Bourdieu on Education and Social and Cultural Reproduction

Bourdieu's work has attracted considerable interest and, not withstanding criticism of his style and obscure theoretical formulations, has introduced some powerful concepts into social theory. This paper examines Bourdieu's contribution to the sociology of education and especially his account of socially differentiated educational attainment. Particular attention is given to issues of structure, agency and habitus, the cultural autonomy of the school, arbitrary and necessary school cultures, and the distinction between primary and secondary effects on educational differences. Some specific criticisms, for example Elster's charge of a double account of domination, are also addressed. Bourdieu's concentration on habitus as the most significant generator of practice is held to be a theory of socialisation and the paper examines the nature of the explanation of social practice provided by such theories. The argument concludes with a plea for critical tolerance with respect to Bourdieu's work but with a suggestion that his account of socially differentiated educational attainment in terms of habitus is finally inadequate.     

Pluralism and its Purposeful Introduction to a Jewish Day School

Pluralism is an ambiguous term with a multiplicity of meanings. In recent decades there has been a proliferation of a newer category of Jewish Day Schools, the Jewish Community School. Jewish Community Schools distinguish themselves by positioning pluralism as a foundational concept of their school's ethos. Very little is known about how individuals within these schools understand the notion of pluralism. This case study uses in-depth interviews, documentary research, and school observations to determine how policymakers in one such Community School think about pluralism in general, and how this understanding influences their vision for the school's Jewish Education.     

Young People,Politics and News Media: Beyond political socialisation

This article considers the place of news media-particularly television news-in young people's political socialisation. Following a brief sketch of debates about young people's apparent indifference to politics and to news media, it provides a critical review of previous research in this field. It argues that researchers have often operated with a functionalist notion of socialisation and an unduly narrow conception of political understanding. The second part of the article provides a summary of some key themes raised by the author's own research into young people's interpretations of television news. It focuses particularly on the question of young people's apparent cynicism about politics, and on the characteristics of 'critical viewing'. The article concludes with a call for media education as a crucial dimension of political education and contemporary citizenship.     

Ethos,Habitus and Situation for Learning: An ecology

It is argued that the concept of ethos connects with Bourdieu's 'habitus' and the notion of situated learning. It can be argued that ethos can be defined as an organisation's habitus. An ecological perspective suggests that habituses external to the school provide dispositions that continuously construct and re-construct school ethos, and the evolving ethos itself provides developing dispositions and contexts for situated co-learning and participation in communities of practice; for example, shared learning about how to learn. Some implications for school improvement and leadership in schools are discussed.     

Code and Habitus: comparing the accounts of Bernstein and Bourdieu

This paper compares Bourdieu's notion of habitus with Bernstein's concept of code in an attempt to show how the apparent similarities mask more deeply seated differences in the way the concepts are conceived and used. We argue that Bernstein is following an essentially structuralist agenda of the kind that Bourdieu has set himself against. To this end, Bourdieu seeks to overcome the rigidities of ‘rules’ (which lie at the heart of the idea of Bernstein's code), with the more flexible notion of ‘strategy’ which incorporates the idea that structure and agency are implicit in each other rather than being dichotomous entities.     

Experiential learning and values education at a school youth camp: Maintaining Jewish culture and heritage

In our post-modern, globalised world, there is a risk of unique cultural heritages being lost. This loss contributes to the detriment of civilization, because individuals need to be rooted in their own specific identity in order to actively participate in community life. This article discusses a longitudinal case study of the efforts being made by Australian Jewish schools to maintain Jewish heritage through annual experiential religious education camps, coordinated in a programme called Counterpoint. The researchers’ aim was to analyse how a school youth camp can serve as a site for socialisation and education into a cultural and religious heritage through experiential learning and informal education. During research trips which took place over several years, interviews enabling insights into the process of experiential education were conducted with a total of three different Directors of Informal Jewish Education, two Jewish Studies heads, five participating teachers, seven youth leaders, as well as seven student focus groups. In their analysis of the semi-structured interviews, the authors of this article employed a grounded theory approach using a constant comparative method, which enabled a more nuanced understanding of the main phenomenon investigated. Over the years, they were able to observe two philosophical approaches, one of which focused more on socialisation, with immersion into experience, while the other focused on education, with immersion into Jewish knowledge. Their findings reveal that some educators aim to “transmit” knowledge through “evocation”, with the students involved in active learning; while others focus more on students’ “acquisition” of knowledge through transmission. Experiential learning activities were found to be more meaningful and powerful if they combined both approaches, leading to growth.     

Understanding and enhancing pupils’ learning progress in schools in deprived communities

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on data from the ‘Raising Pupil Attainment in Key Stage 1 in Stoke-on-Trent’ research project. The particular focus is on how teachers, head teachers and teaching assistants (n?=?59) articulate pupils’ learning success in five highly achieving schools in deprived communities. Six key themes are highlighted which are identified by participants as influencing successful pupil learning and progress. These are analysed in relation to Biesta's theory on the parameters of ‘Good Education’ [Biesta, G. J. J. 2010. Good Education in an Age of Measurement. Boulder, CO: Paradigm] and within Bourdieu's understanding of ‘distinction’ [Bourdieu, P. 1998. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Oxford: Polity Press]. The research reveals that issues related to socialisation and subjectivity are presented as critical and foundational for the more formal measures of success in pupil learning.     

