Abstract
This article explores the issue of what academic literacies research can bring to the study of knowledge and curriculum in higher education from a theoretical perspective and by means of illustrations from a work in progress academic literacies research project in the natural sciences. It argues that reading and writing are central to the process of learning in any discipline and that discipline specialists need to take this into consideration when planning their curricula. It also considers what knowledge means in the context of academic literacies research and how this conception of knowledge may differ from the knowledge structures researchers’ concern with knowledge as an object with its own properties. It comes to the conclusion that academic literacies research with its ethnographic-type exploration of social practice and theorisations of knowledge in the knowledge structures research can complement one another because each field of enquiry brings a lens that the other lacks.
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Notes
Basil Bernstein’s notion of the pedagogic device consists of three fields—the fields of production (where knowledge is produced), recontextualisation and reproduction (schooling). The field of recontextualisation mediates between the fields of production and reproduction. The recontextualising rules construct pedagogic discourse (Maton and Muller 2007).
Bernstein defines hierarchical knowledge structure as ‘a coherent, explicit and systematically principled structure, hierarchically organised’ (Bernstein 1999:161) (often visually represented as a triangle of knowledge).
Horizontal knowledge structure is defined as ‘a series of specialised languages with specialised modes of interrogation and criteria for the construction and circulation of texts’ (Bernstein 1999:162).
In Halliday’s (1996:348) terms a grammatical metaphor is when “some semantic component is construed in the grammar in a form other than that which is prototypical”.
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Paxton, M., Frith, V. Implications of academic literacies research for knowledge making and curriculum design. High Educ 67, 171–182 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-013-9675-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-013-9675-z