A Bernsteinian description of the recontextualising process of the national curriculum statement from conceptualisation to realisation in the classroom.

Abstract

The aim of this study is to describe the recontextualisation of the official pedagogical field, in the form of the National Curriculum Statement (NCS), in the Further Education and Training (FET) band. The study's focus concentrates specifically on the in-service training programme devised by the KZN FET Directorate for teachers of Grade 10's in 2005, beginning with the creation of the FET curriculum statements at national level and tracking the dissemination of this information to provincial level, then through regional and district level and into the schools. The researcher was able to analyse the documents created at national level, observe and/or interview role-players at each level of the continuum: national, provincial, regional, district and school (including parents of school-going teenagers). This evidence, supplemented with video-recordings and posters produced at five different venues was selectively described using Berasteinian terminology and his theoretical framework of the pedagogic device. Research findings in answer to the questions posed, viz. to what extent the social transformation process was understood by the role-players in the process (concentrating on English Home and First Additional Language teachers), indicate that in some cases the official pedagogical field is carried over with minimal change, and in others it is evident that careful monitoring and retraining may be the only means to concretise the intended change in thinking in the minds of South Africa's teachers.