Being kitties in a preschool classroom: maintaining group harmony and acting proper in a female peer-culture play routine

This study examines how young girls construct emotional themes in their peer-culture play routines and rituals in the daily life of a preschool classroom. This research is part of a larger eight-month ethnographic study of one preschool classroom. The data selected and analysed in this article are taken from a focused six-week theoretical sampling of five female preschool children's play. Micro-level analysis of the data (field notes, videotaping, video revisiting and interviews with teachers and students) revealed how children's peer-culture and emotional themes were socially constructed through a specific play narrative that centred on five females being ‘kitties’. A closer look at one group member named Mary uncovered emotional themes that centred on acting proper and group harmony. Females used their peer-culture and emotional themes to hold group members accountable, resolve conflict and appropriate society's emotional display rules. These data reveal the social–emotional ‘work’ of children and the role of peers in childhood socialisation.     

Hugging the teacher: reading bodily practice in an Israeli kindergarten

This paper, based on an ethnographic study of an Israeli kindergarten, describes the practice of hugging, by the girls, of the teacher, and the latter's response to the girls' initiative. Based on Bourdieu's concept of habitus and the assumption that embodiment is crucial to social–cultural learning, the paper demonstrates the complex interweaving of social meanings that may be experienced through, and read into, the practice of hugging. By focusing on this single bodily practice, and endeavouring to reveal some of the richness of interpretation that emerges out of such a focus, the paper aims to show how the educational researcher, in setting out an array of possible readings, may provide teachers with innovative ways of seeing the routine practices of classroom life.     

Muscularity,the Habitus and the Social Construction of Gender: Towards a gender-relevant physical education

This paper begins to develop the concept of gender-relevant physical education, combining the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his notion of the habitus and feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young's analysis of feminine motility. It draws on data generated from a study of young people's articulation of the relationships between muscularity, physicality and gender. The social construction of the body has been of central importance to the construction of femininities and masculinities, and has formed an enduring meta-theme through much of the research on physical education and gender. We build on the young people's insights to argue that Bourdieu's notions of the habitus and the exchange of physical capital provide a useful means of conceptualizing issues of embodiment and gender in school physical education and sport. We conclude by sketching an outline of gender-relevant physical education as a process of interrupting the habitus.     

Gender and social class differences in Japanese mothers’ beliefs about children's education and socialisation

Despite increasing rates of university attendance among women, a significant gender gap remains in socialisation and educational processes in Japan. To understand why and how gender-distinctive socialisation processes persist, this study aimed to examine both middle-class and working-class mothers’ beliefs about gender, education, and children's development. Qualitative analyses were conducted on in-depth interviews with 16 Japanese mothers with preschool children who participated in the research study for three years. The meaning of education differed depending on the children's gender and social class context. While there was a social class difference in mothers’ expectations of their daughters’ educational attainment, the majority of women in this study saw their daughters as caregivers of family members in the future. This study also demonstrates the dilemmas and mixed messages in women's narratives in relation to gender norms and the processes of raising their children.     

阶层流动还是阶层复制？再读文化资本理论并兼谈“底层文化资本”

近年来学者通过建构“底层文化资本”这一概念为弱势农民群体正名,但这一概念却建立在对布迪厄文化资本理论的误读之上。对于文化资本理论存在一种普遍的误读,即将文化资本窄化为文化资源,把文化资本作为阶层流动的工具。而布迪厄的原意,则是通过文化资本揭示阶层复制的机制,进而批判维持社会等级结构的权力关系。布迪厄认为,文化资本是代表获得优势文化的可能性,它以劳动时间的积累为衡量标准,而非占有某些具体文化实践或态度。文化资本在各阶级的不均衡分布源于等级社会秩序背后的象征性暴力。“底层文化资本”的论述陷入实体主义思维所产生的阶级文化本质论的泥沼,实际上承认并加强了城乡阶层文化的不平等结构。     

A New Paradigm: Authorizing a Rhetorical Ground in Technology Transfer

This work was based on a case study of a university institute designed to bring university and industry leaders together to promote research and economic development. The article examines how key terms in technology transfer not only justified the institute but also constituted a ground for negotiating interests. Framed by Burke's and Bourdieu's theories of motive and space, the analysis examines the question of who or what authorizes the grounds for success in technology transfer.     

