Working with Knowledge at the Secondary Level: An Observation Instrument for the Social Sciences Area

Abstract

Argentine papers that try to apprehend the knowledge that actually circulates in our classrooms generally analyze practices using ethnographic methodology and address problems related to student-teacher coexistence. This paper aims to facilitate a systematic observation of the way in which knowledge is worked with in classrooms. With this objective, an observation instrument has been built, which allows the coding of linguistic forms used at school, since language is the instrument par excellence in school communication. Its frequencies and sequences can be communicated—which does not occur with ethnographies—and reliance on the empirical support of language limits the subjectivity of the description, facilitating the verification and replication of the findings by other researchers.

The observation instrument that is proposed permits discourse analysis, that is, the correlation of what is said (what is immediately apprehensible) with the principles of production that structure it (what is invisible). This purpose makes sense within the conceptual framework provided by the Bourdieu school, from which it is possible to think that educational practice is developed according to a kind of logic that goes beyond explicit normativity. Alongside rational calculation, there are other generative principles of practice, irreducible to the consciousness and will of the agents.