Análisis interno

Whilst Girard and Goffman imagine identity as the result of interaction with the social environment – of interaction with models and through the performing of modes, Basil Bernstein (1971) sees identity as constituted through language, arguing ‘it is through specific linguistic codes that relevance is created, experience given a particular form, and social identity constrained’ (Bernstein, 1971: 146). Class relations are also integral to this thesis. In his provocative and controversial work Class, Codes and Control (1971) Bernstein contended that there are ‘entirely different modes of speech found within the middle class and the lower working class’ (Bernstein, 1971: 78). The lived realities of people from different class backgrounds are therefore seen as fundamentally different because the very language, which constitutes that reality has observable variations. Bernstein asserts that ‘the typical, dominant speech mode of the middle class… facilitates verbal elaboration of subjective intent’ (1971: 78), whilst the ‘lower’ working class are:

…limited to a form of language use, which although allowing for a vast range of possibilities, provides a speech form which discourages the speaker from verbally

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elaborating subjective intent and progressively orients the user to descriptive, rather than abstract, concepts (Bernstein, 1971: 79).

This early work of Bernstein draws our attention to the capacity for language codes to both express and constitute a particular category of identity (in this case social class). This is a sentiment that can also be traced within the literature about mentoring and peer practices. Turner and Shepherd (1999), for example, make sense of peer education in health promotion in terms of ‘subculture theories’. They draw upon the work of Cohen (1955), who argued that ‘delinquents developed subcultures which promote values and behaviour which were oppositional to mainstream culture’ (Turner and Shepherd, 1999: 242), and Miller (1958) who argued that ‘working class culture is oppositional to middle class culture’ (Turner and Shepherd, 1999: 242). Turner and Shepherd (1999) also argue that these ‘subculture theories’ make sense of four particular elements of peer education, namely: that peers are a ‘credible source of information’; that peer education ‘formalizes an already established means of sharing information and advice’; that education by peers ‘may be acceptable when other education is not’; and that ‘peer education can be used to educate those who are hard to reach through conventional methods’ (Turner and Shepherd, 1999: 242). Whilst they refer explicitly to peer education in terms of social class, the peer mentoring literature more commonly implies that the language of lived experience and

professional experience is what differs. Devilly et al. (2005: 231), for example, argue that

peers ‘are deemed more credible sources of information because they have experienced similar struggles and are, therefore, able to “speak the same language”’. Other writers, whilst not referencing language codes specifically, point to mentoring as a process of reducing the inaccessibility of professional services, be it through ‘“outreach workers” linking individuals with local services that they would otherwise fail to access’ (Newburn

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and Shiner, 2006: 27) or the ‘targeting of mentoring for those variously identified as “disaffected”, “disengaged”, “non-participating”, or “hardest to help”’ (Colley, 2002: 9). The unspoken implication within these claims is that non-peers or professional interveners are not connecting with their intended clients or may even be speaking a different language.

The notion that understandings rooted in the experiences of socially similar others have more credibility than professionally constructed and discursively dominant understandings is also one which Bernstein (1971) aims to make sense of. He argues that theories of learning (in North America) have been highly influenced by psychological theories, which place an overwhelming emphasis upon the significance of the early years of the child’s life. These ideas, he argues, ‘are likely to view problems of educability as arising out of interactions which are considered to be deficient, inadequate or even pathological’ (1971: 274). As a result, ‘much of the research into “who is able to learn what” was carried out by psychologists whose intellectual training and whose own socialisation led them to define the problem in a limited way’ (Bernstein, 1971: 274). He goes on to suggest that:

It was only with the radicalising of American academics through Vietnam, the rise of Black Power, through the exposure of the failure of the American urban school, that fundamental questions were raised about the political implications of forms of education during the late sixties (Bernstein, 1971; 274).

