Abstract

Interest is increasingly being taken in educational sites which extend or which are located beyond the school. These include sites associated with developing information and communications technologies and mass media organisations as well as institutions of longer standing, such as museums, galleries, and so forth. In this paper we shall deploy a sociological framework originally developed for the analysis of school texts to such non-school sites. Our focus will include considerations of heritage and conservation sites in the form of castles and zoos. We contend that in operating in terms of both pedagogic and exchange relations, such sites may have something to teach as well as something to learn from schooling.

Keywords

Introduction

In the UK, recent educational and social policy (increasingly becoming one and the same thing) has placed ever greater emphasis on learning in non-school contexts. After-school clubs, breakfast clubs and holiday literacy projects have extended both the school day and the school year. Alongside this, the home has increasingly become constructed as a pedagogic site through not only the increased stress placed on homework (see Barber, 1996), but also the notion of parents as partners with teachers in the education of the children (see Bastiani & Wolfendale, 1996). Parents are seen as both agents of and, latterly, subject to official pedagogic action. For example, stemming from an expressed concern for the stability of ‘traditional’ family structures, proposals for ‘support’ for parents have recently been made which include the possibility of teaching parents how best to meet their responsibilities (see Home Office, 1998). The importance of family life to current social policy is clearly demonstrated by Home Secretary, Jack Straw’s statement that:

Whether spending a day in or a day out, it is clearly becoming important to ensure that one’s activity is seen as having some clear pedagogic potential. Primary school age children should, whatever the reservations of researchers, spend time doing homework lest they ‘add another 20 more minutes to the two hours most pupils of that age already spend in front of the TV or playing a computer games’ (Secretary of State for Education & Employment David Blunkett, quoted in the Guardian 20th July 1999, p.10). Similarly, our trips outside the home are open to evaluation according their pedagogic potential. One grand day out is not necessarily equivalent to another.

The pedagogic potential of some sites visited in ‘leisure time’, such as museums and galleries, has been extensively explored (see, for instance, Hooper-Greenhill, 1994). Research in this area has paid attention to issues such as the nature of displays, modes of communication and the social characteristics of the visitors. Our interest in exploring non-school sites is somewhat different. Drawing on the analysis of school texts, we wish produce a description of the nature of the social relations established in and through these sites as texts (see discussion below). Our contention is that, as non-school sites become of ever increasing importance in governmental and commercial educational rhetoric, it becomes important for us, as sociologists and educational researchers, to develop modes of analysis and descriptions that match the levels of detail and analytic power of our work on schooling.

The theoretical origins of this our approach lies in Dowling’s (1998) generation of a language for the sociological description of pedagogic texts. By ‘text’ we mean any empirical object of analysis. The approach to the text is to interpret it as participating in a particular activity so that it is this activity that gives the text its ‘meaning’. The analysis is sociological in that the activity is defined in terms of relations between social positions and practices. The initial concern is with pedagogic activity. This is defined as involving the transmission of a privileged practice between a transmitter and one or more acquirer positions under conditions in which the principles of evaluation of these practices reside with the transmitter.
Dowling’s language enables us to analyse empirical texts—such as a school textbook—in terms of the ways in which they act as instances of such pedagogic activities. Subsequent developments (see, for example, Dowling 1999 and in press) have led to the consideration of other forms of activity and specifically exchange activities, for which the location of the principles of evaluation of practices shifts to the acquirer. Both modes of activity will be considered in this paper.
Empirically, the referent activity of the original object texts was school mathematics. Amongst other findings, Dowling’s analysis revealed the ways in which school mathematics texts constructed different ‘myths’ about mathematics and distributed these myths to categories of reader on what is essentially social class terms, the result being an effective translation of social class into ‘ability’. Here we shall focus on texts relating to non-school educational sites, specifically, two castles and two zoos. In general terms, our research question is, how do these sites construct via their texts’ transmitter and acquirer positions and what are the nature and mechanisms of the distribution of practices between these positions?

