Analysing micro-credentials in higher education: a Bernsteinian analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper critiques the emergence of micro-credentials in higher education. It argues that micro-credentials build on the discourse of employability skills and 21^st century skills within human capital theory, and that they increase the potential of human capital theory to ‘discipline’ the HE curriculum to align it more closely with putative labour market requirements. The paper is situated within the social realist school in the sociology of education, and it draws primarily on the sociology of Basil Bernstein to develop this critique, while also drawing on the Continental Didaktik tradition. It analyses the nature of the person envisaged in curriculum, the homo economicus of human capital theory. This self is a market self who uses micro-credentials to invest in this or that set of skills in anticipating labour market requirements. The paper uses a range of Bernstein’s concepts to analyse the links between what is to be taught, to whom is it taught, and how is it taught in micro-credentials. It focuses on the principle of recontextualization which comprises instructional and regulative discourses, to examine the ways in which notions of the person and human motivation are reshaping relations of classification and framing in HE curriculum.

KEYWORDS:

• Bernstein
• social realism
• micro-credentials
• 21^st century skills
• higher education
• Didaktik tradition

Introduction

The hype about micro-credentials in higher education policy in 2020 is similar to the hype about massive open online courses (MOOCs) in 2012 (Moodie, 2016). Micro-credentials are industry-aligned short units of learning that are certified or credentialed, and they can (mostly) ‘stack’ or count towards a higher education qualification. While variations of micro-credentials have existed in vocational education for many years, they have now moved from vocational education to the centre of higher education policy. They are the newest tool used by governments to re-orient higher education towards a narrow focus on preparation for work. Micro-credentials are the latest contribution to the discourse of ‘genericism’ in which individuals have to be ready for perpetual ‘trainability’, divorced from a core disciplinary or occupational focus and their associated identities (Bernstein, 2000). They are an extension of ‘21^st century skills’ and the discourse of employability in higher education. And, like these, they draw on the language of progressivism, opportunity and self-realization as a key aspect of their legitimation. While micro-credentials were gaining momentum before 2020, Covid-19 has accelerated their introduction in many jurisdictions, as governments have sought to respond to the surge in unemployment as a consequence of quarantining measures, and universities sought to develop new markets, in part in response to the decline in enrolments by international students who could no longer travel to their host countries.

This paper argues that while micro-credentials are an extension of the discourse of employability skills, their potential to ‘discipline’ the higher education curriculum to align it more closely with putative labour market requirements is more far-reaching than hitherto. This is because micro-credentials weaken relations of classification of knowledge and framing (the pacing, sequencing and evaluation) of knowledge more than other previous innovations in higher education curriculum. The paper provides a framework for analysing micro-credentials. It is primarily situated in the social realist school within the sociology of education, but it also draws from the Continental Didaktik tradition. Each can contribute to the other, and in the process make an important contribution to theorizing about the nature of educational knowledge in higher education. Such a dialogue can help to overcome problems of disciplinary fragmentation in theorizing the nature of curriculum and educational knowledge in Anglophone traditions (Biesta, 2007; Furlong & Whitty, 2017).

This paper uses social realism to address questions asked by the more hermeneutic Didaktik traditions in Continental Europe. The main ‘hermeneutic’ question addressed here concerns the nature of the person envisaged in curriculum. In responding to these questions, the paper uses social realism to theorize the nature of educational knowledge in higher education to show that the person envisaged in higher education is the homo economicus of human capital theory (Maton & Moore, 2010; Muller, 2000; Wheelahan, 2010b; M. Young, 2008). Social realism is heavily indebted to the sociology of Basil Bernstein, and in this paper, we draw on a range of Bernsteinian tools in developing our analysis, including the classification and framing of knowledge; singulars (‘pure’ disciplines), regions (‘applied’ disciplines), genericism (competencies), and the principle of recontextualization. These conceptual tools are used to analyse the links between what is to be taught, why it is to be taught, to whom it is taught, and how it is taught, questions which underpin the Didaktik tradition. It uses Bernstein’s distinction between the instructional and the regulative discourse within the principle of recontextualization to demonstrate how the regulative principle of human capital theory ‘disciplines’ the curriculum in the academic disciplines and professions, notwithstanding academic autonomy in universities. In developing this analysis, the paper demonstrates the potential for social realism to contribute to the development of ‘powerful knowledge’ which is able to analyse contemporary changes in higher education curriculum.¹

The first section of this paper explains what micro-credentials are, where they come from, and how they have moved to the centre of higher education policy in many countries. The second section analyses why there is a gap in theorizing educational knowledge in higher education to help explain the relative lack of opposition to micro-credentials, and it contrasts Anglophone traditions with Didaktik traditions. It draws on the latter to consider questions that should be asked in theorizing about curriculum in higher education. This section then explores the state of theorizing about educational knowledge in higher education to show that the distinction between curriculum on the one hand, and pedagogy or teaching and learning on the other, contributes to instrumental discourses about the purposes of, and outcomes from, higher education. The next section draws on social realism and Basil Bernstein to assemble the tools needed to analyse micro-credentials and their precursors, employability skills and 21^st century skills. It shows how the instrumental discourses that underpin curriculum construction are able to co-opt the language of progressivism in legitimating the rational, instrumental, self-maximizing actor of human capital theory. These assembled tools are then used to analyse micro-credentials in the final section of this paper. It illustrates how a theory of educational knowledge can be used to analyse the curriculum and its outcomes.

