1999/06/01 by Rob Moore, Johan Muller · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Global Educational Policies and Reforms #Global Education and Multiculturalism #Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy
paper · doi:10.1080/01425699995407
Abstract This paper presents a critique of 'voice discourse' in the sociology of education (and beyond). The discourse of 'voice' is identified with a position that has recurred periodically since the early 1970s, which reduces knowledge to experience in order to de-legitimise rational, epistemologically grounded knowledge forms and truth claims that are represented as expressing no more than the 'standpoints' and 'interests' of 'dominant' social groups. Today, this position is represented in a variety of postmodernist approaches and earlier in phenomenologically inspired approaches associated with the New Sociology of Education. The paper argues that these reductionist, relativistic and perspectival approaches rely upon a simplistic and positivistic caricature of science that appears unaware of significant debates in 'post-empiricist' philosophy of science. Their position is untenable and has been shown to be so for a long time. It is suggested that 'voice' discourse requires to be accounted for sociologically as a position-taking strategy within the intellectual field rather than accepted as a theoretically sustainable approach. Recent work by Basil Bernstein is drawn upon in order to produce a structural description of this position.