Quand la complexité des supports d’apprentissage fait obstacle à la compréhension de tous les élèves

Abstract

This paper examines the problem of social inequality among students from the point of view of extended literacy, focusing specifically on school literacy – in other words, literacy related to the understanding of complex material used to promote knowledge construction. The aim is to demonstrate the value of the theoretical framework developed by Basil Bernstein and the heuristic value of Bernstein’s core concepts (and in particular the concepts of universalistic and particularistic meanings) for understanding and describing inequalities in learning.