Micro-credentials, 21^st century skills and employability skills

Covid-19 has provided the impetus for the rapid implementation of micro-credentials by governments in several jurisdictions. There is not yet a common understanding let alone the definition of micro-credentials, as we discuss later. For the purposes of this discussion, we understand micro-credentials to be educational awards for learning from around 10% to up to a full academic year but less than a conventional educational award or credential. Micro-credentials have moved from the urgings of policy-think tanks and international government organizations (OECD—Kato et al., 2020, p.8; see also, UNESCO—Chakroun & Keevy, 2018; European Commission—MicroHE Consortium, n. d.; Commonwealth of Learning—Rossiter & Tynan, 2019) to the centre of policy in several countries. For example, the New Zealand Qualifications Framework now includes micro-credentials (New Zealand Qualifications Authority, 2018) and the Australian government, in response to the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, introduced an entirely new type of qualification called an ‘under-graduate higher education certificate’ which is of six months duration (Commonwealth of Australia, 2020). The Australian Government’s action is broadly representative of other governments in marketized Anglophone systems where there is pressure to make universities more ‘responsive’ to the market and more oriented to work, two claims which are made for the importance of micro-credentials (Oliver, 2019). For example, the Business Council of Australia (2018) argues in its policy advocacy for micro-credentials that they can meet the unique needs of individuals and employers. The provincial government of Ontario in Canada says that:

A greater focus on micro-credentials will allow increased flexibility and responsiveness to student and employer needs. Micro-credentials will allow Ontarians to upgrade their employment-related skills quickly and efficiently and remain competitive in the workforce, while at the same time accommodate the demands of work and family. (Government of Ontario, 2020)

Several states in the United States are incorporating micro-credentials into their professional development programmes for teachers as part of their compliance with the federal ‘Every Student Succeeds Act’ (Hunt et al., 2020), and systems such as the State University of New York have introduced micro-credentials as a part of their suite of credentials or qualifications (State University of New York, 2020). Micro-credentials are offered by providers such as Coursera, EdX, Udacity and FutureLearn, often in partnership with prominent universities in the UK and elsewhere (Horton, 2020). And, many prominent universities, particularly in Anglophone systems, are offering micro-credentials in their own right.

International government organizations such as UNESCO (Chakroun & Keevy, 2018), and the OECD (Kato et al., 2020) are focusing on micro-credentials, as is the European Commission, with the European MOOC Consortium launching a Common Microcredential Framework ‘to create portable credentials for lifelong long learners’ (Konings, 2019). The Lumina Foundation (J. R. Young, 2018), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and a range of other philanthropic trusts are funding numerous projects designed to embed micro-credentials within different jurisdictions (Greene, 2019).

There is lack of coherence and consistency in defining micro-credentials and this is the subject of intense policy work to establish a common language as the basis of a ‘common currency’ in the post-secondary education credentials market. While micro-credentials differ in the way they are defined and what they include or exclude, a generally shared assumption is that a micro-credential can ‘count’ towards a ‘parent’ qualification such as a diploma, bachelor degree or higher-level qualification (Kato et al., 2020). Depending on how they are structured, authorized and quality assured, micro-credentials may or may not be broken down further and include badges and industry-recognized certificates. It is becoming clearer that micro-credentials are substantive ‘enough’ to be included in national qualifications frameworks, while in turn, they may comprise smaller units such as digital badges, digital credentials and micro-certifications (Pichette & Rizk, 2020). The development of micro-credentials and their relationship to other ‘micro’ forms of learning such as badges is still in flux (Kato et al., 2020). Their development has been facilitated by the development of digital platforms that can safely record, store and transmit these micro-units of learning between institutions (Keevy et al., 2019). Through these means, micro-credentials can be authenticated as being issued by an authoritative source, and added and stacked to make different combinations of qualifications.

The development of micro-credentials to the point where they are being included in national policy frameworks such as qualifications frameworks shows that these international policy flows are now embedded within national contexts. Wahlström and Sundberg (2018) draw on discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2008) to explain the ways in which international policy flows are constituted by policy actors in international government organizations, think tanks and other policy actors (which includes philanthropic trusts).² These policy actors engage with national policy actors through ‘to and fro’ processes as these discourses undergo processes of recontextualisation to reflect national specificities. Wahlström and Sundberg refer to these discourses as ‘coordinative discourses’, while ‘communicative discourses’ mediate discourse between policy actors and the public. The former provides the basis for the ‘public philosophy’ that underpins policy intentions (in this case the individual as constituted by human capital theory), while the latter provides the ‘persuasive’ discourse to underpin policy development and change.

Micro-credentials are strongly shaped by ‘common sense’ understandings of the role and purpose of higher education, particularly in supporting people to attain the skills needed for work. In other words, the public philosophy that underpins them has become naturalized as common-sense. Micro-credentials build on graduate attributes, employability skills and 21^st century skills, and take these to their logical conclusion, which is that learning is about work, that the purpose of learning is to prepare individuals for the labour market, and that this can be achieved in small bite-sized chunks. Challenging this discourse requires challenging the public philosophy that it is based upon. This is difficult to do in Anglophone traditions which separate theorizing about education, including higher education, into different disciplines. And, the complexities in challenging this public philosophy are further accentuated by the tendency to distinguish between curriculum and pedagogy so that the ‘problem’ is one of how to teach, not what we are teaching or the link between the two (Muller, 2014). The Didaktik tradition is helpful in thinking through these problems.

