Nelson Goodman’s general theory of symbols: can it help characterise some educational concerns?

Nelson Goodman was active between 1941 and the end of the century. From 1968 he was Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. He died in 1998 at the age of 92 having made contributions in the field of logic and analytical philosophy. His unremitting nominalism led to a radical constructivist or irrealist position. He was a constructivist not only in the sense of acknowledging the constitutive nature of our classifications of things, ultimately amounting to versions of the world, but also in the way that, following Carnap, he saw it as part of the responsibility of philosophy to construct robust and consistent systems of statements that serve as correctives to the logical disarray of natural language. He also took to its logical conclusions another of Carnap’s principles namely that the truth of a statement is dependent on a particular frame of reference... In this paper I consider how Goodman's analysis of the forms of reference might fruitfully be applied to some educational concerns. He identifies two main species of reference, denotation and exemplification, and two main sub-species, representation and expression. Symbols may be labels or samples. I first present his theory of notation and then the operation of labels and samples in turn and consider how we might use them to describe teaching and learning. I further apply them to explain the role that experience plays in a teacher’s professional development and how they might help to characterise the personal dimension of teaching. I then present his theory of metaphor and expression and finally suggest ways in which these and his other concepts may help theorise parental choice of school as part of a re-conceptualised theory of social practice

Access, justice and education: : two characterisations of injustice in relation to schooling

The theme of differential access to education plays a significant role in variously characterising the problem of social justice and education. It does so in concert with other key concepts and practices. This paper explores these mutually reinforcing relations and how they vary in two different analytical contexts

Available educational identities: an exploration of kinds of pupils, parents and teachers constituted through classification in the educational field

This paper considers some of the classifications and available identities of pupils, of parents and of teachers that are salient in current debates on social justice and education

Elective identity, social segregation and parental choice

The problem of unequal access(to schools)arises because children from less affluent backgrounds tend to achieve lower levels of attainment partly because they attend lower performing schools. This is widely taken as conclusive evidence that children from some social groups gain access to better educational provision than do others. This conclusion is uncomfortable for political elites who legitimate the status quo as meritocratic and is a focus of criticism by those who know it is not and are concerned to enhance social justice through greater social mobility

Uses and abuses of primary education: the relation of primary to secondary schooling in England between 1870 and 2014

I analyse the relation of primary to secondary schooling. Primary has most of the time been subordinate to secondary. I identify the varying problems this durable inequality was used to address and the different meanings the distinction has accrued. In 1870 government sought to protect existing social stratification by distinguishing parallel and unequal systems of education – elementary and secondary. The contemporary distinction just on the basis of age was fully instituted in 1944 when the task of maintaining social advantage was passed to a selective secondary system. Following a brief period, when a distinctive primary practice was championed, subordinate status was reinstated through curriculum models and the appropriation by politicians of the right to prescribe professional practice. The analysis gives critical distance on key themes in current policy discourse, and helps to understand the differential capital of schools at a time when positioning in local competitive arenas is being renegotiated

Fair school admissions: What is the contribution of the Choice Advice initiative

This paper assesses the contribution of Choice Advice to making admissions to English secondary schools fairer. The initiative characterises the unfairness of admissions as unequal opportunity for poorer parents to access good schools because they are less able to negotiate the admissions process. A major objective of Choice Advice is to enable more poor parents to gain access to popular and high performing secondary schools. The results of an evaluation in 15 Local Authorities are presented showing that Choice Advice provided a valuable service to some families but the proportion of poorer families helped was too small to make a significant impact on the numbers of poorer parents gaining access to popular schools. The characterisation of the problem is, we argue, flawed and, as a consequence, so is the way this policy was designed. Choice Advice is an example of a discursively complex initiative that is ambivalent in its effects. It provides a symbol of political will and is of real benefit to some parents, but it sustains a way of characterising the problem that plays a part in labelling poorer parents as deficient while making no significant impact on the unfairness of admissions

Being a teacher : practice theory, exemplification and the nature of professional practice

Some recent applications of practice theory to education (Kemmis 2010 and 2012) draw on the work of Theodore Scahtzki and has offer a conceptualisation of the nature of schooling and the professional practice of teachers as an architecture and ecology of practices. This paper briefly outlines some of the main benefits of this application of practice theory but also some attendant problems – particularly the difficulty of characterising the personal dimensions of experience. We argue that Nelson Goodman’s work in the general theory of symbols provides a way of filling that gap and, further, that Goodman’s theory complements, and in turn needs to be complemented by, practice theory. After brief expositons of his theories of denotation, notation and exemplification, we show how they imply something like practices and that these can be conceptualised in ways consistent with his nominalistic system