Mediating knowledge and constituting subjectivities in distance education materials for language teachers in South Africa.
Date
2010-08-31
Authors
Reed, Yvonne
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Abstract
International and local guidelines for designing distance education materials advise
designers to use feedback from students in the redesign of their materials. This study is a
response to the researcher’s failed attempt to elicit critical feedback from some of her
students. It therefore sets out to devise a framework for a critical pedagogic analysis of
distance learning materials designed for South African teacher education programmes.
It draws on theorisations of pedagogy, principally from the work of the sociologist of
education Basil Bernstein and the applied linguist Suresh Canagarajah, theorisations of
mediation, originating in the work of Lev Vygotsky, and theorisations of subjectivity. It also
draws on international and local conceptualisations of a knowledge base for teacher
education. In the analysis of the selection and organisation of knowledge on the page, the
study draws on Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics and the field of social semiotics to
uncover the positions constructed for readers as students and as teachers in each
multimodal design.
A pedagogic analysis of distance education materials for pre-service or in-service teachers
responds to a series of questions: What elements of a knowledge base for teacher
education do designers foreground and background? What is the orientation of the
materials to the relationship between knowledge and practice? How is knowledge
mediated through in-text activities, pedagogic episodes and scaffolded readings? What
roles do linguistic and visual design choices play in the mediation of knowledge? A critical
pedagogic analysis interrogates the subject positions that the multimodal designs constitute
for ideal readers as students and as teachers. In the study, all of these questions frame a
detailed analysis of three sets of materials designed for South African teacher education
programmes and, finally, a critical reflection on materials for which the researcher was the
principal designer.
The study concludes that a critical pedagogic analysis affords designers and evaluators the
critical distance needed for evaluating the mediation of knowledge(s) and the constitution
of readers’ subjectivities in teacher education materials. As an alternative (or in some
circumstances, as an addition) to reader feedback it has the potential to inform redesigning
for the original local context(s) of use or reversioning for use in broader regional or global
contexts.
Description
Keywords
Critical pedagogic analysis, Mediation, Pedagogy, Subjectivity, Distance education materials, Design and redesign, Multimodality, Language teachers, Teacher education