Comparing different traditions and the state of educational knowledge in higher education

In his historical analysis of the study of education and the difference between the Anglophone and the Continental Didaktik tradition, Biesta (2011) explains that in Anglophone traditions the study of education as an object and the field of education studies has been fragmented between the ‘four contributing disciplines’—history, philosophy, sociology and psychology, with psychology being the dominant discipline. As a consequence, educational theory has been described memorably as ‘undifferentiated mush’ (Peters, 1967, p. 155); it is not an autonomous construction generating its own theoretical knowledge and criteria for judging knowledge claims, relying instead on its ‘parent’ disciplines to do this. The education field is thus subject to intra and inter-disciplinary disputes which make it difficult to establish education as a shared object of study with at least some shared assumptions about the defining features of that object or the field (Barrett & Hordern, in press)

Biesta (2011) contrasts Anglophone traditions to the field of educational studies in the Continental Didaktik tradition, which takes education as a field in its own right that involves ‘forms of theory and theorising that are distinctively educational’ rather than just being ‘generated through other disciplines’ (p. 176). These traditions are characterized by hermeneutical approaches that explore and link the aims of education, what is to be taught and how, the relationship between a ‘parent’ discipline and its educational subject (for example, the discipline of physics and how that should be ‘pedagogised’ into a subject that is taught), the ‘student-content relation’ and the ‘student-teacher relation’ (Johansen, 2007, pp. 250–251). As Doyle (2017) explains, rather than seeing curriculum as the unproblematic rendering of taken-for-granted knowledge to curriculum, the Didaktik tradition provides ‘tools for teachers to come to pedagogical terms with the contents they teach’ (p. 219). The Didaktik tradition includes a debate about the normative purposes or goals of education, including the nature of the human being as the outcome of education (Biesta, 2011).

In contrast, the disciplinary divisions in Anglophone traditions mean that no single ‘founding discipline’ is able to ask the range of questions asked by the Didaktik tradition. This fragmentation makes it difficult to ask such normative questions about the nature of human beings, and this in part makes it possible for the ‘market’ model of the individual to be the default and dominant goal of educational policy. The dominance of this discourse is reflected in the pervasive and long-standing emphasis in policy on so-called generic and employability skills in vocational education and so-called graduate attributes in higher education, most recently dressed up as 21^st century skills (World Economic Forum & Boston Consulting Group, 2015). 21^st century skills are underpinned by human capital notions of the individual as one who possesses agency in a market, who is ‘market ready’ and able to enact a ‘market performance’ (Brown & Souto-Otero, 2020). Deng (2020) explains that these competency frameworks ‘are not educational, curricular concepts—but managerial concepts that originate from the field of human resource management’ (p. 92). They reinforce policies of the last 40 years or so that subordinate education to the needs of the labour market and economy.

This is the default setting of educational policy which posits the rational, instrumental, self-maximizing actor as the normative and taken-for-granted end-goal of education (Moodie et al., 2019; Wheelahan, 2010a). Challenging this default setting is the reason why the development of educational knowledge is urgent in all sectors of education, including in higher education. We follow Deng (2018) who argues that the Didaktik tradition can inform curriculum theorizing in schools in Anglophone countries, and Hodge (2018) who argues this for vocational education. That is, we argue for theorizing about educational knowledge as educational knowledge and applying this analysis to higher education. This goes beyond theorizing about educational knowledge from the vantage of the four founding disciplines, or about the applied purposes of educational knowledge as preparation for teachers and teaching. Educational knowledge about education would ask broad questions about the nature of education, its different purposes, how it is constituted to reflect these different purposes, and how it is to be taught based on an understanding of its origins, nature, and purpose, and of the nature of students.

How did we get here? The ‘curriculum’ problem in higher education—what works

Hordern (2019b) explains that in education faculties, particularly in Anglophone traditions, knowledge about education has been differentiated from knowledge for education and conceptualized as a distinction between theory and practice. Faculties of education are accused of being irrelevant, not focused on practice, and not evidence-based (Hordern & Tatto, 2018). This separation is coupled with the relative isolation of faculties of education within universities in Anglophone traditions, with their primary purpose being the preparation of school teachers so that the ‘context for the study of education is teacher education’ (Biesta, 2011, p. 180). Consequently, faculties of education have not had a great impact on the university more broadly in thinking through the nature of educational knowledge for higher education. Moreover, the relative institutional autonomy of universities and notions of academic freedom have shielded them to some extent from debates about education and curriculum in the schools and vocational education sectors, as if the problem of curriculum in those sectors were not a problem for universities. In theory, academic freedom means that individual academics within universities are ‘free’ to teach whatever they think matters in their field, within limits defined by disciplinary norms (Shils, 1991). In traditional constructions of academic freedom, the nexus between teaching and research is primary, with this assumed to be all that is needed to teach in one’s area of expertise.

However, educational theorizing for higher education is not entirely absent in the academy. There is research by scholars who have shown that there are differences in the way different disciplines approach the way in which knowledge is translated to curriculum and taught (Ashwin, 2012; A. Jones, 2009; McLean et al., 2017; Muller, 2009; Neumann et al., 2002).³ And, there has been considerable theorizing about the nature of knowledge and the professions, particularly in considering the possibility of ‘powerful knowledge’ in ‘regions’ which are at the interface between the professions and the academy (Case, 2017; Clegg, 2016; Hordern, 2016; M. Young & Muller, 2014).