The empirical texts are, in the main, official publications of the sites that are directed at visitors, including school parties. Mostly, these are print texts, but we shall also make reference to some audio and video texts. In addition, the material organisation of each site was interpreted as a text. Although we visited these sites and observed them ‘in use’, what we are presenting is a textual analysis and not an ethnographic study. The general principles that we are applying in this analysis are given in Brown and Dowling (1998) (see also Dowling, 1999). We have not looked at all of the texts associated with any of these sites—indeed, given our interpretation of ‘text’, exhaustion in this sense is particularly problematic. The texts that we have chosen were amongst those given high ‘visibility’ by the institutions themselves. In this paper we will be able to consider certain key aspects of only some of these texts. We are not, in any event, claiming to make generalisations about the sites as total institutions. We discuss the issue of generalisation at the end of the paper. The four sites that we shall consider, in turn, are: Bodiam Castle; Mountfitchet Castle; London Zoo; and Howletts Wild Animal Park.

Bodiam Castle and the Myth of Reference

All texts may be interpreted as constructing an author and ideal readers (see, for example, Eco, 1979). we refer to these as textual voices that are realisations of the positions of the referent activity. The National Trust guide book for visitors to Bodiam Castle—Bodiam Castle: East Sussex (The National Trust, 1991)—is an example of what we are referring to as a transmission text. That is, it constructs an apprenticing relationship between its authorial and reader voices. The privileged message of the text—the realisation of the practices of the referent activity—may be described, firstly, as a strand of a national historical narrative. The castle serves as the focus of this narrative which is represented largely as a chronicle. So, chapter 1 of the book, ‘The wars with France’, begins:

Control of the Channel was important from the outset. …
(The National Trust, 1991; p. 7)

This narrative strand is the product of a more general historical/archaeological discourse. The guide book also incorporates strategies that construct the reader as an apprentice with respect to this discourse. This is achieved through the generic form and through the content of the text. For example, references are made to historical evidence in the form of contemporary chronicles and diaries—as illustrated in the extract above—and also by the use of contemporary paintings, drawings and sculpture. The text also includes a bibliography in academic form. Chapters six and seven of the guide book offer descriptions of the castle and its setting in terms of archaeological interpretation:

This text is clearly mimetic (see Roberts, 1995) in that it constructs a reality—events and practices—that lies beyond its own description and that is approached via the productive work of the historical/archaeological discourse. From the constructivist perspective within which we are working (see Dowling, 1998, 1999; Brown & Dowling, 1998) this construction is aptly described as mythical. This is the myth of reference, the claim that the discourse refers to rather than ‘simulates’ (cf Baudrillard, 1993; Dowling, 1996) its products.

In terms of its material organisation, Bodiam Castle constitutes what we refer to as a regulatory text. Thus the ancilliary services and practices associated with a ‘day out’ rather than with historical/archaeological discourse are removed from the castle buildings. The ticket office is some fifty metres outside the moat and the tea room and public conveniences are several hundred metres away. There are teaching and video rooms within the castle, but their presence is signalled only demurely. The castle is patrolled by a warden who seems to operate on a ‘panoptic’ principle (cf Foucault, 1977); his presence is likely to be made apparent at some point during a visit, but the visitor is generally uncertain as to his actual location within the castle complex at any given time.

The castle thus operates as what we refer to as an operational matrix. Its structure tacitly encodes the principles of its use in the same way as does a supermarket, a shopping mall or a housing estate.(1) An operational matrix remains a pedagogic text. However, there is no transmission of principles, rather a regulation of behaviour. The distinction between the reader voices of transmission and regulatory texts is that the former constructs an apprenticed reader as a potential subject of the discourse, whilst the latter constructs a regulated operative. Crucially, transmission texts, as they have been described here, construct the kind of practice that tends to make its principles available within discourse. Regulatory texts, by contrast, construct the kind of practice for which principles are relatively implicit, which is to say, not so readily available within discourse. We shall refer to these modes of practice as high discursive saturation (DS+) and low discursive saturation (DS-) respectively. We shall now move on to look at the second castle.

