Internal Factors: Pupils’ class identities & the school

Question 1

Overview

Answer 1

sociologists are also interested in how pupil’s class identities formed outside of school interact with the school & its values to produce educational success & failure.

Question 2

Bourdieu

Answer 2

uses the concept of ‘habitus’ to refer to the norms, values, attitudes & behaviours of a particular social group or social class.

schools have middle-class habitus which gives middle-class students an advantage over working-class students. This idea is often associated with the idea of cultural capital.

Pupils who have been socialised at home into middle-class tastes & preferences gain ‘symbolic capital’ or status & recognition from the school & are deemed to have worth or value. In contrast, the school devalues the working-class habitus as tasteless & worthless which Bourdieu calls ‘symbolic violence’. This may result in working-class pupils experiencing the world of education as alien & unnatural.

Question 3

Louise Archer

Answer 3

Louise Archer (2010) found that working-class pupils felt that to be educationally successful, they would have to change how they talked & presented themselves. In effect they had to ‘lose a part of themselves’ to succeed in the middle-class education system.

Many pupils in Archer’s research were conscious that society & school looked down on them. This symbolic violence led them to seek alternative ways of creating self-worth, status & value. They did so by investing heavily in particular ‘styles’ & especially through consuming branded clothing such as Nike

it led to conflict with the school’s dress code & often led to negative teacher labelling of pupil’s as a rebellious which caused conflict. As a reaction to this, many working-class pupils rejected school even further which contributed to underachievement.