But there has been less theorizing about the nature of educational knowledge for higher education, which includes principles for constructing curriculum, and the relationship between forms of disciplinary and applied disciplinary knowledge and pedagogy.⁴ What knowledge consists of, what knowledge matters, and how higher education provides epistemic access to different forms of knowledge is reduced to pedagogic and not epistemic problems. Knowledge is thus taken for granted, and the problem is reduced to translating this knowledge to pedagogy. Muller (2014, p. 260) explains that in the voluminous literature on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in higher education, that the problem has been recast as one which ‘lies with the practices of teaching and learning rather than with the logic of the knowledge or its curricular recontextualisation.’ The emphasis on, and focus of, SoTL is for example, what has allowed medical faculties to implement problem-based learning and competency-based models of curriculum untroubled by any critiques about these educational practices and the extent to which they facilitate students’ access to the theoretical knowledge needed to solve particular problems; and, the extent to which they provide students with access to the disciplinary criteria that they need to judge knowledge claims. Higher education has largely been indifferent to critiques of competency-based training in vocational education where it originated (Wheelahan, 2010b) because higher education largely ignores vocational education, except when pressed as a source of potential students.⁵

However, while the mechanisms for supervision and coercion are much greater and more overt for vocational education in most countries, universities have also been the subject of reforms to produce similar (if not as tightly prescribed) outcomes. Universities are now required to ensure that their programs produce graduates for the labour market. They must be competitive in markets to ensure that they are responsive to market needs, and be quality assured through mechanisms of external evaluation (Slaughter & Leslie, 2007). Policies for learning outcomes link all levels of the academy, as a mechanism for governance at the broadest level, right down to learning outcomes in individual courses or subjects (Lassnigg, 2012).⁶

This process is not restricted to Anglophone systems or those systems shaped by the colonial imposition of Anglophone models. Magnússon and Rytzler (2019) argue that the Bologna process and the establishment of the European Higher Education Area in Continental Europe has shifted the emphasis of curriculum towards learning outcomes and resulted in homogenized, goal-oriented and standardized curriculum that has resulted in the separation of what is to be taught, from how it is to be taught. They argue that this has separated what is to be taught from the disciplines.⁷ The sleight of hand here is that pedagogy is pedagogy, that there is no difference between disciplines. However, arguably, each field has its distinctive pedagogy which is related to its knowledge and mechanisms for justification.

A Bernsteinian framework

In this section, we explain Bernstein’s concepts of singulars and regions, classification and framing, and the principle of recontextualisation, which refers to how knowledge is recontextualised from the field in which it is produced and translated into curriculum. Our use of Bernsteinian concepts is necessarily selective given the rich and interconnected nature of his theoretical framework. Bernstein’s (2000) key insight was that the structure of knowledge and how this is recontextualised for curriculum and pedagogic practice is the relay for relations of power as much as the content of pedagogic discourse. It is this insight that explains how apparently ‘student-centred’ pedagogic practices and progressive discourses of human empowerment within curriculum can contribute to instrumental human capital discourses of employability. And it is this insight which explains how the ‘pure’ academic disciplines are disciplined to focus on employability, and not just the disciplining of the applied disciplines that prepare students for an occupational field of practice.

Classification refers to the boundaries between different forms of knowledge, whereas framing refers to the selection, pacing, sequencing and evaluation of that knowledge in curriculum. Classification is the ‘voice of power’ because it specifies what counts and what matters, and what is included and excluded (for example, this is sociology, but that is psychology). Framing regulates the forms of interaction and the locus of control over who can speak, and the pace, sequence and form of this interaction. This is the ‘how’ of knowledge and it shapes the way the voice of power is expressed. Framing is thus the carrier or the ‘message’ of power. Relations between classification and framing can vary. Strongly classified knowledge means that there are strong boundaries between different forms of knowledge, whereas weakly classified knowledge means that these boundaries are more opaque and permeable. In curriculum that consists of strongly classified knowledge structures, students can for example, ‘recognize’ the distinction between different structures of knowledge (for example, sociology and psychology, or chemistry and biology), whereas in curriculum where knowledge is weakly classified (such as in programs that emphasize inter-disciplinarity), this may be more difficult. Strongly framed knowledge refers to strong control over the selection, pacing, sequencing and evaluation of knowledge by the teacher, whereas weakly framed knowledge invests greater apparent control of these processes in students.

Bernstein distinguishes between singulars, regions and genericism as modes of knowledge. Singulars describe the academic disciplines, while regions describe education that is oriented to a field of practice (such as engineering or social work) rather than a singular body of knowledge. Genericism also prepares people for a field of practice, but it relies more on the principle of market relevance for selecting knowledge for occupational preparation.

Singulars (academic disciplines) are strongly classified and internally oriented, with strong boundaries between them and other areas of knowledge. Singulars are specialized knowledge structures or discourses which have a unique name (for example, physics or sociology), with specialized languages with rules that stipulate what is included as knowledge, how knowledge is to be created, specialized texts, rules of entry, and rewards and punishments (Bernstein, 2000 p. 52). Socialization (and hence personal identity) is expressed through a commitment to loyalty to the academic discipline, to its ‘otherness’ and as a consequence identities and orientations are focussed inwards (Bernstein, 2000 p. 54). So, for example, one becomes (is) a historian, philosopher, economist, physicist or biologist.

