Language and Education: Learning and Teaching in Society - The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan Vol 3 - Ruqaiya Hasan†
7 Literacy pedagogy and social change: directions from Bernstein’s sociology [2007]
Language and Education: Learning and Teaching in Society - The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan Vol 3 - Ruqaiya Hasan†
Ruqaiya Hasan† [+]
Macquarie University
Ruqaiya Hasan, who died in 2015, was a professor of linguistics who taught and held visiting positions at various universities in England. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University, Australia, from where she retired as Emeritus Professor in 1994. Throughout her career she researched and published widely in the areas of verbal art, culture, context and text, text and texture, lexicogrammar and semantic variation.
Read her obituary here
Description
The problem I want to explore in this paper1 is whether the pedagogic practices of literacy in the classroom can be co-opted for bringing about social change of a specific kind, which in turn will raise questions about what change and why. The obvious sociological theory to which such issues can be usefully brought is Bernstein’s – but it needs to be added that I do so not as a sociologist manqué but as a linguist interested in understanding society because society is the condition for the maintenance and evolution of language.