Class, Codes, and Composition: Basil Bernstein and the Critique of Pedagogy

College pedagogy is now undergoing a reassessment. The student-centered composition curriculum loosely referred to under heading as is being subjected to increased scrutiny, not so much in attacks from conservatives, usual enemies of progressive educational practices, as in revisionist critiques. In one such critique, Competing Theories of Process, Lester Faigley contrasts limitations of instruction based upon development of self (what he refers to as view of process) with an approach aimed at revealing complex historical connections underlying all pedagogical interaction (what he calls view). For Faigley, three principal ingredients of expressive approach to process-sincerity, spontaneity, and originality-are remnants of a romantic tradition that sees as the act of a private consciousness (535), same tradition that Marxist educational critic Henry Giroux criticizes as supporting an overly narrow concern for personal growth, inner happiness, and interpersonal relations which affirm dignity and autonomy of self' (2 16). Like Faigley, Giroux is intent upon exposing essentially liberal ideology behind process pedagogy in order to base what he calls a new critical literacy on a reproductive ideology, one which views relation between individual and society as steeped in domination and conflict (223). The thrust of this revisionist critique is thus to direct our attention, in Faigley's words, beyond who is to whom to texts and social systems that stand in relation to that act of writing (539). The principal movement, in other words, is that which is indicated in Shirley Brice Heath's important work, Ways with Words-beyond questions of pedagogy to larger issues concerning its historical setting: What are historical sources of differences in academic achievement? How does existing class structure shape social and psychic life in general and educational performance in particular, and, most important for our present concern, why is it that, despite our best efforts to make various aspects of curriculum more open,