political processes whilst the latter took account of ‘subjective knowledge’. A key point for Habermas was that one form of knowledge was not necessarily better than another, but that each disclosed different interests. So, whilst ‘nomothetical’ knowledge supported the formation of generalisable rules as its outcome, the ‘critical’ addressed the social and political potential of knowledge, and the ‘hermeneutic’ underpinned experiential and interpretative knowledge. Clearly, all of these may be applied in an educational context, where not all questions can or should be reduced to the instrumentality of teaching and learning from a technicist point of view. Here, it is no longer the case that theory simply ‘tells practice what to do’, but that ‘practice’ actively engages with theory from a critical perspective. Of course, teachers do operate in classrooms according to principles which themselves are based on theoretical perspectives, as shown in the Figure 9.2. However, the process depicted in Figure 9.2 omits an important aspect of educational practice: teachers’ own rationale for their classroom actions which are most often generated from their own past (practical) experience. Much of this knowledge is fragmented, intuitive, affective, holistic and highly contextual. For this reason, it is termed ‘tacit knowledge’ (Polyani 1998/1958) – that practical ‘horse-sense’ that is the prerogative of the experienced practitioner.
FIGURE 9.2 The mediation of justifying education principles
FIGURE 9.3 The mediation of justifying principles of phonetics on teaching of reading
It is probably worth pausing now to consider the nature of this ‘tacit’ knowledge from a theoretical perspective. Polyani writes that an ‘act of knowing exercises a personal judgement in relating evidence to an external reality, an aspect of which (s)he is seeking to apprehend’ (Polanyi 1998/1958: 24–5). As stated, such tacit knowledge is essentially intuitive and subjective. As it emerges from practice, it is also contingent on a practical context to be re-activated at a particular point in time. In some respects, it is the very opposite to Popper's objective, or World 3, knowledge without a knowing subject, since it is, in fact, subjective, World 2, knowledge, with only a knowing subject. This type of knowledge could be seen as almost being ‘pretheoretical’. Such a statement implies a level of subjectivity that might seem unstable, hyper relative, and even arbitrary. However, this is not the case with tacit knowledge which is based on a practitioner's experience and, therefore, has an internal coherence based on an individual's classroom practice, but articulated to varying degrees. One way of elucidating this point is to return to the nature, or characteristics, of theory itself. So far, the predictive quality of theory has been stressed, but, that is not its only attribute. Theory must also be understood in terms of its other essential features. Theory is a reduction: it must express something complex in a simpler form. Theory is intended to be useful: neither a theory that expresses the obvious, nor one that is too obscure to be of much use in a practical context. Moreover, a theory must be expressible and readily articulated: it must not be just a hunch, because it must be communicated from one person to another. Finally, a theory must have some degree of coherence and regularity. In other words, it must pertain to more than a single event. Tacit knowledge, as I have described it, shares many of these characteristics; in that it is useful, generalisable, coherent and a reduction of complexity. In this respect, if tacit knowledge is not exactly ‘theoretical’ from a Popperian, scientific point of view, it does share many of the features of such theory. This type of theory, which reflects articulated tacit knowledge, will be referred to as ‘fundamental educational theory’ (see Vandenberg 1974), as shown in Figure 9.4.
It is ‘fundamental’ since it is still highly personal and contingent; ‘educational’ since it pertains to classroom practice; and ‘theoretical’ in that it shares the theoretical features outlined in the last paragraph. However, there is still one feature to examine more closely – the ‘articulated’ nature of theory: that theory can be expressed, communicated and therefore shared. Many of the statements made in the practical case examples in Part II of this book are examples of ‘fundamental education theory’ since they arise from practice; they are subjective in many cases, and yet they express issues of principle and practice which are of general relevance, and therefore, cannot be viewed as relative, arbitrary, and sui generis. Researchers working within a New Literacy Studies paradigm do make use of appropriate theoretical underpinnings from the foundation disciplines but what marks NLS as distinctive is the central position it gives to literacy as contextually defined practice. Since this approach sees literacies as socio-cultural practices, dependent on actual events, particular places, and on individuals’ articulation of how to teach and learn literacy, the outcomes of NLS studies offer examples of ‘fundamental educational theory’.
The next step in this investigation of educational knowledge is to consider these different types of theory in relationship to one another as a continuum.
