Mediating knowledge and constituting subjectivities in distance education materials for language teachers in South Africa.

[摘要] International and local guidelines for designing distance education materials advisedesigners to use feedback from students in the redesign of their materials. This study is aresponse to the researcher’s failed attempt to elicit critical feedback from some of herstudents. It therefore sets out to devise a framework for a critical pedagogic analysis ofdistance learning materials designed for South African teacher education programmes.It draws on theorisations of pedagogy, principally from the work of the sociologist ofeducation Basil Bernstein and the applied linguist Suresh Canagarajah, theorisations ofmediation, originating in the work of Lev Vygotsky, and theorisations of subjectivity. It alsodraws on international and local conceptualisations of a knowledge base for teachereducation. In the analysis of the selection and organisation of knowledge on the page, thestudy draws on Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics and the field of social semiotics touncover the positions constructed for readers as students and as teachers in eachmultimodal design.A pedagogic analysis of distance education materials for pre-service or in-service teachersresponds to a series of questions: What elements of a knowledge base for teachereducation do designers foreground and background? What is the orientation of thematerials to the relationship between knowledge and practice? How is knowledgemediated through in-text activities, pedagogic episodes and scaffolded readings? Whatroles do linguistic and visual design choices play in the mediation of knowledge? A criticalpedagogic analysis interrogates the subject positions that the multimodal designs constitutefor ideal readers as students and as teachers. In the study, all of these questions frame adetailed analysis of three sets of materials designed for South African teacher educationprogrammes and, finally, a critical reflection on materials for which the researcher was theprincipal designer.The study concludes that a critical pedagogic analysis affords designers and evaluators thecritical distance needed for evaluating the mediation of knowledge(s) and the constitutionof readers’ subjectivities in teacher education materials. As an alternative (or in somecircumstances, as an addition) to reader feedback it has the potential to inform redesigningfor the original local context(s) of use or reversioning for use in broader regional or globalcontexts.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand