By Deborah Tranter - University of South Australia
Abstract
Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction in education and his concepts of field, capital and habitus offer a useful way of thinking about the ways in which the environments in which people are raised, their conditions of cultural and material existence, shape their attitudes, their means of interpreting the world, and their capacities to engage with the academic curriculum.
This paper draws on data collected for my doctoral research on the influence of school culture on the higher education aspirations of secondary students in one of the most educationally disadvantaged regions in Australia, the outer northern suburbs of Adelaide. In this paper I discuss how my reading of Bourdieu, and particularly his concept of habitus, has contributed to an increased self-awareness of my own positioning within the field of education and has informed the interpretation of my data.
Introduction
To begin with, it is important for me to assert that my research is based on the premise that higher education is a valuable opportunity that should be equally accessible to all, no matter their socio-economic background. As a university staff member with responsibility for enhancing access to higher education I have grappled with the continuing socio-economic inequalities evident in university intakes, despite concerted efforts on the part of the sector, and my institution in particular. While I recognise that university is not for everyone, I argue that participation in higher education should not be determined by who your parents are, where you live or what school you attend. However in Australia today we see a large disparity in participation rates, very much determined by where one lives and where one goes to school. Students in the affluent eastern suburbs of Adelaide, for example, are up to seven times more likely to attend university than students from the outer northern suburbs, a region with the third lowest higher education participation rate in Australia (Stevenson, McLachlan and Karmel, 1999).
In asserting my position on the value of higher education I must confess that unusually for my baby boomer generation, I grew up always expecting to go to university; in fact I cannot recall ever thinking otherwise. On my father’s side I am third generation university-educated and for many years my father was a university academic. I grew up with an unconscious sense of entitlement and certainty (Reay, David and Ball, 2005) that I would follow in the footsteps of my father and grandfather and graduate from university. My mother, who grew up working class and did not finish secondary school, played an important role in encouraging these expectations, determined that her children would fulfil ambitions she was unable to achieve.
While we were never wealthy, we were comfortable enough to allow my mother to stay at home and nurture the development of the cultural capital so valued by the family, and the education system (Reay and Ball, 1998). I was immersed in cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1993) from birth along with an almost moral repugnance to the instrumentalism of the economic market.
The instrumentalism of economic capital is the opposite of the central value associated with ‘culture’ that … proclaims the principled rejection of such instrumentalism" (Moore (2004) p 446).
Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens and reams of poetry were read to me while still small; classical music was an integral part of our lives and we poured over my father’s art books from an early age. Like most children, I took the ways of home for granted and never thought about how culturally privileged my childhood had been. My secondary education in the academic stream of a middle class high school did little to disturb this complacency. Ironically, it was only when I commenced university myself, and began meeting a broad range of students from very different families that I began to reflect on my own background and how advantaged I had been. Even then though, I didn’t come to realise the extent of this advantage until many years later when, commencing discussions with my PhD supervisor, I was introduced to the work of Bourdieu. Suddenly so many of the questions framing my research proposal made sense as I began to realise how narrowly circumscribed and privileged my life had been.
In this paper I will briefly outline some of the key concepts of Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction in education, particularly focusing on habitus. I will then move to a discussion of reflexive sociology and how I have used reflexivity and habitus to explore my own positioning in relation to my research questions and to inform the interpretation of my data.
Bourdieu’s theoretical framework
Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction in education uses the concepts of field, capital and habitus in developing an explanation of how the environment in which people are raised, their conditions of cultural and material existence, shape their attitudes, their means of interpreting the world, and their capacities to engage with the academic curriculum (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977).
The concept of cultural capital contests the biological determinism of ‘natural intelligence’ - "the received wisdom that attributes academic success or failure to natural aptitudes" (Reay et al 2005, p19). Bourdieu explains academic success by the cultural capital imbued from one’s upbringing that advantages (or disadvantages) a student in their educational trajectory. Key elements include the appreciation of art, music and education for their own sake; the books available at home, the musical instruments learned, the language and behaviour of the dominant classes, those who control the economic, social and political resources. Cultural capital is the knowledge of and familiarity with prestigious forms of cultural expression. It can be embodied from early childhood but may be also acquired in its institutional form through qualifications gained at school and university (Bourdieu, 1993a).
