When authority is procedural, agency is managed, and resistance is psychologised, regulation no longer needs to be imposed. It can be distributed.
This final post traces how genre-based pedagogy culminates in peer regulation — and how, through this process, epistemic closure is achieved without coercion.
1. From self-surveillance to mutual monitoring
Once students have internalised criteria, they do not simply apply them to themselves. They apply them to one another.
Peer feedback practices increasingly revolve around:
identifying missing stages,
diagnosing misalignment,
and advising on how to satisfy criteria more effectively.
Peers become auxiliary assessors.
2. The normalisation of correction
Because criteria are framed as neutral and shared, peer correction appears collaborative rather than disciplinary.
To point out:
a missing component,
an incorrect sequence,
or an underdeveloped stage
is understood as help, not enforcement.
Norms are reproduced horizontally.
3. Regulation without authority
Peer regulation is powerful precisely because it lacks an obvious centre.
No one appears to be in charge. Correction circulates as common sense:
That’s not how this genre works.
You need to include this stage.
That won’t meet the criteria.
Authority has become ambient.
4. The shrinking of the sayable
As peer regulation intensifies, the range of acceptable utterances contracts.
Students learn quickly which questions:
slow things down,
complicate assessment,
or challenge shared assumptions.
Such questions are not refuted. They are ignored, reframed, or gently redirected.
5. Epistemic closure
At this point, the system achieves closure.
Alternative construals do not need to be argued against. They no longer arise as viable options. What cannot be staged, assessed, or aligned cannot be sustained as knowledge.
The theory no longer encounters resistance because it no longer encounters difference.
6. Consensus as achievement
The resulting consensus feels earned.
Students appear to:
share understandings,
use common terminology,
and converge on similar judgements.
But this convergence is not the outcome of dialogue. It is the product of shared constraint.
7. Why this feels ethical
Peer regulation is often celebrated as democratic and inclusive.
Because power is distributed:
no one seems to dominate,
disagreement seems resolved,
and conflict appears unnecessary.
Yet what has been distributed is not power to mean otherwise, but responsibility to maintain alignment.
8. What has been lost
By the time epistemic closure is complete:
instantiation is no longer a perspectival cut,
context is no longer a semiotic system,
genre is no longer descriptive,
and pedagogy is no longer interpretive.
Meaning has been replaced by manageability.
9. Returning to the beginning
This series began with a simple claim: instantiation is not a ladder.
Everything that followed was not an indictment of intentions, but a tracing of consequences. Once instantiation is miscast, each subsequent move becomes structurally compelled.
The question, then, is not how to soften these outcomes, but whether the original cut can be restored.
That question remains open.
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