This presentation was delivered at the Higher Education Research Group Conference which took place at Sheffield Hallam University on 22 June 2012 http://hersg.wordpress.com/

1. Filling in the blanks: signature pedagogies and
their impact on understanding and sharing
practice in the form of OERs in the Social
Science Curriculum
Richard Pountney and Anna Gruszczynska
Faculty of Development and Society

2. Introduction and background
• The Open Education Resources (OER) movement (2008-) and the release of
content for Higher Education (HE)
• The ‘idea of the university’ (McCLean 2006) occupying physical and notional
space (Barnett, 2005)
• Curriculum becoming a techno-economic conception as a ‘vehicle for
realising taken-for-granted ends’ (Barnett and Coate, 2005)
• The rise of ‘trainability’ and a (second) ‘totally pedagogised society’ in which
an ‘ideal knower’ is constituted by the Official Recontextualising Field (ORF)
(Bernstein, 2000)
• The construction of curriculum knowledge in HE as social practice that
raises key questions (Luckett, 2009):
o What are the cultural and social conditions that underpin it?
o What are the epistemological and methodological constraints?
o What identities and forms of agency do curriculum practices construct
for teachers and students?

3. Evaluating the practice of Opening up
Resources for Learning and Teaching
• A regulative discourse for the design of courses in UK HE (QAA Code of
Practice, Subject Benchmarks, credit tariffs, course validation and approval
etc.)
• Social Science as having a horizontal knowledge structure, segmentally
arranged, with weak classification (-C) and strong official framing (+F) and
weak unofficial framing (-F) (Bernstein, 1990)
• The potential for an ‘invisible pedagogy’ (-C/-F) in which students (and
teachers) do not know the ‘rules of the game’.
• Pedagogic practice as emerging from individual ‘repertoires’ developed
over time drawn from a ‘reservoir’ of tacitly agreed techniques
(Bernstein, 2000, Bourdieu, 1992). The notion of ‘signature pedagogy’
(Shulman, 2005) as a perspective.
• The articulation of personally held beliefs and their effect on strategies in
pedagogic encounters (Schon, 1987), with emphasis in this study on the
process of ‘making open’

4. Evaluating the practice of Opening up
Resources for Learning and Teaching
• A regulative discourse for the design of courses in UK HE (QAA Code of
Practice, Subject Benchmarks, credit tariffs, course validation and approval
etc.)
• Social Science as having a horizontal knowledge structure, segmentally
arranged, with weak classification (-C) and strong official framing (+F) and
weak unofficial framing (-F) (Bernstein, 1990)
• The potential for an ‘invisible pedagogy’ (-C/-F) in which students (and
teachers) do not know the ‘rules of the game’.
• Pedagogic practice as emerging from individual ‘repertoires’ developed
over time drawn from a ‘reservoir’ of tacitly agreed techniques
(Bernstein, 2000, Bourdieu, 1992). The notion of ‘signature pedagogy’
(Shulman, 2005) as a perspective.
• The articulation of personally held beliefs and their effect on strategies in
pedagogic encounters (Schon, 1987), with emphasis in this study on the
process of ‘making open’

5. Researching the ‘making open’ process
1. Reflecting and reviewing stage - peer supported review exercise
• The activity involved reviewing a sample module from the other
partner’s contributed materials, focusing on issues relevant to OERs
and reusability
2. Mapping stage
• Development activity where project partners created detailed
mappings of their modules, using a provided paper-based mapping
proforma
3. Case study creation stage
• Partners created a case study narrative which documented the
process of “opening up” a selected module and showcased the
processes behind repurposing/ material transformation.
• The narratives offered a 'rich description’ of the resource in order
to increase the possibility of its re-contextualisation by other users,
and to develop further insights into tacit practice.