Bourdieu developed his concept: "as a theoretical hypothesis which made it possible to explain the unequal scholastic achievement of children originating from different social classes by relating academic success, i.e., the specific profits which children from the different classes and class fractions can obtain in the academic market, to the distribution of cultural capital between the classes and class fractions" (Bourdieu, 1993a, p243).
He identifies three forms of cultural capital: the embodied state; incorporated in mind and body and accumulated from early childhood. This form requires the investment of time by parents and others to sensitise the child to cultural distinctions (eg parents reading to children from a very young age, playing classical music in the home) and is particularly prevalent amongst the established middle class (Reay et al, 2005) objectified state; objectified in material objects and cultural goods, artefacts, books, paintings, musical instruments and "transmissible in their materiality" (Bourdieu, 1993a, p 246) the institutionalised state; in the form of educational qualifications, the "certificate[s] of cultural competence which confer on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value with respect to culture, … institutional recognition of the cultural capital possessed by any given agent" (Bourdieu, 1993a, p248).
Cultural capital exists in relation to other forms of capital that constitute advantage and disadvantage - economic, symbolic and social. Bourdieu asserts that "academic qualifications are to cultural capital what money is to economic capital" (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977, p 187). And while the values associated with cultural capital may be oppositional to the instrumentalism of economic capital at one level (art, or knowledge, for its own sake rather than any extrinsic reward), the accumulation of cultural capital relies heavily on the exchange or ‘transubstantiation’ of economic capital (Moore, 2004 p445), to purchase books, artefacts or an elite education. The education system, and schools particularly, have an implicit role in reproducing social and cultural inequalities and privileging the cultural practices of the dominant classes through maintaining "the pre-existing order, that is the gap between pupils endowed with unequal amounts of cultural capital" (Bourdieu 1998, p 20). Bourdieu notes (1993a) that as educational qualifications become increasingly necessary for access to secure employment, especially in higher status occupations, the role of the education system in the transmission of cultural capital becomes increasingly important, further disadvantaging those who miss out.
All human actions take place within social fields, "the particular social setting where class dynamics take place" (Reay et al, 2005, p 27) through the struggle for capital, for example a school, a workplace or the broader fields of politics, religion, the law, higher education and so forth. The concept of field is sometimes described as a game with rules to it, "or, better, regularities, that are not explicit or codified" (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p98). Hence in the field of education, qualifications are the capital (the ‘prize’) in the game. Schools and universities control the dispersal of that capital through the determination of what knowledge is considered ‘legitimate’ and by ensuring the reproduction of that knowledge through the allocation of grades and qualifications (Oakley and Pudsey, 1997). They act as gate-keepers to that knowledge, discriminating in favour of those who know how to play the game and win the prize while those who don’t know the (often implicit) rules are excluded and fail. Continuing the metaphor of the game, in the field of education the understanding of how the game is played and how to win, the ‘"sense of the game" (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p120), is a key element of the habitus.
The concept of habitus is at the core of Bourdieu’s work, developing from his desire to move beyond the dualisms of agency/structure and objective/subjective in the interests of a new theory of practice. Habitus is a structured or "socialized subjectivity" (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992 p126). In An Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) Bourdieu explains how practice (agency) is linked with capital and field (structure) through habitus, illustrated figuratively by a formula he included in Distinction (1984, p110): (Habitus x Capital) + Field = Practice.
Habitus describes people’s embodied capacity to assume the attitudes and actions required within particular social fields. It is habitus and its relationship to the field and the capital valued by the field that determines whether a person is able to win, or even play, the game. It is a preconscious, shared set of acquired and embodied dispositions and understandings of the world, developed through both objective structures and personal history.
