Making semantic waves: A key to cumulative knowledge-building

The paper begins by arguing that knowledge-blindness in educational research represents a serious obstacle to understanding knowledge-building. It then offers sociological concepts from Legitimation Code Theory – ‘semantic gravity’ and ‘semantic density’ – that systematically conceptualize one set of organizing principles underlying knowledge practices. Brought together as ‘semantic profiles’, these allow changes in the context-dependence and condensation of meaning of knowledge practices to be traced over time. These concepts are used to analyze passages of classroom practice from secondary school lessons in Biology and History. The analysis suggests that ‘semantic waves’, where knowledge is transformed between relatively decontextualized, condensed meanings and context-dependent, simplified meanings, offer a means of enabling cumulative classroom practice. How these concepts are being widely used to explore organizing principles of diverse practices in education and beyond is discussed, revealing the widespread, complex and suggestive nature of ‘semantic waves’ and their implications for cumulative knowledge-building. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Semantic waves are the pulses of cumulative knowledge-building. . Introduction: the cumulative and the segmental Almost everyone in education shares a desire for cumulative knowledge-building. Researchers typically aim to generate deas that have utility or appeal beyond the specificities of their originating contexts. Educators urge the need for pedagogic ractice to have, as Bransford & Schwartz (1999: 61) put it, ‘positive effects that extend beyond the exact conditions of nitial learning’ by enabling students to build on previous understandings and transfer what they learn into future contexts. olicymakers proclaim that education must prepare students for living and working in fast-changing societies by providing nowledge and skills that can build throughout ‘lifelong learning’ (Field, 2006). Thus, cumulative knowledge-building in esearch, teaching and learning are at the heart of education. Conversely, research and policy debates are replete with oncern over segmentalism, when knowledge is so strongly tied to its context that it is only meaningful within that context. hat this remains a serious problem is acknowledged across disciplinary and institutional maps, from arts to sciences, school o university, education to training (e.g. Christie & Macken-Horarik, 2007; Wheelahan, 2010). How the segmental may be vercome to enable the cumulative, however, is less clear. This problem forms the starting point for the inter-disciplinary research discussed in the papers collected in this Special ssue. Freebody (2013) outlines some key issues serving as the background to this research, which focuses specifically on eaching in secondary schools. The current article offers a means of conceptualizing knowledge-building in terms of features f the knowledge itself. Specifically, I highlight the significance of ‘semantic waves’ for cumulative teaching. Martin (2013) xplores the linguistic resources actors marshal to achieve semantic waves in teaching, identifying a trio of complexes he erms ‘power words’, ‘power grammar’ and ‘power composition’. Matruglio, Maton, and Martin (2013a) draws on both these E-mail address: karl.maton@sydney.edu.au 898-5898/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2012.11.005 K. Maton / Linguistics and Education 24 (2013) 8– 22 9 papers to explore the temporal features of semantic waves in teaching, focusing specifically on History. Finally, Macnaught, Maton, Martin, and Matruglio (2013) discusses how ‘semantic waves’ and Martin’s ‘power trio’ were enacted in a pedagogic intervention involving teacher training. The current paper is thus primarily concerned with establishing and illustrating some of the key conceptual ideas that shaped and emerged during this research project and which, as I shall discuss, are being used in a growing number of studies into diverse practices. The paper begins by exploring two obstacles to understanding and enabling knowledge-building: knowledge-blindness, whereby educational research overwhelmingly obscures knowledge as an object; and, among models that do see knowledge, segmental theorizing of its forms. Secondly, I introduce concepts from Legitimation Code Theory, a sociological framework that builds primarily on the approach of Basil Bernstein. These concepts of semantic gravity and semantic density offer insight into one set of organizing principles of knowledge practices, and enable the analysis of change over time in terms of semantic profiles. Thirdly, these concepts are employed to examine knowledge within classroom practice. Drawing on a major study of secondary school History