Each theoretical area in Figure 9.5 is distinct but inter-related. In other words, the different types of knowledge under discussion are represented in terms of their relational rather than their substantive nature. In this respect, they are dependent on time and place and on specific interactions. The ‘triangle’ is a representation of the variety of relationships which exist between theory and practice. Since Bourdieu's approach to research was predicated on a ‘theory of practice’, the area at the top of the triangle is particularly pertinent because, for him, any research undertaking must begin with a consideration of a practical, empirical context; any object of research must be studied in its practical environment (its field context) and at the same time, the activity of research itself is viewed as a practical engagement. Here, both the researched – teachers and their students – and the researchers themselves are implicated in the research activity and in how its findings are constructed. Hence, in Bourdieu's theory of practice, it would be necessary to see the triangle both in terms of the object of research and the practice of the researchers themselves.
FIGURE 9.4 Fundamental educational theory – knowledge with a knowing subject
On the right hand side of the triangle, a form of knowledge is represented which is predicated on an explicit expression of knowledge formed in practice – an articulation of tacit knowledge itself. The best way of describing and supporting such a process as theoretical is with recourse to philosophical resources based around phenomenology. Fundamental educational theory can therefore be understood in terms of an imminent reflection on practice where, in the terms used in Chapter 4, the noema is expressed through an engagement with an individual noetic event. This is what tells us what we know about such an event at that point in time. In contrast, if we look at the left hand side of the triangle, educational theory, or principles of practice, provide a stable objectification of what we know about a particular research object – for example literacy. This knowledge itself is formed on the basis of the natural sciences, aspects of which are normative. It is ‘theoretical’ to the extent that it conforms to the type of characteristics outlined above: generalisability, articulated, useful, simplified and predictable. This knowledge source informs and is informed by practice. However, it is formed at some theoretical distance from practice and takes little account of tacit knowledge.
FIGURE 9.5 Relationships between different types of knowledge (based on Vandenberg 1974)
The completed triangle (Figure 9.5) demonstrates the inter-relationships between three distinctive types of knowledge – tacit knowledge, fundamental educational theory and justified educational principles and shows the theoretical underpinnings for each as justification for regarding theory and practice in this particular way. From a more ethnographic perspective, the sides of the triangle might be described as ‘application’ – left hand – and ‘understanding’ – right hand (see also Gitlin et al., 1989). Further, the left and the right sides of the triangle respectively represent knowledge which mirrors Bourdieu's objective and subjective knowledge. They therefore conform to the type of structural understanding set out in Chapter 4, as being both ‘structured’ and ‘structuring’. It is worth remembering that Bourdieusian science seeks to go beyond the opposition of these two to a synthesis, so that a new form of praxeological understanding can be constructed out of research activity. In this way, the horizontal arrowed lines provide links at the bottom of the triangle – between left and right; objective and subjective; nomothetical and phenomenological. These links are particularly important as it is here that the epistemological breaks of which Bourdieu writes, the synthesis to which he aspires, and the praxeological knowledge he is attempting to open up, are occurring (see Bourdieu 1977/1972: 1–2). In other words, nomothetical knowledge – justifying educational principles – must connect with fundamental educational knowledge, and vice versa, all whilst both of these take account of practice as represented by tacit knowledge. The triangle is, therefore, to be seen as dynamic which expresses both discrete items within the theory-practice continuum, and their constantly changing inter-relationships.
