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EDS/SOC 126
Week 5, Monday
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Announcements/Reminders
Grading takes about 7-10 days
Investigative Assignment #2 due this Wednesday. Upload the assignment to TritonEd by 4pm and bring a copy to class (electronic or hard copy)
Midterm instructions Wednesday
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Longstanding Conversation in Social Science: What Determines Our Life Pathway?
Institutions in society
Life
Family
Self
Neighborhood
Friends
School
Peers
Church
Etc.
Individual choice, free will, human agency
Economic
Health
Education
Social
Legal
Political
Religious
Etc.
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Economic Approach to Explain Inequality
Functionalist Theorists
Necessary for society to fill economic positions with qualified individuals.
Serves the “greater good;” natural part of the world.
Schools socialize students to aspire to unequal positions through a selective reward system (moral & cognitive achievement).
Unequal reward system is justified because ability is innate, so schools must gear children toward economic positions that “fit” their ability.
Schools help reproduce economic and class inequality across generations.
Conflict Theorists
Serves the interests of those who benefit the most (those w/ status and power)
Reward system in schools is justified by the façade of the meritocratic ideology
Non-cognitive aspect of achievement and rewards are often more important than the cognitive.
Intelligence, knowledge, and skills alone don’t determine how teachers reward students; beliefs about students’ futures based on their economic background.
Schools socialize students by mirroring hierarchical workplace relationships.
Schools help reproduce economic and class inequality across generations.
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The economic structure of society
Individual free will, human agency
Weaknesses in both functionalist theory and conflict theory
Overly deterministic about the influence of economic structures on peoples’ lives and on the causes of inequality. What about gender/sexuality, race/ethnicity, culture, language, immigration status?
Both theories portray individuals as passive in shaping their lives. Only dominant groups or high status groups have power to influence their lives? Not true.
Free will or human agency seems impossible under the weight of societal structures (e.g., generational transmission of inequality in schools and in society)
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A Cultural Approach to Explaining Inequality in Schools and in Society
An economic approach narrowly looks at the ways inequality in the economy is mirrored in schools (social reproduction)
A cultural approach looks more broadly at the way schools mirror the culture of dominant class groups (cultural reproduction ).
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Structure – Culture - Agency
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Societal Structures
Culture
Agency
Pierre Bourdieu Cultural Reproduction Theory
Bourdieu is also concerned about economic inequality in society
The concept of culture, and not social class, is more comprehensive in helping us understand the relationship between inequality in schools and inequality in society.
Social class groups have distinct cultures that are passed down through generations.
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Pierre Bourdieu Cultural Reproduction Theory
How do schools exercise power? By promoting the values, beliefs, attitudes and preferences of the dominant (i.e., high status) groups in society.
The culture of middle class and upper class families is mirrored in the culture of schools. Schools reinforce values, attitudes, preferences, and beliefs that are dominant in middle and upper classes. (Lareau and Wilcox readings)
Similar to conflict theorists, American ideas about individual merit mask the power that schools exercise (individuals are blamed for failure and not schools)
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Pierre Bourdieu Cultural Reproduction Theory
“Capital” metaphor illustrates how schools privilege middle/upper class culture and devalue the cultures of working class and poor groups.
Capital is currency; it can be exchanged or traded. Successfully activating (or spending) one’s capital brings “social profits.”
School programs, rules, policies, curriculum, instruction, relationships and rewards reflect dominant or high status cultural capital.
It’s not differences in natural ability that rank individuals from various class backgrounds, it’s cultural differences with dominant cultural capital ranked highest.
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Bourdieu’s concept of “capital”
Capital offers advantage; it can be used to advance in life – financially, educationally, socially.
Economic Capital – income, property, financial assets
Social Capital – social contacts, social connections and social networks
Cultural Capital (Lamont & Lareau reading) – institutionalized, i.e., widely shared , high status cultural signals (attitudes, preferences, formal knowledge, behaviors, goods, and credentials) used for social and cultural exclusion
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Family socialization and upbringing pass on cultural capital to children
Cultural capital are embodied in us, imprinted on us as “ways of being”
Knowledge – formal and informal information
beliefs, attitudes, values
credentials (symbols of knowledge)
widely valued information (e.g., opportunities)
Behavior - ways of talking, walking, eating, gesturing, interacting, etc.
Tastes – hobbies, interests, forms of self-expression (e.g., art, music, film, museums, books, theatre, material goods, technology, etc.)
Cultural Capital in Dominant/High Status Groups
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Examples of Cultural Capital - Concerted Cultivation in Middle Class Families
Stacey Marshall
“Ms. Marshall is a conscious role model for Stacey, deliberately teaching her daughter strategies for managing organizational matters. Although it is hard to know how much Stacey absorbs her mother’s lessons in how to deal effectively with people in positions of power in organizations, or how much she might draw on those lessons in the future, exposure to such learning as a child has the potential to be a tremendous lifelong asset.”
