Powerful knowledge, technology and education in the future-focused good society

I contend that access to powerful knowledge is the cornerstone of education in the Good Society. Such powerful knowledge is accessed by students through engagement in vertical discourse. I adopt Bernstein's definition of vertical discourse as a form of pedagogical discourse that enables students to link symbolic knowledge, derived from a context, to other symbolic knowledge structures in a vertical manner. Engagement in vertical discourse enables students to transcend an immediate context to examine social classifications and control mechanisms that are inherent in pedagogical discourse. In the process, both education and technologies integrated into the curriculum are revealed to be ideologically charged. To illustrate this, I use the example of the study of augmented reality in a Postgraduate Certificate of Applied Practice. I then make suggestions regarding engagement in vertical discourse, so that practising teachers enrolled in the course are enabled to recognise and engage with the classifications and control mechanisms inherent in technological discourse. Finally, I suggest that engagement in vertical discourse is not an inevitable aspect of 21st Century learning design. Rather, engagement in vertical discourse and access to powerful knowledge have to be incorporated consciously in learning design by teachers who are familiar with the territory.