In its abstract form, the triangle represented in Figure 9.5 awaits practical application to the real world. Indeed, we might see this application as the ‘return of the repressed’ to the construction; namely the actuality of agency and context – the people and the places. To put this more succinctly and in Bourdieusian terms, the triangle must be articulated through the lens of habitus and field. This is particularly important at the practice end of the triangle where practice occurs in a field context that is both structuring and structured. The most obvious examples of this are the material spaces of classrooms, their physicality and ideational structures, for example, and the logic of practice enshrined in curricula and actualised in classroom pedagogy. A classroom is liable to a full field analysis and at the same time, the agents involved – teachers and pupils – who come with their own backgrounds, attitudes and experiences can be studied in terms of constituents of habitus at play. What happens in the classroom for teaching and learning happens at the interface of this habitus and this field context. The triangle can therefore be actualised socio-genetically. If we are exploring theory and practice in classroom language ethnography, we need to do it both in terms of theory and practice, as represented in different sites of activity, and in terms of the habitus-field interface being played out in those sites. For the top of the triangle, this may be actual classroom practice and teachers’ and students’ habitus. However, on the left side, activity is to be accounted for in terms of the structures of the academic field in question and the habitus of those involved in it – the researchers and academics. Acknowledgement of this amounts to a reflexive stance, about which more in the next chapter. Indeed, it is also possible to see the academic activity of research as the object researched. In this case, it would be possible to set this at the top of the triangle – as a practice – and therefore as a source of both objective principles formed within the established field and fundamental theory as an expression of personal tacit knowledge with respect to the academic object under study. Both of these forms of theory will necessarily reflect the interests of the field itself, and any consequent biases. For Bourdieu, all this would be articulated through a field analysis which would, ipso facto, include detail of the way that individuals’ habitus supports particular position taking and differing degrees of dominance within the particular social environment.
With this view of the inter-relationships of different types of theory as a background, I now want to return to the practical examples presented in Part II of the book to consider in more detail how these are theorised. What features of field and habitus can be found there? And, to what extent do the studies offer us examples of the types of knowledge forms raised in the above discussion of theory and practice.
The LETTER project is offered as an example of how research is undertaken within a NLS approach, but it can be viewed in different ways. It can be understood as a specific intervention by researchers interested in adult literacy into a specific field – that of female literacy in Uttar Pradesh. But, it is not research in a pure sense – ‘research for research's sake’ – since it arises out a practical need and reflects a very deliberate strategy of social engagement in overseas development. This approach itself defines a certain relationship to the object of research, and thus, a certain modus operandi, which itself must be understood in terms of the structured and structuring habitus of all those involved with the project. The researchers, the literacy trainers and the Dalit women each come with differing degrees of academic capital, and with particular epistemological orientations. For example, not only are the researchers amongst the originators of New Literacy Studies itself – and therefore occupying legitimated positions within the academic field – but they also have in common particular dispositions and methodological approaches. To acknowledge the existence of multiple literacies, to see them as a social construction and, as events susceptible to ideological infusion, the researchers have developed what is termed an ‘ethnographic perspective’, which they distinguish from ‘straight’ ethnography. For the researchers, their ‘practice’ in undertaking interventions in India is, therefore, guided by principles of practice derived from such an ethnographic perspective. This perspective can be objectified in terms of the human sciences as grounding principles for a particular theoretical orientation. The orientation would be placed on the left hand side of the triangle in Figure 9.5 as ‘justifying educational principles’.
This research can also be seen as a study of how one field interacts intentionally with other national, regional and local fields. The researchers will also have their own personal as well as academic habitus and, their practice itself will be shaped by tacit knowledge developed from previous experience of similar projects. Their work takes place at the intersection of three distinctive fields: that of the study itself, the national field of adult education in India together with the international academic field of the researchers, and the local field of Dalit culture. This inter-relationship of fields is not uncommon in an academic field (and is not dissimilar to Bourdieu's own (see The Algerians 1962/1958)
The object of research, the rural Dalit women of Nirantir, exists in a state of ‘empirical practice’, apparently unencumbered by any engagement with objective principles or articulations of fundamental theory. From the perspective of the academic field, their habitus is that of the naïve, unreflexive state, subsumed by a common sense relation to the field that surrounds them. As Street states in Chapter 5: ‘the women themselves were to a large extent unconscious of their distinctiveness’. The project focus is on training local teachers to discover more about these alternative ways of looking at the world, and about pre-existing Dalit literacies and numeracies. For NLS, this is an ethnographic study of the literacies practices of the Dalit. From a Bourdieusian perspective, this project is an investigation into the structures of the local Dalit field, what acts as capital, and how it engages with the broader social space.
As noted in Chapter 4, Bourdieu often began with a key observation. Here, the key observation is the fact that the local field is a great deal more sophisticated than first thought because these women have alternative ways of looking at the world. For example, they see rivers as animate objects in contrast to Western categories which define them as inanimate. This alternative way of interpreting the world is itself a question of legitimation: which is acceptable? Clearly, in principle, both can be adopted and, in their respective fields, probably are. However, ‘improving literacy’ may mean learning what would be acceptable as ‘correct’ within a Western literacy event.