The habitus is the product of the work of inculcation and appropriation necessary in order for those products of collective history, the objective structures, (eg language, economy etc) to succeed in reproducing themselves more or less completely, in the forms of durable dispositions". (Bourdieu, 1977. p85)
The term is related to the words habit/habitual and implies a tendency to act in a particular way, a ‘taken for granted’ world view that we carry around with us, deeply internalised within our bodies as well as our minds, usually below the level of consciousness; absorbed into our cognitive structures from a very young age. It provides the context within which we later perceive and evaluate all life experiences. Habitus is second nature, knowing how to ‘walk the walk’ and ‘talk the talk’ in relation to a particular field, how to play the game. It’s ‘the way we do things here’; what one eats, how one holds oneself, how one dresses, ones tastes, preferences and expectations concerning life chances.
For Bourdieu the dispositions of habitus are not biologically determined but socially and culturally constructed, ‘inherited through subtle reinforcements by which a young child enters the practices and relations of family and community’, (Zipin, p1) shared across families and communities that occupy similar positions in the broader social structure. Habitus further challenges the biological determinism of ‘natural intelligence’. If one is not aware of the depth of cultural construction it is easy to perceive these dispositions as genetic/natural abilities, both within ourselves and within others. As Charlesworth notes (2000), it is often those most culturally dispossessed who see intelligence as genetic, in "a deep and determining way" that they cannot escape (p251).
Habitus is linked to systemic inequalities in society through power and class; it "is a kind of transforming machine that leads us to ‘reproduce’ the social conditions of our own production, but in a relatively unpredictable way." (Bourdieu, 1990, p87) While critics of Bourdieu have questioned the latent determinism of habitus, Bourdieu has long challenged this, pointing out that more or less identical habitus can produce widely different outcomes. He has argued that habitus is "powerfully generative" (Bourdieu, 1990, p87) rather than determining, potentially generating a wide repertoire of possible actions. "Habitus is not the fate that some people read into it. … it is an open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its structures. It is durable but not eternal!" (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p133). However, Reay contends "while the habitus allows for individual agency it also predisposes individuals towards certain ways of behaving" (2004 p 433), thus contributing to the reproduction of class differences and hence educational inequalities.
Therefore, returning to my own self-discovery, within my familial habitus it was taken for granted that I would attend university, and I and my sisters did. On the other hand, my brother chose to follow a different path, possibly rebelling against his family history and his older sisters, but possibly taking an even more culturally distinctive route as he pursued experimental music, theatre and visual arts, scorning any work which might actually reap economic rewards (though always with the safety net of middle-class family support if the economic situation became too dire).
In Bourdieu’s efforts to theorize the relationship between structure and agency through habitus, he argues for a new ‘reflexive sociology’ (Bourdieu, 1977, Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). He challenges both the objectivism of traditional structuralists such as Levi-Strauss and the subjectivism of phenomenology, while attempting to build on them both in a more reflexive account of practice. He calls for an understanding of social life which takes account of both the social and material structures and the practices and experiences of individuals and groups (Calhoun, LiPuma and Postone, 1993). For Bourdieu, reflexivity involves a looking back at one’s own biases, practices and ‘taken for granted’ point of view, to "question the suppositions inherent in the position of an outside observer who, in his preoccupation with interpreting practices, is inclined to introduce into the object the principles of his relations to the object." (1977, p2) [Reflexivity calls] less for intellectual introspection than for the permanent sociological analysis and control of sociological practice … It entails …the systematic exploration of the ‘unthought categories of thought which delimit the thinkable and predetermine the though’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 40)
Accordingly, in this paper I have used Bourdieu’s concepts to come to a greater understanding of my own position in relation to my research questions, which in turn enables a more reflexive analysis of the data I have gathered.
So how did I come to my research questions?