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Examples of Cultural Capital - Concerted Cultivation in Middle Class Families
Learning social skills and cultural knowledge:
When Stacey’s gymnastics instructor is critical of her, Stacey’s mom coaches her on what kind of behavior and comments are appropriate from the instructor, and she encourages Stacey to respond directly to the instructor.
Stacey learns that she has a right to expect certain treatment by her coaches, even though they are authority figures. She also learns that she has choices, and she does not have to accept unfair treatment.
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Examples of Cultural Capital - Concerted Cultivation in Middle Class Families
Learning social skills and cultural knowledge:
Stacey accompanied her mom as she looked for the right gymnastics program and learned the criteria to evaluate programs and a specific vocabulary to express her opinion.
Stacey (at 10 years old) says, “It saves like six feet of where it is now, so it’s in closer…So that way they can pull out the rest of the floor…We’re gonna end up having a longer vaulting runway…”
Stacey meets with the coach of the program and easily describes her skill level. She confidently interacts with adults and expects to have her opinion considered.
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Successfully Activating Cultural Capital
Middle-class parents in the Lareau book “routinely scanned the horizon for opportunities to activate their cultural and social capital on behalf of their children.”
Access to the best teachers and best programs gave middle-class children immediate advantages. The long-term advantages include lifelong skills for negotiating with professionals in institutions in self-beneficial ways.
Due to Ms. Marshall’s intervening, researching, and criticizing, Stacey was enrolled in a gifted program, advanced beginner gymnastics class with extra support, and the best gymnastic and horseback riding camps.
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Melanie Handlon - concerted cultivation gone awry
Melanie Handlon – frequently sick and misses school; ongoing academic problems
Melanie’s mom was not as good at activating her capital to get advantages for her daughter.
Melani’e s mom uses her social capital through parent networks and Girl Scout networks to help her decide what demands she’s entitled to place on the teachers.
Teachers perceived the problems to be the mom and that Melanie needed testing for a learning disability.
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Lacking middle-class cultural capital has educational consequences
Wendy Driver – underdeveloped language skills could lead to literacy challenges and learning delays.
“Wendy’s teachers uniformly praise her mother as ‘supportive’ and describe her as ‘very loving,’ but they are disappointed in Ms. Driver’s failure to take a more active, interventionist role in Wendy’s education, especially given the formidable nature of her daughter’s learning problems. From Ms. Driver’s perspective, however, being actively supportive means doing whatever the teachers tell her to do.”
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Wendy’s teachers blamed her mom for not being more actively involved in monitoring her education.
“Mr. Tier, Wendy’s fourth-grade teacher, expresses outrage that she has made it to fourth grade without knowing how to read. He urges Ms. Driver to be more demanding with him and other school personnel, telling Ms. Driver in a parent-teacher conference: ‘If our roles were reversed – I’d be beating me on the head.’”
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Wendy’s mom is lost on what to do and feels she has no choice but to do what the school tells her to do.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start going. On the radio there was something for children having problems reading and this and that, call. And I suggested it to a couple different people, and they were like wait a second, it’s only to get you there and you’ll end up paying an arm and leg. So I said to my mom, ‘No, I’m going to wait until the first report card and go up and talk to them up there.’”
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Billy Yanelli – Good student (“B” average) but a behavior problem in class. He uses physical force rather than reasoning and negotiating to solve conflicts with peers.
“Ms. Yanelli felt her lower social status, as she expressed after a parent-teacher conference with Mr. Tier, Billy’s fourth-grade teacher: ‘I wanted to ask why he pulls Billy’s hair. Why does he pick up Billy’s book and throw it across the classroom and say, ‘You’re too slow…’ I didn’t get to talk about the things that I wanted to talk about…I’m not very professional. I can’t use the words I want to use. Just because they are professional doesn’t mean that they are so smart.’”
Lacking middle-class cultural capital has educational consequences
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Lareau’s Implications For Families and Schools
Middle/upper class families need to slow down on the Race to Nowhere
Students need interventions that give them an institutional advantage
Working class and poor families need schools to offer educational programs to teach the cultural capital valued in education
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Non-Dominant Groups’ Cultural Capital
Recall Functionalists’ ideas about the inner conflict youth from working class and low-income backgrounds experience as they climb educational and economic ladders.
Research and scholarship on using the concept of cultural capital to challenge Functionalist views that devalue, dismiss and overlook the positive assets of working class and low-income groups.
There are many cases where students who are not middle/upper class acquire cultural capital that schools value and reward.
All groups possess important cultural capital. The trick is to get schools to use non-dominant groups’ cultural capital as assets in the classroom.
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The concept of cultural capital helps us understand…
Cultural capital shows how inequality can be perpetuated through beliefs and perceptions about what counts as valid or legitimate knowledge, whose knowledge is more valuable, and what forms of expressing knowledge are judged as best.
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