There are three key points to make here. First, the women's practice is both unconscious and tacit. Moreover, they do not recognise that it is the very thinking structures derived from their surrounding local field – their habitus – which in part positions them as a highly dominated group within the broader social space. They are unaware of the symbolic power of this way of thinking, in a negative sense.
Second, an important aspect of the study was the way that adult education practitioners were trained in ethnographic style research, who then trained adult teachers to conduct research into their own learning groups. In other words, an indirect approach to the rural women was made through local trainers and facilitators. In this way, objective principles of practice where passed on which, in practice, could be used to explore tacit thinking and knowledge. They are trained ‘to see’ with a particular ‘ethnographic eye’.
Third, this method itself discloses a different structural form to the researched in terms of the relation between the field of knowledge and those who are to be the object of instruction. As pointed out, normally, literacy is seen as a deficit. It is therefore assumed that the ‘illiterate’ must be instructed in what can be regarded as a legitimate way of speaking and writing. The resultant method is ‘top-down’ and one-way: from field to habitus, as the latter is brought back ‘into line’ with the dominant culture. However, the LETTER project began with what existed ‘in the field’ and the habitus of those involved, and worked outwards to construct a field of literacy informed both by local and national patterns. Such an approach is essentially dialogic in the same way as the theory-practice triangle suggests above, and is predicated on principles, logics, and norms found in habitus and field and their intersection.
To conclude this brief consideration of the LETTER Project, there are two further points I would like to stress. First, in these microanalyses of ethnographic context, quite a small amount of data can, if sufficiently analysed, render enormously important information on underlying generative structures, and the principles of practice which constitute them. Second, the focus of such analyses might begin with seemingly mundane artefacts and events: for example, calendars, routine statements, etc. Both may seem quite simple compared to the academic arsenal. However, both observations are consistent with Bourdieu's own practice.
Similar issues of perspective can be identified in Chapter 6 on pupils’ creativity. A distinctive feature of this chapter is the researcher objectifying her own generating principles and stating explicitly what she was interested in: the unfolding stories that children used when making boxes. A second key feature is the clear relationships she identifies with the broader national space through its policy for socio-economically deprived regions – Creative Partnership Funds. The context, that of 6- and 7-yearold children constructing objects out of classroom materials, is a relatively mundane one, but one with rich potential. In terms of the research itself, the researcher and the teacher are at least in part working at cross purposes. The ‘pedagogic habitus’ of the researcher has been shaped by academic readings – for example, texts by Williams (1989) and Steadman (1983). The ‘pedagogic habitus’ of the teacher, on the other hand, was predicated on her interest in art and craft, design technology, and her experience with artists in the classroom. Whose reality is real? At one point, Bourdieu writes about the ‘scholastic fallacy’ as skholè (Bourdieu, 2000/1997) defined in terms of leisure. This does not mean that researchers take it easy, but that they have a ‘non-empirical’ relationship to the part of the world they study. As soon as they adopt a semi-objective stance towards the world, their relationship to it changes. They do not live in this world in its everyday, sensual sense, as a naïve experience, since they have a different interest in it. The problem is then, when, and how scholastic interest imposes itself on their view of the world, with all its preformed interpretations and constructions. In other words, a certain – academic – view is imported into reality which is then used to describe it as real. The result is the re-integration, with its self-referential confirmation, of the scholastic view that is now passed on as a deeper truth than the thing itself – scholastic fallacy incarnate. What a ‘different eye’ demonstrates is one researcher beginning to create a reflexive space where such processes are objectified, as part of her research practice – an example of the articulation of ‘fundamental educational theory’ of research practice. This degree of reflexivity, however small, is significant since it is integrated into the object of research itself. This researcher's view is clearly identifiable in her discussion of the pupils’ dialogues where what is sought is a deep understanding of the inherent structure of what is occurring. The author contrasts her interests with the teacher's focus on ‘the progressive pedagogic space’, on how the children respond and on what she is doing, for example when she says ‘I try to make the projects more children-led …’.