In contrast to singular forms of knowledge, regions of knowledge face inwards towards the disciplines that form the knowledge base of their practice, and outwards towards the field of practice itself. Regions include the applied disciplines. Bernstein (2000 p. 52) explains that the process of regionalizing knowledge occurs through:

… recontextualising singulars into larger units which operate both in the intellectual field of disciplines and in the field of external practice. Regions are the interface between disciplines (singulars) and the technologies they make possible.

Regions draw on, integrate and recontexualise multiple singulars using the principle of the demands of the field of practice. The classification of knowledge within regions is consequently weaker, because the principle of selection of knowledge and its translation to curriculum is the field of practice and not the structure of knowledge itself (and its disciplinary classification). While this is so, knowledge in the regions can be more or less strongly classified and more or less strongly framed. So, curriculum may be structured so that students have access to the disciplines that underpin their practices (such as psychology in early childhood education), or engaged in curriculum that makes these distinctions between the disciplines and the criteria they use to judge knowledge claims more opaque, such as in problem-based learning.

Beck and Young (2005) distinguish between the ‘old’ regions of the traditional professions (such as medicine, engineering and law), and the ‘new’ regions of new vocationally oriented higher education (such as social work and teaching). They elaborate and develop Bernstein’s analysis to argue that strong forms of inner dedication to professional identity arose in traditional regions because of the strong links between the profession and the academy. This includes the historical links between the professions and their knowledge bases (the singulars); their emphasis on collegiate autonomy and collegiate control over training and admission to the profession; through defining the boundaries of their knowledge base; the development and enforcement of codes of conduct; and, socialization within the profession, or in other words, ‘the creation of a professional habitus’ (Beck & Young, 2005, p. 188). So, again for example, one becomes (is) a lawyer, medical doctor, or engineer.

In contrast to the traditional regions, Hordern (2016) explains that the newer regions often have weaker communities that underpin collegiate autonomy and are also characterized by stronger market and bureaucratic logics that shape their development in the academy, and their practice in the field. Bureaucratic logics are often associated with ‘welfare’ professions such as teaching and social work in which attempts to ‘control’ professional knowledge are by external regulation (Hordern, 2016) because of their importance as mechanisms of social control in shaping citizens and workers. Consequently, matters to do with teacher education are of strong interest to the state. But even with these strong forms of external regulation, one becomes (is) a teacher or social worker.

Genericism

Bernstein identified a third principle for distinguishing and organizing knowledge in the late 20^th century which he described as genericism, or as the generic mode. This has had a strong impact on the new regions that have arisen since the massification of higher education began apace in the 1970s and took off in the 1980s (Trow, 2010). These new regions such as hospitality, tourism, business studies and information science rely more strongly on market relevance as the principle for selecting knowledge for fields of practice and have a tenuous connection to a knowledge base (Muller, 2009). Muller (2009) explains that in these fields, ‘the profession itself is generally more diffuse, fluid and less organised, and consequently sends out more ambiguous, frequently contradictory signals about professional requirements to the academy’ (p. 214). Forms of identity are also more fluid. One ‘works in’ hospitality or tourism or business administration, and occupational identities are more fluid and contingent, reflecting in part the nature of employment in those fields.

In generic modes, identity is shaped by the requirements of the market and less by an inner orientation to a field of knowledge or a field of practice. The impact of generic modes is felt on all forms of higher education, including singulars, traditional and newer regions, and broad fields of practice. The impact of generic modes may be felt differentially within these fields, with stronger singulars and regions more able to resist the imposition of genericism. Nonetheless, all are required to ‘produce’ graduates who are ‘economic citizens’ able to function in a market society where contingent forms of employment have become more pervasive and where we are all expected to be ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ (Sayer, 2015, p. 18).

Arguments about the perpetual pace of change and the need to constantly reskill drive human capital discourses about continual investment in the self. Bernstein (2000, p. 59) explains that the current human capital discourse within the ‘official’ education and training field is based on a concept of work and life in which every area of life is perpetually transformed, and that the concept of trainability is now the key principle governing the construction of curriculum and pedagogy. He explains that the process of perpetual re-formation ‘Is based on the acquisition of generic modes which it is hoped will realise a flexible transferable potential rather than specific performances’ (Bernstein, 2000: 59). He says that in this way knowledge is divorced from knowers, and ‘from their commitments, their personal dedications’ (Bernstein, 2000: 86). The new principle governing the way knowledge is classified is oriented outwards, but to markets and not to a field of practice, and this severs the link between the regions and disciplines and changes the relationship between knower and knowledge. The knowledge and capacities ‘that matter’ are oriented to the market, and to the market’s demands and accountabilities because markets endure while knowledge and occupations change. Bernstein (2000, p. 59) asks if identities are to be formed in and through markets, then:

… how does the actor recognise him/herself and others? By the materialities of consumption, by its distributions, by its absences. Here the products of the market relay the signifiers whereby temporary stabilities, orientations, relations and evaluations are constructed.

Ball (2003, p. 217) explains that ‘working on the self’ is shaped by a regime of accountability and audit which leads to the development of subjectivities in which individuals are:

… encouraged to think about themselves as individuals who calculate about themselves, ‘add value’ to themselves, improve their productivity, strive for excellence and live an existence of calculation.