6. Becoming open: to others and to oneself
1. Embodying cultural capital
• Materials relied on repertoires of existing practice and
were British culture and politics centric, context based,
without captions (cultural colonisation)
2. Subject to housekeeping
• The presence of redundant local information (module
codes), links to institutional sources (VLE), and the absence
of explicit information (duration of lectures, slide numbers,
how content is being used)
3. Implicit design for learning
• Module design is unclear, especially how this relates to
other modules and (prior) learning and how this builds as a
body of knowledge, practice or skills

7. Learning and teaching as social practice
involving a pedagogical discourse
• The need for a shared pedagogical rationale to enable the pedagogic conversation
to take place. The unsuitability of existing pedagogical frameworks (e.g. Goodyear
and Jones, 2004) offering models, characteristics and principles of learning
• ‘learning design and reusability are incompatible. Design requires specificity and
specificity prohibits reusability’ (Downes, 2003)
• ‘the transformative educational potential of OER depends on: 1. Improving the
quality of learning materials through peer review process; 2. Reaping the benefits
of contextualisation, personalisation and localisation ...’ (UNESCO, 2006)

8. Empirical work in developing shared and
open resources in the curriculum
• How the proposition emerged that this involved a translation at differing levels: in
technical terms (as xml); as a ‘wrapped-up’ or packaged curriculum; and as an
articulation of the tacit
• How the examination of the 18 modules revealed elements of a signature
pedagogy (lecture / seminar / Powerpoint)
• The development of an external language of description (Bernstein 1990) and how
this is ‘legitimated’ in terms of autonomy (Maton, 2007) as a cline of collegiality
(Pountney, 2012)
Theoretical Degree of emphasis on:
concept
Curriculum Content knowledge specified by discipline
Positional Pedagogy Teaching of content knowledge based on tradition
autonomy Assessment Evaluative criteria aligned with teachers’ needs
Curriculum Content knowledge specified by educational policy
Relational Pedagogy Teaching of content knowledge based on economic and other factors
autonomy Assessment Evaluative criteria aligned with institutions’ needs

9. Further work in OER
•Local teachers and pupils, teacher • For more information:
educators and teacher educations • Project blog
students involved in: www.deftoer3.wordpress.com
•sharing and developing good • Twitter @deftoer3
practice in teaching
• Slideshare
•understanding more about digital
www.slideshare.net/deftoer3
literacy
•developing guidance on Open
Educational Resources for the
school sector
•addressing issues of digital literacy
in the context of professional
development
•Project outputs will be shared via
an open textbook and the "Digital
Bloom" installation

10. References
• Barnett, R. (2005) Reshaping the University. Maidenhead: Society for Research into Higher
Education/Open University Press
• Barnett, R. & Coate, K. (2005) Engaging the curriculum in higher education. Maidenhead: Society
for Research into Higher Education/Open University Press
• Bernstein, B. (1990) The structuring of pedagogic discourse. London: Routledge
• Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control, and identity: Theory, research, critique (Rev. ed.).
Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
• Bourdieu, P. (1992) Thinking about limits. Theory, Culture & Society 9: 37-49.
• Luckett, K. (2009). The relationship between knowledge structure and curriculum: A case study in
sociology. Studies in Higher Education, 34(4), 441–453
• Goodyear, P & Jones, C (2004) Pedagogical frameworks for DNER (the Distributed National
Electronic Resource), Deliverable DC1, EDNER Project. Lancaster: Centre for Studies in Advanced
Learning Technology, Lancaster University (online at www.cerlim.ac.uk/edner/dissem/dc1.doc)
• Maton, K. (2007). Knowledge-knower structures in intellectual and educational fields. In F. Christie
& J. R. Martin (Eds.), Language, knowledge and pedagogy: Functional linguistic and sociological
perspectives (pp. 87–108). London: Continuum.
• McClean, M. (2006) Pedagogy and the University. London: Continuum.
• Pountney, R. (2012) Constructing the curriculum in Higher Education (in press)
• Schön, D.A. (1987) Educating the reflective practitioner. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass
• Shulman, L. (2005) Signature pedagogies in the profession, Daedalus, 134 (3) 52-59