Towards a Sociology of Pedagogy : The Contribution of Basil Bernstein to Research

This series explores the history of schools and schooling in the United States and other countries. The series will examine the historical development of schools and educational processes, with special emphasis on issues of educational policy, curriculum and pedagogy, as well as issues relating to race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Special emphasis will be placed on the lessons to be learned from the past for contemporary educational reform and policy. Although the series will publish books related to education in the broadest societal and cultural context, it especially seeks books on the history of specific schools and on the lives of educational leaders and school founders.

«Basil Bernstein was both the most interesting and important British sociologist of recent times, internationally better known for longer than any other [...]. His ideas offer the most developed grammar for understanding the shape and character of our current educational practice. At its various points, his emerging corpus has offered a combination of connectedness and openness. He was a constant reviser of his ideas, arguing always that this was necessitated by the relationship between the empirical and the theoretical.
This volume is replete with cameos of various aspects of his corpus that the individual researchers represented have regarded as particularly important both for themselves and their analyses. They celebrate a joint dedication to ‘developing a more systematic and general language of description’. [...]. This book also contains a paper by Bernstein and a video conference.» (Brian Davies, From the Introduction)