Figure 2 - uploaded by Lee Rusznyak
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Images of the Orion Nebula (middle) and the Trapezium Open Star Cluster (right), taken by the Hubble Telescope (open access with acknowledgement to NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team).
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Supporting student success is increasingly important, especially in contexts where relatively few school-leavers access higher education and drop-out rates are high. Many student support initiatives suggest generic approaches that underestimate the significance of differences in knowledge-building processes across their various courses. While knowl...
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Context 1
... inside the nebula, a trapezium of four newly formed stars can be identified. Much more detail of the structure of the Orion Nebula and the Trapezium open star cluster becomes discernible in the images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (see Figure 2 below). In much the same way, concepts that have stronger semantic density are not as straightforward as they may first appear. ...
Citations
... Briefly put, epistemological semantic density relates to the building of knowledge. Studies have used this concept to look at how a curriculum connects and builds knowledge into a larger whole, for example Rusznyak (2020) and Maton and Doran (2021). Axiological semantic density relates to the building of knowers, as, for example, Lambrinos' (2019) work has shown: building particular dispositions, attitudes, and ways of being that are valued or necessary for success. ...
Doctoral training and education tends to focus on how to research and write a thesis, which can take many forms. However, a thesis is not the only valued outcome of a doctorate: the emerging Doctor is important too. Being and becoming a Doctor implies identity work and engaging affective dimensions of researcher development alongside researching and writing a thesis. These are not always explicit in doctoral education, though. Thus, we contend that their role in researcher development needs to be named, described, and understood. In this paper we use Constellations from Legitimation Code Theory to make visible two valued doctoral attributes and dispositions as exemplars. We have used published papers in the field of doctoral studies as data. Within increasingly diverse doctoral student cohorts, it is important to actively foreground the development of valued affective dispositions through doctoral education to enable more candidates to achieve success in their doctorates.
... Furthermore, it can be enacted in any field where there is a need to understand how knowledge works. In South Africa alone, the diverse application of the theory is considerable, including to educational concerns in academic development ( (Luckett 2012), teacher education (Rusznyak 2018(Rusznyak , 2020Walton & Rusznyak 2020), theology (Meyer 2019), and vocational education and work-integrated learning (Hudson, Engel-Hills & Winberg 2020;Shay & Steyn 2016) to name a few. As this non-exhaustive list demonstrates, the range of areas is diverse though we noted a strong focus on academic development. ...
In the context of rapid change in higher education, there is a great demand for powerful theory and methods to address key issues, particularly related to teaching and learning. This chapter traces the uptake of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) in higher education studies in South Africa to make sense of how and why this theory has become so popular. LCT draws on the works of Bernstein and Bourdieu to provide a powerful theoretical and analytical toolkit with which to analyse social practices. In the chapter we argue that the attraction of this theory is that it attends to a ‘knowledge blindness’ whereby much higher education research, particularly that focused on teaching and learning, fails to consider the nature and effects of the discipline or field being learned. The use of this theory is illustrated in the chapter by reference to a number of publications. In doing so, we illustrate the importance of conceptual tools that allow an interrogation of what we are teaching, who we are teaching and how this social practice takes place.
... SeeMacDonald (1998) and data available at www.stellarium.org. 2Rusznyak (2020) goes further by using the constellation of Orion to additionally illustrate the concepts of semantic density and condensation. 3 Though these concepts were first introduced using concepts from the Semantics dimension of LCT(Maton 2014: 148-70), they do not belong to any dimension. ...
A key aspect of science is how ideas are related to create explanations. Yet, reflecting their knowledge-blindness, dominant approaches to researching science education neglect these relations. Maton and Doran introduce the method of constellation analysis from LCT as a way of revealing how ideas are brought together in different ways and the effects these differences have for teaching science. This innovative method is used to analyse explanations of the tides and seasons. In each case the logic of explanations presented in school textbooks is analysed and compared to how the explanation is taught in a classroom. These analyses show that explanations of seemingly similar kinds of phenomena differ in terms of how ideas are related together and that the logic of these relations impacts on how they are taught in classrooms. Constellation analysis offers a new analytic method with huge potential as a practical tool for researchers, curriculum designers, educators and students.