Mountfitchet Castle and the Myth of Participation

Bodiam Castle primarily consists of the material remains of a building and is owned by a charitable organisation, the National Trust. Mountfitchet, by contrast, is almost entirely a modern (1986) reconstruction and is a privately owned commercial enterprise, which is to say the institution is likely to be characterised, at least in part, by exchange relations. In the way that we have defined it, a pedagogic activity is concerned with the regulation of practice which is why the principles of evaluation of texts are located on the transmitter side. An exchange activity, on the other hand, is concerned with the marketing of a product and so locates the principles of evaluation on the acquirer side. This is not to deny that a commercial organisation might seek to construct rather than respond to a market; under these circumstances, it will be operating pedagogically. Nor is it to deny that marketing strategies in the context of exchange relations must act selectively on the reservoir of potential clients. Both pedagogic and market texts construct reader voices. The latter, however, impose less regulation in terms of their reading. In Bernstein’s (1977, 1996) terms we might say that pedagogic activity is strongly framed, whilst exchange activity is weakly framed.(2)

The ‘Souvenir Edition’ of the Mountfitchet Castle guide book constructs its product via positioning strategies which establish its singularity—‘The Castle Time Forgot’—and which affiliate to authoritative documents (Doomeseday Book) and to institutions and individuals constituting endorsements. Thus:

The Mountfitchet guide book also makes reference to the domesticated animals that are kept on the site.

The final sentence of the above extract signals a further broadening of the organising principles of the institution. That is to say, there is a foregrounding of an interest in physical violence and maiming here and in the associated texts. Severed heads on bloody poles adorn the palisade; a corpse hanging from a gibbet is positioned centrally in the reconstruction and punishment stocks are located nearby; in the prison, the constable is in the process of cutting off a felon’s hand; and so forth. The emphasis on violence in this way appeals, perhaps, to the same kind of reader/visitor interest as The London Dungeon or Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.

For the purposes of this paper, the crucial distinction to be made between the Bodiam and Mountfitchet texts is in respect of their distinct modes of mythologising of the past. As we have suggested, The Bodiam text provides a form of commentary on the past that backgrounds the simulating work of the historical/archaeological practices. These practices are presented as uncovering rather than constructing the past. Even a realist epistemology would grant the constructive effect of the principles of recognition and realisation that constitute the historical/archaeological ‘past’. We refer to this effect as recontextualisation. In the case of Bodiam, the recontextualised past is presented in terms of the myth of reference. The Mountfitchet texts go further in claiming to provide an experience comparable to Norman England. The publicity leaflet, for example, invites visitors to:

The Bodiam and Mountfitchet texts both mythologise the relation between a generative practice—history/archaeology—and its simulated object—the past. We refer to the generative practices as the esoteric domain of, in this case, history/archaeology, and the simulated object as its public domain. The strategies of the Bodiam guide book provide some access to the esoteric domain, thus constructing an apprenticed reader. The Mountfitchet texts, by contrast render this domain invisible. Here, the promise is to show the reader/visitor what it was really like. This claim is, of course, made with authority, as is illustrated by the affiliations introduced at the head of this section. However, what is being offered here is an experience and not an apprenticeship. The principles of evaluation of this experience reside with the visitor precisely because no other principles are made available. The Mountfitchet texts, in other words foreground exchange rather than pedagogic activity. We shall now move on to the zoo texts.

Zoos and the Conservation Myth

London Zoo is an institution of the Zoological Society of London, which, according to the official guide book (Zoological Society of London, 1997) was founded on 29th April 1826 by Stamford Raffles. who died in July the same year. The current strapline is ‘Conservation in Action’ which perhaps contrasts somewhat with the original purpose of the original resolution of the society, ‘to establish a collection of wild animals’ (London Zoo guide book, p. 2).

Howletts Wild Animal Park is one of two ‘zoos’ owned by Howletts and Port Lympne Estates Ltd.(3) According to the audio quide, it was established by John Aspinall after he made a lot of money at an early age. Aspinall is a prominent figure in the texts that we have considered; his principal residence is situated within the Howletts site. The current strapline for Howletts and Port Lympne is ‘Committed to Conservation’.

