Targeting the heart of practice: Autonomy from LCT

Prof Karl Maton, University of Sydney

How can we explore the ways that different practices (disciplines, forms of knowledge, modes, media, etc) can be brought together productively without losing our analysis in endless description of every facet of each practice and of every possible way in which those facets come together? In this talk I illustrate how ‘autonomy analysis’ from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) offers a fresh way of thinking about how different practices are brought together. I do so through the example of integrating multimedia such as animations in science classroom. Scientific knowledge is complex. Multimedia can be complex. When trying to figure out how best to integrate multimedia in teaching scientific knowledge, the complexity can quickly become unmanageable. Many approaches in education avoid the problem entirely by focusing instead on the implications of cognitive processing of information for designing multimedia. This ignores the knowledge practices embodied by multimedia objects, the knowledge practices to be taught, and the teaching practice for integrating the former into the latter. However, for any understanding of education to have real-world relevance, the question remains of how to analyse knowledge and teaching without becoming lost in the complexity of both classroom practices and multimedia objects.

Autonomy analysis from LCT uses the key concept of ‘target’ to place the specificities of practice at the centre of analysis. This allows the distinctive nature of, say, a specific task in a specific lesson to determine what features require scrutiny in a specific analysis. Autonomy analysis is already having significant impact in education – it is, for example, now taught to all trainee teachers across South Africa. Here I illustrate its usefulness through looking at how teachers use animations in secondary science lessons. I focus on two examples, one where an animation is poorly integrated into the knowledge ostensibly being taught, the other where the animation is adapted to match the intended knowledge being taught and integrated well. I show how autonomy analysis helps sharpen our focus to manage complexity. I also highlight how this approach reveals the ‘pedagogic work’ required to integrate, pull apart, turn to purpose, add, remove and substitute elements in a teaching resource to match the needs of a task. In so doing, it begins to give insights into the fertile but underexplored notion of ‘recontextualization’ from Bernstein, the key idea that the form taken by knowledge changes when enacted. Finally, I discuss how, for SFL scholars, the approach may offer a complementary approach to the strong and ongoing tradition of SFL studies that reveal the myriad linguistic features of multimodal and multimedia practices.