Civilising the natives? Liberal studies in further education revisited

This paper uses Basil Bernstein’s work on pedagogic discourses to examine a largely neglected facet of the history of vocational education – the liberal studies movement in English further education (FE) colleges. Initially, the paper discusses some of the competing conceptions of education, work and society which underpinned the rise and fall of the liberal studies movement – if indeed it can be described as such. It then draws on data from interviews with former liberal and general studies (LS/GS) lecturers to focus on the ways in which different variants of liberal studies were, over time, implicated in inculcating certain forms of knowledge in vocational learners. Whilst it is acknowledged that LS/GS always represented contested territory and that it was highly variable both in terms of content and quality, the paper argues that, at least and under certain circumstances, liberal studies provided young working-class people with the opportunity to locate their experiences of vocational learning within a critical framework which is largely absent from FE today. This, it is argued, can be conceptualised as an engagement with what Bernstein described as ‘powerful knowledge’

Discourse, Defiance, and Rationality: “Knowledge Work” in the “Obedience” Experiments

In this paper I present a secondary qualitative analysis of archived audio data from two conditions (‘voice-feedback’ and ‘women as subjects’) in Milgram’s experiments. Using a perspective informed by rhetorical and discursive psychologies, I focus on the rhetorical strategies employed by participants. This highlights the use of strategies based around direct invocations of ‘knowledge’. Analysis explores the ways in which participants could use such strategies to challenge the experimenter’s definition of the situation in their efforts to extricate themselves from the experiment. Findings are discussed in relation to two ongoing debates in the study of Milgram’s experiments: First, the importance of attending to defiance and resistance as much as compliance and obedience; second, the questioning of the status of the phenomena captured in Milgram’s studies as necessarily being concerned with ‘(dis)obedience’