My reading of Bourdieu has assisted my insight into why and how there continues to be significant class-based disparities in higher education participation, and how privileged I have been in comparison to the young people I have been working with. I have also come to realise that the dominant classes will always seek to consolidate their dominance through ensuring the distinction of cultural capital, often through the exchange of economic capital (Bourdieu, 1984). Thus, as the Australian higher education system has moved from an elite to a mass system, we have seen an increasing stratification of universities. The conscious decision by the former Hawke Labor Government to develop a unified and relatively egalitarian national system of research-based universities (Dawkins, 1988, Marginson, 2005) has been resisted by the formerly dominant group of ‘sandstone’ universities (Marginson, 2000) and the current conservative Howard Government which has pursued a more diversified (or hierarchical) system. Hence, in 2006 Australia has a much more de-regulated and competitive higher education market, with a clear elite consolidating itself, now able to charge increasing fees and to apply more restrictive entry scores, the sort of scores few students other than those from the most elite (and expensive) schools are able to achieve (Dobson and Skuja, 2005, Win and Miller, 2005).
At the same time, the Howard Government has overseen the rapid expansion of funding to the private school sector with parents increasingly choosing the status they hope private schooling will bestow on their children. Just as higher education has become increasingly hierarchical, with the strengthening of an elite small group of ‘sandstones’, so the school system, both private and public, is becoming increasingly stratified. In this environment, schools such as those I am studying are rapidly becoming residualised (Marginson, 1993, Thomson, 2002) into little more than welfare institutions for students whose parents "either don’t care, or don’t know enough to care" (interview with teacher at EHS, Tranter, 2005). Teese (2000) points out that the expansion and normalisation of senior secondary participation has "tended to amplify the role of cultural selection" (p 8) with the rich needing to prove their academic superiority through a system of "fortified sites where the advantages of education and culture can be … pooled …, and exposed sites where failure will and must accumulate to balance its eradication from the strongholds of selective schooling" (p7). "In a system of relative merit, however, failure cannot be eliminated, merely exported" (ibid, p3). Bourdieu encapsulates this process in his discussion of ‘educational inflation’:
… because a qualification is always worth what its holders are worth, a qualification that becomes more widespread is ipso facto devalued, but it loses still more of its value because it becomes accessible to people ‘without social value’ (1993b, pp97-98)
Alongside the cultural capital so important to my childhood was a very strong commitment to social justice, rooted in the Quakerism of my parents and nurtured by the 1960s and 70s in which I grew up; a strong belief in equality, both before God and as a matter of justice. While cultural capital was valued highly by my family, commitment to the idea of education as a public good was paramount. Hence private schools were never considered but my parents chose (and could afford to choose) to live where we could attend a local high school with a strong academic reputation, again exploiting the family’s cultural capital and habitus: "knowing how to play the game" (Reay and Ball, 1997 and 1998). Almost all members of my family work or have worked in education, mostly as teachers, and with a fervent commitment to the public education system. I had also planned to work as a teacher but involvement in student politics saw me head towards university administration instead. It was there that I first began working in the area of student equity, working within the then Hawke Labor Government’s higher education framework to broaden participation in higher education, and in a post-Dawkins university (Dawkins 1988, DEET, 1990). Thinking reflexively therefore, my choice of research question is very much a product of my own habitus, the combination of a high value placed by my family on education, and higher education in particular, a family commitment to social justice and equal opportunity, and my own employment history.
My Research Questions
With a strong commitment to providing higher education opportunities for people who have experienced educational disadvantage mandated in its Act of Establishment (University of South Australia, 1990), the University of South Australia (UniSA) is a national leader in the range of alternative access programs it has developed. An early and important program was USANET, a scheme which targets secondary students from educationally disadvantaged schools. USANET employs a three-pronged approach of outreach (visits to schools), access (the adjustment of year 12 results by the addition of compensatory bonus points) and support once students are admitted. The scheme has been successful in at least maintaining the comparatively high proportion of students from low socio-economic backgrounds at UniSA during a time of considerable growth in higher education participation (Ramsay, Tranter, Charlton and Sumner, 1998, Tranter, 2005). While the number of students admitted through USANET has increased spectacularly over the years (from 120 in 1996 to 1100 in 2005) the gap between the high SES and low SES students enrolled at the University has only marginally shifted, with those from the highest SES quartile still at least twice as likely to attend university as those from the lowest quartile.
