Basil Bernstein, Open Concepts, and the Possibility of Change

In this reflection we make the argument that Bernstein’s theory offers an exceptionally powerful resource for analyzing social systems such as education, which critical realists as well as Bernstein have described in similar ways as “open.” Bernstein’s work has two significant features that contribute to this power, namely its capacity to conceptualize deep structures and organizing principles of education, teaching, and learning, as well as the possibilities it opens for imagining and accounting for alternatives and change through “open concepts.” Bernstein’s work is thus especially valuable both for analyzing 10educational inequality as well as for developing and testing measures for mitigating it in policy and prac-tice. We argue that one reason for the limited success of many contemporary education reforms has been a tendency to conceive of education as a closed system with causal mechanisms that, ostensibly, always produce the same effects, and where curriculum and instruction can be effectively scripted to produce equitable and reliable opportunities and results. We aim to expose some of the problematic assumptions of these closed conceptions of educational practice through an example of teacher education reform in England and highlight some essential features of Bernstein’s sociology of education that can be drawn upon in charting a way back to a more open future for educational thinking.