The principle of recontextualisation

It is important at this point to distinguish between singulars and regions on the one hand, and curriculum intended to induct students into these knowledge forms on the other. When knowledge and skill is selected from the field in which it is produced and implemented (say in singulars such physics or regions such as early childhood education) and recontextualized in curriculum, it is always selected according to assumptions about what is important, what students need to know, and what they need to do. This is regardless of whether the curriculum is for school, vocational education or higher education, although the process may differ in each sector, along with the actors. This process of selection is exemplified both through the official and hidden curriculum, and both structure the curriculum as practised. Neither the discipline of physics nor the field of early childhood education can be reproduced in its entirety in the curriculum even in a university, and there must be a process of selection which is used to delocate knowledge from the field in which it was produced and practised and relocate it in curriculum (Bernstein, 2000, pp. 113–114). The recontextualizing principle mediates the way knowledge is classified through disciplinary or non-disciplinary frameworks, and the way in which it is framed through competing perspectives about human nature and the purpose of education. When knowledge is selected and reshaped through curriculum, it is always through principles that differ from the way in which it was produced.

Bernstein refers to the principle used to select knowledge for curriculum as the recontextualizing principle. The recontextualizing principle mediates the production of pedagogic discourse and underpins relations of classification and framing in curriculum. Bernstein (2000, p. 33) explains that ‘Pedagogic discourse is constructed by a recontextualizing principle which selectively appropriates, relocates, refocuses and relates other discourses to constitute its own order.’ He says the recontextualizing principle encapsulates ‘expectations about conduct, character and manner’ (Bernstein, 2000, p. 13). The recontextualizing principle is made of up two parts: a regulative discourse and an instructional discourse. The instructional discourse is the curriculum, but the selection, sequencing, pacing, and evaluation of the instructional discourse is shaped in part by the regulative discourse. The regulative discourse limits what can be said in the instructional discourse and how it is said; this is because ‘the instructional discourse is always embedded in the regulative discourse, and the regulative discourse is the dominant discourse’ (p. 13). Relations between these discourses can vary so that, for example, there can be ‘weak framing of regulative discourse and strong framing of instructional discourse’ (p. 13).⁸ A strong regulative discourse imposes definitive notions about the nature of the individual, for example, in school education, that students are patriotic, respect authority and so forth. In vocational education and higher education, a strong regulative principle may be that graduates are ‘employable’ and have the dispositions required by employers.

This distinction between instructional and regulative discourses, and the emphasis on the regulative discourse, helps us to understand three things: the first is the dominance of human capital discourses in higher education curriculum; the second is the way in which the instrumental discourses of human capital theory appropriate apparently progressive discourses of individual empowerment; and, the third is the way in which relations of framing (the message of power) can impact classification (the voice of power).

First, the regulative principle is shaped by an understanding of the nature of the individual and in current policies, the purpose of education is to prepare the economic citizen, one who is not dependent on the state.⁹ The economic citizen emerges from neo-liberal beliefs intrinsic to human capital theory about human nature that argue that human beings are by nature rational self-interested actors who base their decisions on instrumental calculations about likely returns (Harvey, 2007). Participation in markets is natural because it is the means through which individuals pursue their goals through relations of exchange, and it is the role of governments to facilitate markets (Friedman & Friedman, 1982). The skills individuals need are market skills given the rise in contingent employment and informal labour markets, and this helps explain the emphasis on employability skills, graduate attributes (Allais, 2015), 21^st Century skills and now, micro-credentials.

In many ways, 21^st Century skills are the epitome of the colonization by human capital theory of all aspects of our lives because they are exhaustive, focusing not just on what we can do, but also who we are. They include foundational literacies (literacy, numeracy, scientific literacy, ICT literacy, financial literacy and cultural and civic literacy); competencies (critical thinking/problem solving; creativity; communication; and, collaboration); and, character qualities (curiosity; initiative; persistence/grit; adaptability; leadership; and social and cultural awareness) (World Economic Forum & Boston Consulting Group, 2015, p. 3). These apparently ‘neutral’ terms assume a common-sense and consensual understanding of skills ‘required of any job’ that are ‘stripped of academic clutter’ (Hickox & Moore, 1995, p. 53), but are steeped in human capital discourses of agency in markets and skills required for work. In many countries variations of these types of putative skills underpin qualifications frameworks and institutional quality assurance frameworks elicit compliance with the emphasis on employability skills.

Second, 21^st Century skills and their predecessors mobilize the language of agency and empowerment while colonizing our beings in the process. Jones and Moore (1995) explain that educational policy must be located within the political context in which it arises. The regulative discourse (in this case human capital theory) is used to selectively appropriate concepts from the borrowed discourse (in this case progressivism with the language of empowerment) and reassemble it in a policy discourse. The developmental language of empowerment is tied to the ‘project of the self’, but it is a self that is constructed as a market identity using ‘the products and services which the market provides’ (Hartley, 2007, p. 2). The person constructed through the higher education system is one who is able to position themselves in the market, acquire knowledge and skill in response to external signals and invest in themselves appropriately. Maintaining one’s human capital is now a duty of citizenship and future wellbeing may well depend on it, and this will require investing in skills over the course of a lifetime (Mounier, 2001).

Third, the relations of framing (message of power) can have an impact on classification (voice of power) of knowledge. Bernstein explains that classification determines what can be expressed, but framing determines how it can be expressed. In other words, whilst relations of power are established through the classification of boundaries, the way in which social practices operate within these boundaries has the potential to alter the relations of power. Arguably, framing through learning outcomes, employability skills, graduate attributes and 21^st century skills has the potential to weaken relations of classification. So, even in strongly classified fields that are strongly oriented towards the field of knowledge and underpinned by strong communities, institutional imperatives in quality assurance processes require programs to meet homogenized requirements in programme reporting, all couched within the discourse of skills and employability. They must all have learning outcomes and demonstrate how these produce employable graduates. Micro-credentials take this one step further, as is discussed in the next section.