Bernstein juxtaposes a dominant discourse about how people learn with movements to challenge this dominance. In doing so he contends that accepted ‘professional’ truths are open to challenge. More specifically, they are open to the challenge that the social world

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can be experienced and communicated differently by people from different social backgrounds. Moreover, difference is not necessarily indicative of deficit, but can expand understanding. This argument is echoed by those who attempt to explain the emergence of peer mentoring in this field. These explanations privilege personal insight into prison life (Princes Trust, 2012), which offers ex-offenders ‘a credibility that statutory agencies don’t often have’ (Nellis and McNeill, 2008: xi; emphasis added). Peers are claimed to have

specific knowledge about risk behaviour occurring both inside and outside the prison, and

an understanding of realistic strategies to reduce the risk’ (Devilly et al., 2005: 223; emphasis added). This quiet but insistent privileging of the lived experiences of crime and criminal justice tacitly challenges notions of deficit inherent in dominant forms of professional intervention. It also holds the potential to shift the focus away from pathological versions of deficiencies in criminal tendencies and toward deficiencies in the social and penal order. Bernstein also recognised, however, that variations in language codes are not limited to different classes or different status positions, but are also situational:

The speech used by members of an army combat unit on manoeuvres will be somewhat different from the same members’ speech at a padre’s evening. Different forms of social relations can generate quite different speech-systems or linguistic codes by affecting the planning procedures (Bernstein, 1971: 145).

People therefore relay meaning through codes, which differ as much in setting as in social strata. Indeed a similar linguistic division was also recognised by Goffman in the context of the asylum:

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An institutional lingo develops through which inmates describe the events that are crucial in their particular world. The staff, especially its lower levels, will know this language, too, and use it when talking to inmates, reverting to more standardized speech when talking to superiors and outsiders (Goffman, 1961: 55).

If language bears a print of social class and situated experience and these prints carry, and indeed constitute meaning, this may well explain why people with criminal records claim to relate to people with shared histories and why their peers find them ‘credible’. It is not simply that they have experiences in common, but they may also share a common language and elements of a common reality. Whilst Bernstein’s work helps to make sense of this key connecting element within peer mentoring, he is not without criticism. His early work ‘was highly controversial because it discussed social class differences in language that some labeled a deficit theory’ (Sadovnik, 2008: 21). Indeed Labov argued that ‘Bernstein’s views are filtered through a strong bias against all forms of working-class behaviour so that middle-class language is seen as superior in every respect’ (cited in Bernstein, 1971: 273). Bernstein, however, responded to these criticisms by arguing:

In a fundamental sense, a restricted code is the basic code. It is the code of intimacy which shapes and changes the very nature of subjective experience, initially in the family and in our close personal relationships. The intensifications and condensations of such communication carry us beyond speech, and new forms of awareness often become possible (Bernstein, 1971: 275).

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For Bernstein the argument was not that middle class codes of speech were superior to lower working class codes, but that they operated in linguistically and therefore conceptually different ways. Moreover this difference allows for exclusionary practice:

Bernstein argued that different social classes used different ‘codes’ in their language, and the middle/upper classes developed ‘elaborate’ codes which restricted access to the education system they devised and ran (Rowlingston and McKay, 2012: 195).

By this reasoning, in order to minimise the inequality of opportunity which exists between social classes, there is a need to recognise the different codes in operation and recognise how this difference can be exclusionary. Peer mentoring quietly makes a similar claim. By insisting that mentors have lived credentials, which are as valuable as professional credentials and that they speak a particular ‘language’, its advocates inherently suggest there is something excluding about the reality imposed by professional forms of understanding.

Whilst Bernstein’s theory of language has met with controversy, his central thesis that language codes differ in different social contexts and settings, and indeed that this has a direct bearing on the possibilities of social identity, may have a special relevance to the work of peer mentoring. These ideas help us to consider how language is perceived and used in mentoring relationships. Bernstein also alerts us to the potential for subtle processes of social control and personal limitation where administrators of education provision employ different language techniques to some of their beneficiaries. Indeed, as

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mentoring itself is a form of education, any theoretical work must also make sense of peer mentoring as a pedagogical process.