There are a number of differences between these two zoos as they are represented in the texts that we have considered. Firstly, the institutions differ in the extent to which they participate in exchange activity. However, and more importantly for the present discussion, there are also differences in the constructions of their respective esoteric domains, notably in respect to their different relationships to scientific research. London Zoo affiliates to science through its foregrounding of references to The Zoological Society of London, a brief history of which appears at the front of the official guide. We obtained, from an information kiosk, a folder containing information on membership of the society. A letter from its Director General, included in the folder, notes that ‘we undertake ground-breaking biological research in those areas directly related to conservation’. These are positioning strategies, affiliating the Zoo to the research activity. To a limited extent the official guide also gives limited access to the esoteric domain of this research activity. Thus there is a definition of the term ‘species’—‘a group of animals that are so similar that they can breed together and produce fertile offspring’ followed by a brief entry on ‘The Binomial System’ of nomenclature.

The Howletts guide book incorporates positioning strategies which externalise scientific practice, thus:

Whilst there are these substantive differences between the texts associated with the two zoos, there are also important similarities in respect of the central concern of both sets of texts with ‘conservation’. The London Zoo official guide has a section under the heading ‘Conservation in action’ on most pages and a ten page chapter under the same heading. The Howletts guide book has two sections, one of four pages titled, ‘The role of Howletts and Port Lympne in conservation’ and a ten page section titled ‘Overseas conservation’. There is also reference to the issue of conservation throughout the Howletts guide book. The key questions are, ‘what is being conserved?’ and ‘how?’

Both sets of texts identify the zoos’ role as being concerned with the conservation of ‘endangered species’. As was the case with Bodiam, this is in part achieved via the constitution of the physical institution itself as a pedagogic space—an operational matrix. Each zoo is organised as a taxonomic structure in which physical barriers and a division of labour within the body of keepers construct strong classification of the various species contents. The visitor, by and large, moves physically between species.

The conservation of endangered species is also achieved discursively in the guide books and other written and spoken materials. Thus, there is explicit incorporation of the collection of animals into the taxonomy of species via the generalising strategy of the provision of a definition of ‘species’ in the London Zoo official guide book, as indicated above. Both sets of texts also incorporate specialising strategies which elaborate principles of recognition relating to individual species and genuses. For example, the Howletts guide book entry on elephants begins as follows:

From the tame countryside of Kent, Mark Attwater, a former Howletts Animal Park keeper and his wife Helen, a qualified nurse, set out for the Congo two years later to run this pioneering project.
(Howletts pamphlet)

This global hierarchy is consistent with the identification of most endangered species with ‘Third World’ regions including Indonesia, Africa and South America. The treatment of the British field cricket by the London Zoo official guide is somewhat different from the gorilla text. Thus, the loss of the cricket’s habitat is passively identified as the result of ‘changes in grazing practices’. Further, Britain is presented as able to organise its own conservation activities via the institutions English Nature and London Zoo. This contrasts with the Congo government, presented as Aspinall’s client, above, and, for example, a photograph of the white Dr Jacques Flamand surrounded by Nepalese children in the London Zoo official guide and another photograph of a white man surrounded by Indonesian men captioned ‘London Zoo staff taught tiger husbandry to Indonesian staff’ (London Zoo official guide, p. 45).

One of the sheets from Howletts educational materials consists of two statements relating to the world embargo on trade in elephant products, one by David Shepherd—‘an artist and founder of the David Shepherd Foundation, an elephant charity’—and one by Andrew Mutandwa—‘information counsellor at the High Commission of the Republic of Zimbabwe’. Mutandwa’s statement inverts the global hierarchy established elsewhere in the texts, thus:

Even the urban dweller realises that if wildlife is self-sustaining, revenue from taxes will be available for social needs and not diverted to wildlife conservation.
(ibid)

The pack also contains a page presenting ‘Arguments for and Against the Ban on Trade in Ivory’. The arguments (reprinted from a BBC publication) appear in two columns, with the ‘for’ text being more extensive than the ‘against’ text (by a factor of about 1.3). Beneath the columns more text includes a refutation of one of the ‘against’ points and the statement: ‘Although some elephant populations are rising, the species is still highly threatened over most of its range’.