and Biology, I highlight how teaching often involves (to put it simply) a repeated pattern of exemplifying and ‘unpacking’ educational knowledge into context-dependent and simplified meanings. This raises questions of how this knowledge may be transformed to become the relatively decontextualized and condensed knowledge students must demonstrate in educational assessments to show their mastery of pedagogic subjects. Using brief examples from History and Biology lessons I illustrate how semantic waves, involving shifts in meaning in both directions, offer a potential means of traversing this gap in classroom practice. Fourthly, I discuss how the concepts outlined here are being used to explore the organizing principles of diverse practices in education and beyond, and their relations with other concepts and frameworks. Lastly, I return to the issue of cumulative knowledge-building to consider what light these ideas might shed on this widely shared goal for education. 2. Knowledge-blindness and segmental theorizing 2.1. Knowledge-blindness in educational research Much educational research is characterized by ‘knowledge-blindness’ (Maton, 2013): knowledge as an object is obscured. The forms taken by this condition result at least partly from how psychology and sociology have influenced educational research over recent decades (Freebody, Maton, & Martin, 2008). On the one hand, psychologically-informed approaches typically focus on generic processes of learning and sideline differences between the forms of knowledge being learned. Research on ‘transfer’, for example, explores forms of knowing (‘knowing with’, ‘knowing that’, ‘knowing how’, etc.) rather than knowledge (Bransford & Schwartz, 1999). This construction of the object for research has been bolstered by the dominance of constructivisms, which include a view of ‘knowledge’ as mental processes and states of consciousness that reside within the learner. The notion of knowledge as an object of study emergent from but irreducible to how individuals know is thus obscured. On the other hand, approaches informed by sociology and cultural studies have tended to focus on the effects of power relations for the experiences and beliefs of different social groups (Maton & Moore, 2010). Here the central aim is to unmask the social power underpinning knowledge, to reveal those whose interests it serves or diminishes, where the form taken by that knowledge is considered arbitrary. Here, knowledge is reduced to a reflection of social power. Educational research has thus typically backgrounded knowledge as an object. Key issues for research are exploring processes of learning and revealing whose knowledge is being learned. What is being learned and how it shapes these processes of learning and power relations among knowers have been largely obscured. Such knowledge-blindness thus proceeds as if the nature of what is taught and learned has little relevance. Accordingly, debates over teaching have oscillated between ‘traditional’ and ‘constructivist’ pedagogies that are generalized across the curriculum, and knowledge-building has been typically understood generically, as accumulation of content or ill-defined skills such as ‘critical thinking’. How the forms taken by educational knowledge may enable or constrain cumulative teaching and learning remains relatively under-researched. 2.2. Segmental theorizing of knowledge Highlighting the prevalence of knowledge-blindness is not to say there exist no models of knowledge. A host of thinkers, including Bourdieu, Foucault, Habermas, and Piaget, have distinguished everyday or commonsense knowledge from educational or uncommonsense knowledge (Bernstein, 2000). Similarly, there exist numerous attempts to characterize forms of academic knowledge. For example, Biglan (1973a, 1973b) typologized disciplines into hard/soft, pure/applied, and life/nonlife; Kolb (1981) offered categories of abstract/concrete and active/reflective; and Becher (1994; Becher & Trowler, 2001) combined these typologies to describe the cultural and cognitive styles of academics as disciplinary ‘tribes’. Such distinctions are legion: effective/ineffective; context-independent/context-dependent; conceptual/contextual; and many more, including the well-known taxonomies of Bloom (1976) and Shulman (1986). The creation of knowledge typologies is a thriving cottage industry. These models are to be welcomed: they bring knowledge into view as an object of study. Categories such as abstract/concrete or context-dependent/context-independent offer a useful starting point for highlighting knowledge – I drew on such terms in the Introduction to this paper as a simple way into the issues. However, overcoming knowledgeblindness is but a first step. It is not enough to see knowledge, one also needs to theorize knowledge in ways that