Inequality/difference in New Zealand education: Social reproduction and the cognitive habitus

A programmatic study of inequality/difference in New Zealand education has been carried out, for a quarter of a century, within a family resource framework that has supported both theoretical and empirical research. Although deeply influenced by Bourdieu's theories of social and cultural reproduction, its adherence to a realist philosophy of science means that its structure-disposition-practice explanatory schemes cannot be represented as Bourdieusian. This article takes the concept of habitus (as a set of learned dispositions)and argues that durable embodied cognitive schemes, acquired by children in classed environments, are a principal cause of observed class variation in educational performance. This view challenges accounts in which 'ability'is regarded as 'socially constructed'. The entire history of the sociology of education might be written in terms of its struggle against the dominant influence of IQ theory as an explanation of inequality/difference in education. It is not clear that our discipline has yet been successful in that struggle. These matters are discussed with reference to empirical data on the association between social class and educational achievement in New Zealand. The evidence suggests that class patterns of attainment, particularly on standardized tests designed to assess verbal intelligence, support the thesis that cognitive operations effected by the cognitive habitus are fundamentally involved in the reproduction of inequality/difference. It seems that the primary effects of socialisation may be more important than the secondary effects that many sociologists have taken as their proper area of concern. Some policy implications of this thesis - which is neither a move to encode IQ theory in a radical discourse nor an attempt to reinstate classical deficit theory - are discussed in the context of state-sponsored possibilism currently being imposed on many educational systems.     

Learning to play the seminar game: students’ initial encounters with a basic working form in higher education1

This paper demonstrates how the introduction of the word scholarship in respect to teaching has become confused and misplaced and used to sustain and enhance a particular type of credibility to activities related to the enhancement of learning and teaching in higher education. Bourdieu's concept of symbolic culture is used to construct the argument and show how the use of the term ‘Scholarship of Teaching’ needs to be re‐examined and conceptualized. Twenty‐five academics from a variety of disciplines were interviewed to give their perceptions on the notion of scholarship, the scholarship of teaching, and the scholarship in teaching. These data were used to develop a framework for understanding and possibly reconsidering the role of the scholarship of teaching.     

Subjectivity and Schooling in a Longitudinal Study of Secondary Students

This article addresses the question of how to interpret the relation between the production of subjectivity and the effects of different forms of schooling. Two kinds of problem are explored. The first is the immediate empirical and historical one of understanding how gender and class subjectivity takes shape and is embodied by Australian secondary-school students. This is investigated through close readings of interviews with two young people who are participants in a qualitative, longitudinal study of Australian secondary-school students—the '12 to 18 Project'. The article thus examines the developmental and longitudinal aspect of identity formation, and addresses the impact of feminism on gender change. The second problem is how to theorise the subjectivity schooling relation, and this is explored through an analysis of the interactions between individual biographies and the aspirations and discursive practices of different schools. After considering some contemporary approaches to subjectivity, the discussion proposes a return to Bourdieu's notions of habitus and social field and, through an analysis of the two case studies, illustrates how habitus is formed over time.     

Bourdieu on Higher Education: The meaning of the growing integration of educational systems and self-reflective practice

This paper discusses Pierre Bourdieu's multi-faceted understanding of the higher education process by considering the evolution of this domain since the end of the 1970s both in France and England. Following a brief review of Bourdieu's main interpretations of higher education, several theoretical shifts in his thought and practice over time are identified that have sought to accommodate the rapid changes that have occurred in the higher education sector in recent years. This theoretical repositioning is used to reflect on ideas of homological reasoning advanced by Bourdieu and others, and their limitations in the cross-national comparative exercise. Using the findings of her own comparative study of the evolution of the French and English higher education sectors, the author tests some of the conceptual tools developed by Bourdieu mainly during the 1960s and 1970s, and discusses claims for their universal validity.     

Socialization into a Civilization: The Dewey–Kaplan Synthesis in American Jewish Schooling in the Early 20th Century

This historical study focuses on how John Dewey's theory of education as socialization and Mordecai Kaplan's theory of Judaism as a civilization together served as an ideological base and pedagogical framework for the creation of “progressive,” “reconstructed” American Jewish school programs in the early 20th century (1910s–1930s). In the main, progressive Jewish educators no longer conceived of Jewish education merely as a program of religious education designed to impart the ways and dictates of Judaism. Rather, Jewish education was conceptualized as a total program of socialization designed to prepare children for active and intelligent participation in American Jewish life.     

Jewish Education and American Jewish Education,Part III

This is the last in a series of articles exploring the history of Jewish Education magazine, later known as the Journal of Jewish Education, with a particular emphasis on its intersection with the history of American Jewish education and, more generally, American Jewish life. Major themes and issues that preoccupied the magazine's editors and writers are isolated and analyzed as to how their discourse sheds light on their individual aims, values and philosophical outlooks, as well their collective efforts at educational reform. Particular attention is paid to how Benderly's disciples sought to reinterpret their mentor's vision in a changing American Jewish environment and why this vision was, at best, only partially realized.     

Jewish Education and American Jewish Education,Part I

This series of articles explores the history of Jewish Education magazine, later known as the Journal of Jewish Education, with a particular emphasis on its intersection with the history of American Jewish education and, more generally, American Jewish life. Major themes and issues that preoccupied the magazine's editors and writers are isolated and analyzed as to how their discourse sheds light on their individual aims, values, and philosophical outlooks, as well their collective efforts at educational reform. Particular attention is paid to how Benderly's disciples sought to reinterpret their mentor's vision in a changing American Jewish environment and why this vision was, at best, only partially realized.