Recontextualising English, Regulating Thinking: Bernsteinian Framing and Higher-Order Thinking Possibilities in Pakistan's Secondary Curriculum

Abstract

In more recent curriculum reforms, English language education increasingly sees itself as a medium for the development of critical thinking skills, creative capacities, and self-reliance. In order to fulfill these imposed objectives, school textbooks are recontextualised through selection, organization of knowledge, and pedagogic control. This qualitative document analysis focuses on 9th and 10th Grade English textbooks published by the Punjab Curriculum and Textbook Board, under the Revised National Curriculum of Pakistan 2023. Using Basil Bernstein's sociology of education (e.g., the pedagogic device, classification, and framing) in combination with a social realist knowledge approach, the article examines the construction of higher-order thinking (HOT) and the distribution and control of pedagogical agency. Inconsistent patterns emerged from the analysis. On one level, the textbooks expand students' horizons for intellectual development and creativity by way of activities designed for analysis, evaluation, and reflection, yet on another level these are highly controlled within strong framing (through highly sequenced, tightly organized, and explicitly defined tasks and teacher instructions). The analysis demonstrates that while disciplinary knowledge is widely circulated and access is established for students, students' involvement and pedagogical agency remain constrained within tight pedagogical frameworks of framing and classification. I contend that even though the textbooks offer students copious opportunities and intellectual resources to exercise and hone HOT, strong framing restricts affordances and constraint teacher pedagogic judgement to some extent. This essay avoids claims of revealing the actual teachers' agency in their work; instead, it outlines what constitutes pedagogical possibilities to serve as a baseline for classroom enactment studies.