Internal Factors (social class)

Question 1

Describe Becker’s findings

Answer 1

Interviewed 60 chicago high school teachers and found they saw pupils from middle class backgrounds as ideal pupils and working class as furthest away from it.

Question 2

Describe Rist’s findings

Answer 2

Studied an american kindergarten and found that teachers used information about children’s home, background and appearance to place them in separate groups.

Fast learners were labelled as tigers and tended to be middle class - they had neat and clean appearances, she seated them close to her and showed them greatest encouragement.

The other two groups were labelled as “cardinals” and “clowns” - they were seated further away, given lower level books, had fewer opportunites to demonstrate their abilities and were mainly working class.

Question 3

What does streaming involve?

Answer 3

Separating children into different ability groups

Question 4

Why is streaming often a problem for working class children?

Answer 4

Working class are more likely to be labelled negatively and put into lower streams. It is difficult for them to move up which stops them from succeeding. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in which pupils live up to their teachers’ low expectations by underachieving.

Question 5

Summarise the study of Gilborn and Youdell into streaming, the A-C economy and educational triage and show how working class and black pupils are negatively affected

Answer 5

Teachers see working class (and black) pupils as having less ability and they are placed into lower streams and entered for lower tier exams.

Publishing league tabels creates an ‘A-C economy’ in schools - a system where schools focus their time, effort and resources on students they believe will boost the league table.

Gillborn and Youdell call this process ‘educational triage’ - schools categorise pupils into three types:
1. Pupils who will pass anyway and can be left to get on with it
2. Those with potential, who will be helped to get a grade C or better
3. Hopeless cases, who are doomed to fail
Teachers do this using a stereotypical view of working class (and black) pupils as lacking ability. This means they are labelled as hopeless cases and placed in bottom sets where they cant achieve. Produces a self-fulfilling prophecy and failure.

Question 6

What is differentiation?

Answer 6

The process of teachers categorising pupils according to how they perceive their ability, attitude and behaviour. A form of this is streaming.

Question 7

What is polarisation?

Answer 7

The process in which pupils respond to streaming by moving towards a pro-school subculture or an anti-school subculture

Question 8

What is a pro-school subculture and how is it linked to social class?

Answer 8

Pupils placed in high streams are largely middle class. They become committed to the values of the school and gain their status through academic success.

Question 9

What is an anti-school subculture and how is it linked to class?

Answer 9

Those placed in low streams tend to be working class. This label of failure causes them to seek to alternative ways of gaining status (not doing homework, being cheeky) among peers and then form anti-school subcultures

Question 10

What is habitus?

Answer 10

Refers to the learned ways of thinking, being and acting that are shared by a particular social class. A group’s habitus is formed as a response to its position in the class structure.

Question 11

What does the MC have the power to do?

Answer 11

Has the power to define its habitus as superior and to impose it on the education system. As a result, the school puts a higher value on middle class tastes and preferences.

Question 12

How do MC gain symbolic capital?

Answer 12

Because schools have a mc habitus, pupils who have been socialised at home into mc tastes and preferences gain ‘symbolic capital’ (status and recognition) from the school and are deemed to have worth/value.

In contrast, the school devalues WC habitus, so WC class tastes and preferences are deemed tasteless and worthless.

Question 13

What does Bourdieu call the withholding of symbolic capital?

Answer 13

Symbolic violence - by defining the WC and their tastes as inferior, symbolic violence reproduces the class structure and keeps the lower classes ‘in their place.’

Question 14

What do wc pupils experience as a result of mc habitus in schools?

Answer 14

There is a clash between WC pupil’s habitus and the MC habitus of the school.

WC may experience the world of education as alien and unnatural.

Question 15

What did Archer find?

Answer 15

Archer found that WC pupils felt that to be educationally successful, they would have to change how they talked and presented themselves.

Therefore, for wc students educational success is often experienced as a process of ‘losing yourself’.

Question 16

What has symbolic violence lead to?

Answer 16

Pupils seeking alternative ways of creating self worth –> they did this by constructing meaningful class identities for themselves by investing heavily in styles such as nike

Question 17

What does Nike Identity cause?

Answer 17

Causes working class pupils’ educational marginalisation in school and they actively choose to reject education because it doesn’t fit in with their style/way of life.

Also leads to conflict with dress code - teachers opposed street styles = children who adopted street styles risked being labelled as rebels.

Question 18

What does Archer argue?

Answer 18

Argues that the school’s middle class habitus stigmatises wc pupils’ identities. While MC see their nike identities as tasteless, wc see this as a means of generating symbolic capital and self worth.

Nike styles also play a role in wc pupils rejection of higher education which they saw as both unrealistic and undesirable:
unrealistic - because it’s not for people like us but for rich, posh and clever
undesirable - because it wouldn’t suit their preferred lifestyle or habitus.

Question 19

What does Archer conclude about WC pupils’ investment of Nike Identities?

Answer 19

It is not only a cause of their educational marginalisation by the school, but also expresses their positive preference for a particular lifestyle.

As a result, WC pupils may choose self-elimination or self exclusion from education. They actively choose to reject it because it doesn’t fit in with their style.

Question 20

Describe Sarah Evan’s research

Answer 20

Studied a group of 21 working class girls in south london doing a levels and found that they were reluctant to apply to elite uni’s because they felt a sense of hidden barriers and of not fitting in. They had a strong attachment to their locality.

Question 21

What do studies of Evan and Archer show?

Answer 21

A consistent pattern of a middle class education system that devalues the experiences and choices of working class people as worthless or inappropriate.

As a result, working class pupils are often forced to choose between maintaining their working class identities, or abandoning them and conforming to the middle class habitus of education in order to succeed.

Question 22

Give some examples of the relationship between internal and external factors

Answer 22

poverty (external) leads to bullying (internal)
wc pupils using the restricted code (an external cultural factor) –> leads to negative labelling from teachers and SFP (internal factor)

Question 23

Describe Rosenthal and Jacobson’s study

Answer 23

They show SFP at work

told the school they had designed a new test specially designed to identify those who would spurt ahead (it was actually just an IQ test)

The researchers tested all the pupils, but then picked 20% of them purely at random and told the school the test had identified these children as spurters.

Question 24

What did Rosenthal and Jacobson find?

Answer 24

Upon returning to the school a year later, they found that almost half of those identified as spurters had indeed made significant progress.
R+J suggest that the teacher’s beliefs about the pupils had been influenced by the test results and the teachers had then conveyed these beliefs to the pupils through the way they interacted with them.