What is reported appears as a simple classroom project, but one that is made up of a complex array of features, all intertwined in a fluid and dynamic way. Returning to the triangle, the teacher's own principles of practice, derived from her training and experience – her practice and tacit knowledge – motivate her to do what she does, but this time shaped by and through the educational principles made explicit in specific curricular initiatives – National Literacy Strategy and Creative Partnerships. These projects, which themselves were shaped and funded by governmental policy, set out to use artistic experience and creativity as vehicles for the social inclusion of economically deprived groups (here an ex-mining community in north-east England). The National Literacy Strategy was a key component in this mission. As such, Creative Partnerships were shaped by a certain rhetoric about what constitutes creativity and how it should unfold in the classroom.
By adopting a ‘linguistic ethnographic’ approach, the researcher was able to highlight aspects of creativity in the language of the classroom. What we see is a coming together of different languages of creativity: first, in the field context of this classroom, the language of the pupils in expressing what they are doing, interacts with that of the teacher coming from her own interests and pedagogic habitus; second, the language of the researcher, based on her own experience as teacher and researcher re-presents the broader perspectives of an academic field’ and third, the language of the principles of practice of governmental policy is enshrined in curricular documents and actualised in aspects of classroom pedagogy. What we see is creativity as an individual and external event – a specific site context, a field, and a field within fields – all somehow being played out in the dynamic of pupilpupil and pupil-teacher relations, to a greater or lesser extent. Moreover, we see such a dynamic as sedimented in literacy events, in the very language of discourse, its genres, and the knowledge bases drawn upon to express them. One might ask, then, what are the rules of creativity? And, how are they shaping these events? Bourdieu's theory of practice combines with our triangle of practice to allow us to navigate through the data in formulating a response to such questions.
Creativity is also the focus of the research reported in Chapter 7; although, here, the learners involved are perceived as underachieving in their literacy lessons. The rubric ‘underachieving’ is an explicit expression of an aspect of the logic of practice of education: the assumption of normality, legitimised as such by those most dominant in the field, and offering consecration to those who conform to it. These students have not yet gained this acknowledgement, even though one might argue that they are not wildly deviant from ‘the norm’. Rowsell accepts their non-conformity. Their lack of achievement in more traditional English lessons is her starting point, which is to offer them creative opportunities through their film making, with whatever technical skills they are able to procure. In one way, the practice of the students (and of their teacher) is not directly informed by formal educational principles at all. Although it is possible to set their pedagogical activity in the context of official curricular requirements, it is innovative and therefore unorthodox and could also be read as in opposition to this doxa. The students’ film-making practice has a product, which itself is seen as sedimentation of habitus, albeit partial, in other words, as containing slices of a particular form of life histories. The ‘fractal habitus’ of the title refers to these ‘slices’.
Elsewhere, Rowsell (op cit.) has worked with artists’ experience of ‘fatherhood’: an experience where, on becoming a father, individuals respond consciously and unconsciously by adjusting their life view and lifestyle (habitus) as a result of this dramatic change in their personal history. This chapter demonstrates the way similar adjustments are made by underachieving students who have experienced personal dislocations, for example, through family immigration from Israel or Australia or more simply, through a holiday to Niagara. These students, offered the model of Homer's account of Odysseus’ journey home, expressed their own personal experiences of dislocation in artistic and linguistic practices, in this case, film. The focus of the work is both deeply psychological and phenomenological. The creative act itself can again be seen as a relation between noema and noesis as part of a dynamic and personal response within specific site contexts. Of necessity, this response entails a certain challenge to the self in the demands it puts upon the individual. Bourdieu writes of his own disrupted experiences – in rural south-west France and in Paris, for example –as resulting in a cleft habitus which he describes as a ‘coincidence of contraries’, one which ‘helped to institute … an ambivalent and contradictory relationship to the academic institutions, combining rebellion and submission, rupture and expectation …’ (Bourdieu 2007/2004: 100). To a lesser extent, fractal habitus, as exemplified by these students’ films, is not dissimilar. Personal adaptation with respect to times of crisis and challenge is always a form of control over self, others, and the material world in which dispositions are reinforced, modified, or attenuated in the face of the situations presented to individuals. In this case, the challenge is the creative act into which ‘bits’ of the student self are expressed and sedimented as ‘multimodal texts’ in a way which parallels the process involved in the formation and articulation of fundamental educational theory. Through the external and internal shifts involved, we see the way that the identity of the self can be ‘repositioned’ by objectifiying the structural relations that surround it and the forces they exert on individual action.