The regulative discourse underpinning micro-credentials

n this section, we apply the assembled Bernsteinian conceptual tools to analyse micro-credentials or micro-qualifications. The promise of micro-credentials is that they will enable individuals to keep up with the relentless pace of change in the knowledge society and meet the future needs of work, and provide disadvantaged people with access to credentials that will recognize their skills and lead to jobs (Ifenthaler et al., 2016). They are also legitimated by progressive discourses of student-centred learning that focus on self-regulated learning, self-efficacy, personalization, and self-realization (for example, see Wills & Xie, 2016). They are subject to the same transformative rhetoric as other reforms such as 21^st century skills and MOOCs that seek to transform education so that it is more responsive to work (for a critique of the latter, see Moodie, 2016). For example, Ellis et al. (2016) in their overview of digital badges and micro-credentials say: ‘As with most changes of this magnitude, principles, philosophies, beliefs, and attitudes that have existed for decades and even centuries are being challenged’ (p. 19).

Micro-credentials start with the requirements of work tasks and roles, not even whole occupations. They go beyond requiring programs and their individual courses or subjects to be based on learning outcomes, to breaking the nexus between micro-credentials and the broader discipline or field of practice. They change the relations of classification within programs for professional preparation within universities so that the focus is on parts of an occupation.¹⁰ Figure 1 shows the relationship between the regulative and instructional discourses, and how they shape the classification and framing of knowledge in curriculum. The original principles of classification and the boundary relations between different forms of knowledge are reconstituted, but on the basis of a different principle altogether—employability or jobs. In so doing, micro-credentials are seeking to convert disciplinary knowledge into everyday knowledge using the workplace as the organizing principle, not the system of relations within disciplines and applied disciplines. Micro-credentials reflect the regulative discourse of human capital which shapes the instructional discourse, and they also fragment the curriculum and in this way change the relations of classification. The discourse of micro-credentials has rules of accumulation where credentials are stackable, additive, and commutative so that the order of acquisition is irrelevant. This is constructed in a way that does not allow the hierarchical construction of knowledge and thus micro-credentials undermine notions of sequence, hierarchy and coherence. Knowledge moves from being in the form of ‘a coherent, explicit and systematically principled structure’ (Bernstein, 1999, p. 159) organized in the disciplines or applied disciplines to everyday knowledge which is organized by being relevant to a particular context. Students don’t have access to disciplinary systems of meaning; instead, they are provided with access to contextually specific applications of knowledge organized by its relevance to tasks and roles, or parts of jobs. Exemplification of Bernstein’s concepts in micro-credentials.

Figure 1. Exemplification of Bernstein’s concepts in micro-credentials

Programs that were constructed as coherent wholes can be disaggregated into components and ‘stacked’ together (Fong & Janzow, 2017), a process which, once commenced, suffers from further processes of atomization. A more granular example than micro-credentials is badges and other very small parts of learning offered by publicly funded universities which may also ‘count’ towards a formal qualification. One example is the suite of ‘employability credentials’ offered by two Australian universities that have discrete credentials for each ‘soft skill’ or ‘transferable skill’ such as communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving.¹¹ Each of these is offered independently and in a context-free way even though to engage in ‘problem-solving’ one needs to be able to mobilize the knowledge underpinning practice in that domain. For example, the knowledge needed to ‘problem solve’ putting out a fire on an oil rig is completely different to that required to manage a room of three-year-old children having a meltdown in a childcare centre. In this example, the disciplinary knowledge that underpins each is different, and problem-solving is not transferable from one domain to another.

Micro-credentials, badges, and other ‘alternative credentials’ that focus on small components of learning, are based on a behaviourist approach imported from the vocational education sector where it originated in which qualifications can be disaggregated into components and unproblematically reassembled. Micro-credentials are premised on methodological individualism in which the sum is the total of the parts. The outcomes of learning are assumed to be observable, unproblematic, and transferable. Micro-credentials extend the human capital premises in higher education by requiring individuals to second-guess the requirements of employers and if they don’t guess correctly, then they have made a bad investment. They shift the costs of internal training from employers to individuals, where individuals are required to always be ‘market ready’ and ‘enact a market performance’ (Brown & Souto-Otero, 2020). They help to strengthen the regulative discourse of human capital theory, which in turn exerts an influence on the instructional discourse. They contribute to undermining the relations of classification and framing in higher education through a human capital discourse based on the homo economicus model of human motivation. This is the normative model that drives the regulative discourse in higher education, and it is a particularly narrow understanding in contrast to broader conceptions of human agency, motivation and reflexivity (Archer, 2000).

Conclusion

We must move beyond the disjunction between pedagogy and curriculum endemic to the literature on the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education. There is not ‘good’ pedagogy identified by ‘what works’ (Gov.UK, n.d.; U.S. Department of Education, n.d.) and ‘bad’ pedagogy that are independent of what is to be taught. What is to be taught must be the starting point for considering pedagogy. Continental hermeneutic traditions have much to offer Anglophone traditions in considering the role of knowledge in curriculum, how that is related to pedagogy, the relationship between the student and the content that is to be taught, and the relationship between the student and the teacher.