Mutandwa’s text is thus recruited as a resource by a higher level strategy which constitutes it as a token local oppositional message to that distributed to the dominant authorial voice of the educational text. Shepherd’s statement contrasts Zimbabwe with Zambia. The latter state is adjudged to be in the process of rehabilitation, thus:

The emboldened extract from Shepherd’s statement reads:

Shepherd’s statement describes the basis of the ‘doubt’ as follows:

The discursive and non-discursive zoo texts that we have discussed constitute a regulation (and to a far lesser extent an apprenticing) of the zoo visitor into a taxonomy of species, a pathology of anti-conservation practices which are globally distributed on a broadly North/South hierarchy, and a programme of pro-conservation practices. In respect of the latter, we have already discussed the re-introduction into the wild practices foregrounded in many of the Howletts texts. However, both the Howletts and London Zoo texts also refer to ‘captive breeding’ and the use of international studbooks. ‘Martin’s story’, in the London Zoo official guide provides a clear indication of precisely what is conserved in these conservation practices:

The next stage was to select a perfect mate. We searched the studbook for a female of the right breeding age who was as distinctly related to Martin as possible. The computer is able to give each tiger a ‘mean kinship number’ which indicates each individual’s degree of relatedness to every other tiger on the programme. From all the information available, the species co-ordinator selected Mira, a 7-year old from Bremmerhaven Zoo in Germany.

(London Zoo official guide, pp. 44-5) (4)

Myth, Pedagogy and Exchange

In discussing these texts we have introduced elements of a language of description. This language defines the categories, esoteric and public domain, apprenticing strategies, authorial and reader voices, pedagogic and exchange relations and so forth. Our deployment of the language of description has, firstly, enabled us to describe the four sets of texts in the same terms. This, of course, is the essential purpose of theory. Secondly, the specific nature of the language has generated textual analyses that are sociological in nature. That is, we have described the texts in terms of the ways in which they construct relations and distribute practices between social positions, such as transmitter and acquirers in pedagogic activity.

We are now in a position to summarise key elements of our analysis and to suggest the nature of some implications for edutainment and educational institutions more generally. Before doing so, however, we should restate two caveats. Firstly, the form of analysis that we have been conducting is text analysis. That is, we are analysing the text as an instance of a referent social activity (see Dowling, 1998, 1999). What we are not doing is audience research (eg see Buckingham, 1993). We are aware that some authors within the field of audience research have criticised text analysis approaches on the basis that they tend to assume that the text defines its own use. However, we are not making that assumption. We are defining referent activities as exhibiting particular characteristics. To the extent that an audience, reader or visitor occupies voices that are constructed by the texts, then they are participating in the same referrent activity. That they may be participating in different activities is attested by graffiti on the wall of the postern tower of Bodiam Castle. We would add that audience research must also recontextualise and so mythologise its object. It often does so, furthermore, with very little attempt to render explicit its recontextualising principles.

Secondly, our aim in the analysis is not to provide definitive descriptions of the institutions that we have discussed. Rather, we have attempted to describe the institutions in terms of their referent activities insofar as these are instantiated in the texts that we have looked at. The implications of our analysis are to be interpreted in relation to the extent to which authors of edutainment or educational material are intending to participate in the kinds of referent activity that we have described.

In relation to these implications, then, we should recall that the texts of three of the institutions that we have introduced construct strongly pedagogic relations between their authorial and reader voices. That is, in each case, authority in respect of the principles of evaluation of texts and practices—the esoteric domain of the practice—is distributed to the authorial voice of the texts. The reader or visitor may be constructed as an apprentice in relation to the esoteric domain. In this case there will be some attempt to render this domain visible. Such visibility is found in the Bodiam and to a lesser extent in the London Zoo guides. The Howletts guide provides an apprenticeship into a rationale for ‘bonding’. However, this rationale is a discursive recontextualisation of the practice itself which is, of necessity, non-discursive. The material layouts of these three institutions are operational matrices that constitute regulatory texts in respect of a privileged comportment in relation to heritage (Bodiam) or the simulation of nature (London Zoo and Howletts Wild Animal Park).