The highly personal undertaking of film making can be compared to the more formal field setting of the English classroom in a way which makes explicit their relative positioning with respect to consecrated forms of literacy, literature and pedagogy. Literacy, in this case, takes on an unorthodox multimodal dimension, including both written and visual texts defining the producer and the product in terms of creativity (agency) and medium (context). A fractal habitus can also be seen to be a fractured habitus in the narratives emerging from this activity, as they juxtapose working with and against the ‘rules of the games’ set in formal pedagogic discourses.
It is important to see this research activity in terms of its framing. By adopting a specific ‘ethnographic perspective’ the researcher is using the approach both as a pedagogical principle, in setting up the classroom activity, and as a research approach to the collection and analysis of data arising from it. The researcher undertakes to make a film herself as a way of positioning herself reflexively both in the classroom and in the research. Central to both activities is the development of a language to talk about them. In a globalised world, we are used to acknowledging multimodal communications as alternative forms of discourse. However, it is not enough for the students in this case simply to express their ideas in their own terms; they also have to address the differences in relations between their own text and more traditional texts – here Homer's Odyssey. What this case finally offers is an opportunity to consider the valuation of texts in literature and in less doxic media in terms of the cultural capital at play and, in so doing, to understand its provenance and functioning in the literary field and in the broader cultural field. In this way, theory provides an underlying language of critique to shape the ethnographic perspective employed.
The sedimentation of theory into practical action can also be identified in the microanalysis of the lesson in the reading classroom case study. The focus here is on race and culture, in that the school context under consideration is predominantly an African-American one. There is then an explicit observable differentiation between the cultures dominant inside and outside the school. Of particular note here are the very evident structural relations between the dominant forms of pedagogy, as prescribed in official documents, and in the actual discourse of this classroom of African-American students. Moreover, such differences should not be seen simply in terms of linguistic morphology, but as consequences of the contrasting logics of practice from which they are constituted.
Bloome and Brown show how the state defines its official literacy pedagogy in terms of the requisite skills needed to be effective in the workplace, and that these ‘justified educational principles’ are supported by a series of ‘national’ research reports –normative science. State action is therefore legitimised and seen to be both neutral and scientific. Of course, that neutrality is itself an ideological position, that of the most dominant, and one that asserts a particular reading of literacy – autonomous – over a cultural one where literacy is seen as a social construction, and thus both arbitrary, and ultimately relative. For the symbolic violence of pedagogy (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977a/1970) to do its work, nothing further has to be done. The same is asked from all students (justified in terms of equity), all whilst knowing that the tasks are in fact highly differentiated so that not all can deliver the same. And, by being invisible, presented as neutral and scientific, the differential challenge is misrecognised and is all the more pernicious and effective for that.
Cultural difference – between two cultures (one of the school and one of the community) – has long been recognised. As the authors assert, such a difference has often led to policies of compensation and other less legitimated strategies of celebration and resistance. However, at base there is a paradox for the individuals involved: namely, what is required of them is a ‘double consciousness’, a kind of ambidexterity which requires a student to be competently operative in two totally distinct ‘languages’. At the heart of that demand lies a paradox – named as a ‘double bind’ in Chapter 8. If the Africa-American students are to succeed, they have to acquire the literacy style and skills of the dominant white majority, which itself implies tacitly accepting Black ‘inferiority’. Yet, if they do not do this, they remain as part of a dominated culture. This socio-cultural dilemma is not so different from that facing any bilingual student where languages (and their implicit cultures) are juxtaposed with all the questions of loyalty, identity, acknowledgement and distinction acutely posed.