A focus on the nature of educational knowledge in higher education would result in deeper analyses of the principles that shape curriculum and the impact of these principles on relations of classification and framing in curriculum. Bernstein’s conceptual tools provide us with the tools we need to begin this investigation. They perhaps do not take us the whole way, and we need further dialogue with other traditions such as in the Didaktik tradition (Biesta, 2011; Deng, 2018, 2020; Magnússon & Rytzler, 2019) and other traditions, such as the Confucian tradition (Hayhoe, 2005). However, Bernstein’s tools do provide us with a starting point in higher education in understanding the nature of the human being envisaged in the regulative discourse, and how this regulative discourse impacts relations of classification and framing. These are issues considered in the Didaktik tradition, and provide the basis for dialogue between the two. So too do questions about relations between ‘parent’ singulars and how they are recontextualized in curriculum, relations between students and knowledge and relations between students and teachers. While these questions can be asked in all sectors of education, the way they are answered in each sector may differ because relations of power differ in the schools, vocational education and higher education sectors.

This paper applied Bernstein’s tools to analyse micro-credentials. The novelty of the paper is twofold. First, it shows how the use of Bernsteinian tools, particularly the relationship between the instructional and regulative discourses which constitute the recontextualising principle, can be a powerful way to dissect contemporary changes in higher education curriculum. The regulative discourse is the dominant discourse, and it is this that is contributing to restructuring curriculum in the image of homo economicus, the individual in the market place who chooses to invest in this or that skill, and the employer who seeks to purchase them. Second, in using these tools, it shows that micro-credentials are contributing to changing the nature of classification and framing in higher education curriculum and this demonstrates that it is not just the content of curriculum that matters, but how it is structured matters. The paper demonstrates that micro-credentials are a strong tool for ‘disciplining’ curriculum in higher education so that it is more aligned with the putative requirements of the workplace. Micro-credentials build on and extend discourses of employability and 21^st Century skills in higher education and they break the nexus between contextually specific applications of theoretical knowledge and the relational system of meaning in which they are embedded. They undermine principles of coherence, sequence and hierarchy in the disciplines, and they contribute to fragmenting the knowledge base of practice in the applied disciplines. Micro-credentials also contribute to fragmenting occupations by disaggregating components from the whole. They are based on a human capital perspective in which individuals invest in themselves by second guessing the requirements of the labour market, and are increasingly a form of currency which is exchanged. They are subject to multiple processes of atomization, so micro-credentials can themselves be comprised of smaller components such as badges. This is the type of analysis that can inform practice and has implications for what we teach, as well as how we teach.

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to the two reviewers and to the associate editor for their very helpful and perceptive comments which helped us to sharpen the focus of this paper and our argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leesa Wheelahan

Leesa Wheelahan is a professor and William. G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership in the Department of Leadership, Higher, and Adult Education at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include relations between colleges and universities, tertiary education policy, and the role of knowledge in curriculum.

Gavin Moodie

Gavin Moodie is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Leadership, Higher, and Adult Education at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Adjunct Professor in Education at RMIT University, Australia. His research interests include relations between college and university education in developed countries; relations between postsecondary education and work; and, postsecondary education policy.

Notes

1. We are grateful to one of the reviewers who drew this implication to our attention and helped us to position it more clearly than we may have otherwise done.

2. While discursive institutionalism is helpful in this context in analysing policy flows, it would be stronger if it were grounded on a stronger realist ontology such as critical realism (a notion the authors explicitly reject), rather than its current constructivist premise. Such a debate is, however, beyond the scope of this article.

3. See also the work of scholars associated with Legitimation Code Theory (https://legitimationcodetheory.com/).

4. Exceptions are the work of Young and Muller (2014), Hordern (2016, 2019a, 2019c), McLean et al. (2013), (2017), and Clegg (2016) in the UK, and scholars in South Africa (see Luckett, 2009; Luckett & Shay, 2020; Muller, 2009; Muller & Young, 2014). In contrast, there has been substantial theorizing about the role of knowledge in the vocational education sector, in part in response to competency-based training models of curriculum, although there is still a marked disjuncture between the scholarly literature and policy (see Allais, 2014; Gamble, 2016; Wheelahan, 2015).

5. For a clear example of this arrogance by higher education scholars about vocational education, see Lewis and Lodge (2016, p. 46).

6. For example, as is common in university quality assurance processes in the Westminster Anglophone systems, this is exemplified by the need to produce a program quality assurance report which includes a demonstration of how learning outcomes at the course or subject level are linked to program learning outcomes, which are then connected to the department, faculty and university missions.

7. They cite the dominance of John Biggs’ model of Constructive Alignment (Biggs & Tang, 2011) in programs for university teachers in Europe (and arguably also in many Anglophone systems) as a pedagogic model that offers one homogenized framework for understanding the nature of teaching and learning.

8. And this is a key reason why it is mistaken to confuse a curriculum that it strongly classified and framed with strong signalling to students about content, selection, pace, and evaluation as antithetical to a student-focused approach. Strong framing of the instructional discourse may provide working-class students with access to the boundaries between different forms of knowledge and the principles of their construction.

9. The demonization of those on welfare is, of course, a key component of neoliberal discourse from the 1980s until now at the time of writing, in 2020. However, attitudes may shift, given the widescale implementation of state-funded welfare for the whole population in many countries necessitated as a result of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

10. As an illustration, an example of a new six month higher education certificate in Australia is an under-graduate certificate in aged care support which is offered fully online. See: http://handbook.westernsydney.edu.au/hbook/course.aspx?course=7173.1.

11. For examples, see: https://credentials.deakin.edu.au/credentials/ and https://www.rmit.edu.au/creds.