In terms of institutional missions, the school (including further and higher education) would seem to stand as the institution most explicitly associated with pedagogic activity, at least with respect to discursive forms of practice. It is, therefore, to schools that institutions such as the National Trust and the London Zoological Society might reasonably look for lessons in the production of pedagogic texts. Naturally, learning these lessons will depend upon the availability of a language of description that is adequate to the analysis of school texts. This is the case not least because the school operates to exclude as well as to include. Dowling’s (1998, 1999) analysis of school mathematics texts, for example, organises and illustrates the ways in which specialising and generalising strategies operate to construct access to the generative principles of a DS+ practice, such as mathematics, whilst localising and articulating strategies deny such access in the case of these kinds of practice. In developing the Bodiam and London Zoo guides as apprenticing texts, therefore, their authors would need to give attention, firstly, to how most effectively to give access to specialised topics within the esoteric domain of historical/archaeological or zoological/conservational discourse. Secondly, they would have to attempt to reveal how these specialised topics relate to each other within the more generalised discourse. The development of such textual strategies would entail careful consideration of the ways in which the texts moved between the mythologised public domains of historical/archaeological or zoological/conservational discourse and the esoteric domain principles that generate these public domains.

The castle and zoo texts also incorporate regulatory strategies, firstly, in respect of the physical (DS+) realisation as operational matrices of heritage comportment or zoological classification. Insofar as the school is concerned primarily with the transmission of DS+ practices, it may be that it pays insufficient attention to the ways in which other institutional intentions—such as privileged comportments and administrative practices—a encoded within its non-discursive organisation. If this is the case, then it may be that institutions, such as castles and zoos have something to teach the school. We are not in a position to develop this programatic further here.

Secondly, the texts incorporate regulatory strategies that operate in the other direction, as it were. This is clear in the discursive recontextualisation of the DS- practice of ‘bonding’ in the Howletts texts. However, it may also be appropriate to describe as ‘regulation’ rather than apprenticeship the construction of ‘conservation’ as a discursive practice. Specifically, the discursive strategies of these texts present the conservation position as the product of rational decisions within a broader general discourse. This is illustrated, for example, in the ‘face to face’ debate in the Howletts text. Clearly, rhetorical strategies feature strongly, here. However, this is not quite the point. This excerpt from the London Zoo guide is instructive:

Only in the case of Mountfitchet Castle have the texts that we have considered foregrounded exchange relations between authorial and reader voices. What Mountfitchet is offering is participation in an experience. The experience is certainly a mythologising—a reification of a simulation. Nevertheless, by drawing back on pedagogic authority, these texts are offering a commodity to be evaluated or enjoyed in terms to be dictated by the client. Now the other institutions also engage in exchange activity, as we have indicated. For example, on one visit to London Zoo we observed a show in which a lemur was made to perform balancing tricks for a large audience; feeding time at the penguin pool has long been an attraction. Furthermore, as we have suggested in the title to this paper, all four institutions are constituted as edutainment—they are all, in part, there for a grand day out. The issues to consider, however, are, firstly, which features of the practices of an institution are most effectively constituted within pedagogic texts and which within market text. We have suggested that the choice of value spheres or political positions (rather than their elaboration) is possibly more appropriately constructed within exchange relations. To the extent that this is the case, the second issue to consider is the extent to which the rationalising or pedagogising of such a choice invites a form of engagement that will call pedagogic authority into question.

Having reintroduced the exchange features of these edutainment institutions, it is appropriate to conclude the paper by reflecting briefly on the extent to which, as market institutions, they have anything to teach the school. As we have indicated, Dowling’s analysis of school textbooks has associated the myth of participation with academic failure. Essentially, this is because this myth operates more or less exclusively within the public domain so that access to the esoteric domain principles of the practice is denied. Furthermore, insofar as esoteric domain principles are still privileged, the public domain is always a more or less radical recontextualisation of other practices. The myth of participation has, here, been associated with the Mountfitchet texts. In the latter case, however, the texts foreground exchange relations between authorial and reader voices. Furthermore, the particular form of the public domain, though still mythical, is constituted as a form of myth that is marketable; the kids can have fun at the castle. School discourses must construct public domains in order to provide points of entry. It may be that the most important lesson that is to be learned from the analysis that we have presented here is that public domains should primarily be constructed outside of pedagogic activity as market texts. If they are market texts, then they should be marketable in their own rights and not as the sugaring of a pedagogic pill. If school exchange activity entails the production of commodities that are the simulations of its privileged discourses, then school pedagogic activity can concentrate on the transmission of the principles that enable these simulations.