At the heart of the empirical data in this case is an example of the tacit knowledge of an expert teacher in practice. We know next to nothing of her formal theorising, nor of the extent to which she can (or could) articulate this knowledge as a form of ‘fundamental educational theory’: this is one of the aims of the collaborative research project in which she is engaged. Neither is much known about her own pedagogical habitus or the methodological conventions of the pedagogy she was expected to employ. What we do see, however, is the way she is able to draw on two distinct styles of literacy – white and Black, majority and minority, dominant and inferior – in her own teaching in order to support her students in their task of developing this bicultural literacy. What she models for her students is a fluent ability to switch between language forms and cultures. Bloome and Brown refer to it as a ‘jazz’, itself an African-American vernacular, to describe its organisational patterns of interaction, response, improvisation, and rhythmic variation. What is brought together are the cultural experiences of the students involved and the text in question through the medium of the teacher's tacit knowledge, a knowledge which itself draws on actual cultural artefacts, their valuation, and the way they can be played against each other with a view to developing the ‘seeing eye’ of the students. Cultural sedimentation is present – for example, in the use of language resonant with well known negro spirituals – which is meshed (through questioning and answering) with the students’ own world view and experience (habitus), and what they need to be able to say (and how) about the written text. As Bloome and Brown argue, what is presented here is ‘theory’ as something that is lived in a tacit way, not as a stand-alone separate entity waiting to be applied. The same might be said about our understanding of both pedagogic principles as set out in the triangle of practice above, and the way that Bourdieusian sociology furnishes us with a way of seeing the world – actively! These issues are extended in the next section.
The final chapter will offer a synthesis of Bourdieu, Ethnography and New Literacy Studies as a way of defining a new perspective on classroom language ethnography, which is the raison d’être of the book. The next section is intended as a preparation for this discussion and seeks to highlight aspects of theory and its place in the approaches used so far.
The earlier sections of this book considered various relationships between theory and practice. A prime issue here was that theory never exists in a single form, and that it is possible to identify different types of theory – normative, educational, fundamental, and even ‘pre-theoretical’ – which all shared characteristics of classic definitions of theoretical statements. Each of these has been shown to have its place in educational contexts. The case studies illuminated this in practice: agents involved in learning and teaching contexts – researchers, teachers and students – operated from schema, state regulated curricula and from educational principles, all of these theoretical in nature when taken in terms of this broader definition. These theorypractice relationships were never simply one-way. Practice shapes theory as much as theory impacts on practice. The ‘triangle of practice’ outlined above must be seen in terms of constantly changing and fluid structures where two-way relationships continually anticipate further knowledge bases beyond immediate interactions. The triangle can be applied to an individual teacher's activity as it implies the present or absence of ways of knowing that underpin classroom practice. Actual classroom practice is so intense, it would be impossible to be active in situ whilst holding various other theoretical forms explicitly in mind. However, such lack of explicitness does not mean that they have no effect, as we have seen, tacit knowledge is itself a medium essential for the sedimentation and transmission of these other theoretical forms, and can be seen as ‘dispositional’ in Bourdieusian terms. The principal usefulness of Bourdieu's theory of practice is its demand that such activity be situated within the actuality of those involved in time and place. So, the teacher and their students are not treated as generalised, anonymous entities, bleached of biography, and background, but as individuals with particular habitus to be read in a generative structural sense and thus prone to pre-dispositions and changing dispositions. Moreover, the whole unfolds in a social space which is structured according to logics of practice enshrined in formal forms of pedagogy such as syllabi, curricular documents and teaching materials. The practical case examples have highlighted these relations between the literacy curriculum and those involved in working with it.
Ethnographic practice can itself be seen in terms of a similar ‘triangle of practice’, with its own theoretical positions – again normative, fundamental, tacit, and pretheoretical – linking researchers with their object of research. A significant element of the practice of a language researcher is to work in the literacy classroom as part of their ethnographic field work, while bringing theoretical knowledge to bear on what goes on in practice and to examine its relationship to the literacy curriculum as an underlying rationale for what occurs. Such research activity can never be oneway, but rather involves dialectical relationships in both theory and practice, and between them.
