Keynote Address
A. Prof. Kathy Luckett, Director Humanities EDU, UCT

Abstract:
Making the Implicit Explicit: Pedagogies for Epistemic and Social Access

In this presentation I will first set out the basic principles of Karl Maton’s Legitimation Code Theory (Specialisation). I will use this conceptual scheme to map the intellectual development of Academic/ Education Development in South Africa. I will show that AD interventions begun in the early 1980s were based on an autonomous, decontextualized skills discourse that was explicit about a genericized form of procedural knowledge (ER+, SR-). A major shift took place in the 1990s, influenced by socio-cultural theories of learning and the New Literacy Studies. The focus of AD work shifted to viewing the academic literacies as situated social practices (SR+, ER-). This approach suggested that students learn best in socially situated literacy events, where sustained participation and identification with a particular ‘community of practice’ leads to the production of socially purposeful texts. This approach emphasises the social relations of acquiring knowledge or ‘acquiring a gaze’ and tends to promote an implicit pedagogy. This approach is particularly compatible with a critical/ emancipatory interest that aims to empower learners from oppressed social groups, helping them to find a voice and take up a position against dominant cultural forms. More recently in the South African AD field there has been a call to ‘bring knowledge back in’ and to focus on ‘epistemic access’ (ER+) as opposed to ‘social access’ (SR+). I will argue that working for both forms of access – social and epistemic – are crucial for ED work and that we need to move beyond unproductive stand-offs between social-practice-based accounts and knowledge-based accounts of academic literacy. Rather the challenge is to develop powerful pedagogies (ER+, SR+) that enable students to acquire the recognition and realisation rules for accessing and producing legitimate texts in the powerful knowledge forms. I turn to the work of Robert Brandom to suggest ways of doing this. His work highlights the importance of (implicit) inferential reasoning and provides ways of ‘making the implicit explicit’.