1. This is not to say that operational matrices operate in a determinate way on users’ behaviour. Empirically, this is clearly not the case as is illustrated by John Fiske’s (1989) study of a shopping mall. An operational matrix differs from discursive pedagogic texts in that its principles are encoded, in the main, non-discursively. Examples of regulatory texts that are not operational matrices are algorithms and recipes.

2. We are using Bernstein’s term by analogy, here, in order to aid the reader who is familiar with Bernstein’s work and not ours. Our position in detail differs from that of Bernstein to the extent that we do not consider classification and framing to be mutually independent. That is, we claim that strong classification entails strong framing generating redundancy. To the extent that an empirical situation is described as exhibiting strong classification and weak framing, we would claim that there may be some confusion regarding precisely what is classified/framed (see Dowling, 1999).

3. In the audio guide, Aspinall explains that he prefers to call Howletts a ‘wild animal park’ because of the negative connotations of the term ‘zoo’.

4. See Dowling (1999) for a discussion of the semiotics of this page of the London Zoo official guide.

BARBER, M. (1996). The Learning Game: Arguments for an Educational Revolution. London: Gollancz.

BASTIANI, J. & WOLFENDALE, S. (Eds). (1996). Home-School Work in Britain: Review, Reflection and Development. London: David Fulton.

BAUDRILLARD, J. (1993). Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage.

BERNSTEIN, B. (1977). Class, Codes and Control: towards a theory of educational transmissions. (second ed.). (Vol. 3). London: RKP.

BERNSTEIN, B. (1996). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: theory, research critique. London: Taylor & Francis.

BROWN, A. J., & DOWLING, P. C. (1998). Doing Research/Reading Research: A Mode of Interrogation for Education. London: Falmer Press.

BUCKINGHAM, D. D. (1993). ‘Introduction’ in BUCKINGHAM, D. D. (Ed). Reading Audiences: Young People and the Media. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

DOWLING, P.C. (1996). Baudrillard 1 – Piaget 0: Cybernetics, Subjectivity and The Ascension. At www.ioe.ac.uk/ccs/dowling/1996.html

DOWLING, P. C. (1998). The Sociology of Mathematics Education: Mathematical Myths/Pedagogic Texts. London: Falmer.

DOWLING, P.C. (1999). Interrogating Education: Texts, Social Activity and Constructive Description. Plenary presentation at Centro de Investigação em Educação da Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, April 1999, available at www.ioe.ac.uk/ccs/dowling/lisbon1999.

DOWLING, P.C. (in press). ‘Mathematics Education in Late Modernity: Beyond Myths & Fragmentation’. In Atweh, B, Forgasz, H.& Nebres, B. (Eds.). Socio-cultural aspects in mathematics education: An international research perspective. Sydney: Erlbaum.

ECO, U. (1979). Introduction: the role of the reader, The Role of the Reader. London: Hutchinson.
FISKE, J. (1989). Reading the Popular. London: Routledge.

FOUCAULT, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. London: Penguin.

HOME OFFICE (1998). Supporting Families: A Consultation Document. London: The Stationery Office.

HOOPER-GREENHILL, E. (Ed). (1994). The Educational Role of the Museum. London: Routledge.

ROBERTS, J. (1995). Melancholy Meanings: Architecture, Postmodernity and Philosophy. In N. Wheale (Ed.), The Postmodern Arts. London: Routledge.

SEFTON-GREEN, J. (Ed). (1998). Digital Diversions: Youth Culture in the Age of Multimedia. London: UCL Press.