We have seen that New Literacy Studies represented a significant break from the way that literacy was traditionally viewed: as a set of independent skills to be imparted to the learner in an instrumental way. For NLS, the classroom is seen as a social construction, and as a place where social and cultural factors play a crucial part in what occurs, and how. Such factors are attributable to ideological and political forces, as well as the personal trajectories of those involved in the classroom. But, here a dichotomy opens up: that between the social and the cognitive. NLS's affirmation that literacies are to be seen in socio-cultural terms, not simply a set of developmentally specific autonomous skills, is correct. However, insisting on literacy as a social construction runs the risk of being satisfied with a simple narrative assertion of the need to view literacy through a cultural lens, and to ignore any of the issues of cognition in the acquisition of literacy. As we have seen earlier in this book, structure needs to be understood as much as a cognitive act than a social one. In this sense, Bourdieu's theory of practice is both phenomenological and psychological. Literacy forms actively structure a social space which is already structured, and thus one which exhibits power relations as transmitted by pedagogic practice, based on national curricula, which are themselves informed by specific ways (logics) of seeing the world associated with the most dominant. We saw this above in the way a curriculum was presented as scientific and neutral, and thus encouraged misrecognition of the inherent cultural difference set up within its principles of practice. Bourdieu's approach is useful in examining the psychological beyond the social, and again in the use that can be made of habitus and field to tease out the specificity of theory and practice in actual literacy exchanges.
Yet, Bourdieu is still regarded as a macro-rather than a micro-theorist, and thus one with little to say about the detail of classroom exchanges (see Hardy, 2011), however, for a recent example which develops its potential in this direction with practical exemplification). Much of Bourdieu's best known work pertains to ‘field analyses’, of the relations between fields and the structures of field themselves with the importance of individual encounters underplayed. Thus his approach is recognised as useful for studying the relations of what is occurring between or outside a field, rather than ‘within’ it; whilst, on the other hand, educational researchers are often more preoccupied by the actuality of classroom discourse, teachers’ and students lives, learning and teaching, etc. However, what the practical case examples have shown is that it is perfectly possible to construct ethnographies of classroom practice in a way which retains the links with generating structures constituted outside the classroom and, indeed, it is necessary to connect with them if we are to understand what is occurring at a micro level, and why.
The classroom is made up of certain fundamental constructs – teacher, pupil, teaching and learning, etc. The process of education leads to differential responses and outcomes. The autonomous view of literacy is predicated on a value-neutral notion of acquisition – one that classifies learners. Both NLS and Bourdieu's work are useful in revealing the processes of the construction of these constructions and the implicit differentials which result in cultural factors acting as determinants of the outcomes of literacy education. This occurs because, in Bourdieusian terms, legitimated knowledge is more accessible to some than others because of inherent patterns of cultural capital embodied in individual habitus. Consequently, the affinities set up by education match the socially and cognitively generating structures of some more than others. To this extent, it is falsely dichotomous to suppose that there are oppositions between ‘mid’ and ‘high’ levels of theory, or between ‘mid’ and ‘high’, and ‘low’ levels. Bourdieu makes explict what is implicit in NLS; namely, that each of these can be connected by the same theory of practice.
An ethnographic approach to the literacy classroom from both an NLS and Bourdieusian perspective sometimes seems to result in a view of that what is occurring there is a kind of conspiracy, as it appears to suggest that the field is set up to deliberately favour some groups of pupils over others. However, the central tenet of Bourdieu's work is that such processes and products are most often unreflected, since they are simply inherent in the logic of practice of fields – that is what they do! Indeed, the effects are all the more powerful because their provenance is ‘misrecognised’ within public discourses which legitimise policy and practice in terms of equity and inclusion. Is there an escape from this seemingly fatalistic conclusion? Yes, since these are systems which are constantly changing and being changed by the struggles of individuals and between fields themselves, which are inherent in the logic of practice whenever explicit moves are taken to alter structural forms. The next chapter explores this dilemma further. In this context, I conclude by raising the question of the practical usefulness of researching from the combined theoretical perspective of NLS and Bourdieu's approach.
In its crudest form, we might argue that bad research produces bad science. The linkage between research and policy (and practice) is not without contentious questions about the way one informs the other. However, we can conclude that research outcomes from approaches that do not offer as truthful a representation as possible of the pedagogic processes under consideration will lead to poor decisions about literacy in policy and practice. Finally, the bifurcation between an autonomous or constructed view of literacy is not just about politics and ideology, but about life skills in an increasingly complex, skill-hungry age. NLS and Bourdieu's theory of practice certainly furnish us with new tools of research so that better research will lead to better science, which itself will better inform policy. In this respect, NLS and Bourdieu's approach have a utilitarian mission as much as an epistemological one. Chapter 10 now explores how a synthesis of these two approaches might be more formally expressed, and what implications this new perspective has for research theory and practice, and the product of these endeavours.
