Bernsteinian Perspective on Further Marginalization of International Students in Open and Online Learning Environment: Pedagogizing Student Centric Approaches

This paper attempted to explore the relevance of Bernstein’s (2001) critical views on the marginalization of international students in the context of emerging online learning models. It also focused on the disengaged learning patterns of marginalized international students via Bernstein’s (1990) theoretical lens of elaborated code and restrictive code, where Bernstein (2001) instructed teachers to play their vital roles in complex learning processes, which were heavy on teachers and students alike, to facilitate the healthy and successful learning trajectory. This paper used metadata via Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997; Van Dijk, 2003) to construct themes from students’ assignments, Flipgrid videos, and reading audios submitted for grading for their technical communication and English communication courses. The paper also discussed these three questions, such as 1) How can linguistically-challenged students feel left-out? 2) What language patterns do these international students use in the context of the sociology of education? Finally, 3) How can teachers play an instrumentally critical role in an online learning environment? The resultant social initiations of linguistically complacent international students have been treated as a problem for educators to upend the educational inequalities in the knowledge economy. The findings revealed that 21st-century knowledge production, distribution, and its adequate reproduction are in the hands of well-rounded knowledge consumers, and if the knowledge consumers are not well cognizant of their instrumental roles in the knowledge economy, social inequalities will quadruple exponentially. In addition, international students’ poor language skills in online learning appeared to be a huge barrier in their roles as “woke consumers.” Finally, Bernstein’s (2001) totally pedagogizing society (TPS) might appear paradoxically preposterous at this stage; its judicious applicability is more than needed currently, in the aftermath of E-Campus Ontario’s (2020) policy of up-credentialing, by asking post-secondary instructors/teachers to introduce micro-credentialing, especially in technical English, knitted around courses