In the late 1990s I worked on an early evaluation of USANET which recommended that "further research should be undertaken to assess the longer term impact of such programs on student attitudes towards higher education within the targeted schools…" (Ramsay, Tranter, Charlton and Sumner, 1998, p 120). It was this recommendation, along with my ongoing concern about the still very low participation rates of students from the most disadvantaged schools, which persuaded me to commence research degree studies and my original topic; "The Impact of the University of South Australia's USANET Scheme on the Student Populations of its Targeted Schools."
Using a case study approach (Stake, 1994, Yin, 1991), I have been undertaking an in-depth study of the culture of three of the more socio-economically disadvantaged metropolitan schools targeted by USANET, and the aspirations and attitudes towards higher education of groups of students from these schools. My data is drawn from extensive observations at the schools and a series of semi-structured interviews with staff and students (students in year 12 and in year 10). I have also conducted interviews with a small number of students who enrolled at the University of South Australia from the case study schools, asking students to reflect back on their experiences at school and their transition to university.
Collection of data and exploration of habitus
Very early in my data collection, it became clear to me that special entry schemes like USANET were hardly touching the surface in influencing the attitudes and aspirations of secondary students in the more disadvantaged schools. Such schemes appeared to give hope to those students who were already interested in university, and to increase their expectations of success, but for the vast majority of the students I interviewed, university was an alien and inaccessible concept.
I don't know about other schools, but, the first time that I heard anything about Uni, when I was in year twelve, like, we hadn't had, like, information … in year twelve we went for like an excursion, like to, not this Uni, but to like Adelaide Uni, and that's the first time I had ever, ever, been to a Uni before in my life, I didn't ever know they were here. Students only become aware of the schemes as part of the application process, near the end of year 12, and had very vague ideas about how they worked.
…we were classed an underprivileged school. I think everybody knew that. But I don’t think we realised that we could get extra points for it though.
Because I think that the USANET schemes for them, if they are determined to go, it’s probably only helping them to get in. But if they don’t want to go I don’t think that the scheme is going to make a difference to how they think.
The year 10 students I interviewed were particularly unclear about the concept of university and none of them was aware of the special entry schemes offered by all three of the local universities. Attending university does not appear to be part of the culture of the schools and their student populations, and I became increasingly aware that the universities’ (and my) presumption that an occasional interaction and the addition of a few bonus points could somehow compensate for possibly generations of educational disadvantage was far too simplistic. As my data collection progressed I realised that the focus of my thesis would need to change. Clearly the University’s intention, that the outreach component of USANET would gradually influence the culture of the targeted schools, developing familiarity with and interest in university, was not working. I became increasingly interested in the question of how the schools themselves, the teachers expectations, the relationships between management, teachers and students, the subjects offered, the counselling provided, and so forth, influenced students’ aspirations, both positively and negatively. The title of my thesis therefore changed to its current title: Why University? School culture and higher education aspirations in disadvantaged secondary schools.
The schools I am studying are all located in communities where very few people have attended university, where the culture of the community is not shaped by this experience. As discussed by Thomson in her study of teaching in disadvantaged schools in South Australia (2002), within the overarching category of "disadvantaged schools", with many factors common to all three, each school has its own individual identity or "thisness", what Reay, David and Ball call "institutional habitus" (2001, 2005). Like class habitus, institutional habitus is acquired over years from a school’s particular history, location, neighbourhood resources and issues, student mix and staffing. It involves "a complex amalgam of agency and structure and could be understood as the impact of a cultural group or social class on an individual’s behaviour as it is mediated through an organisation" (Reay, David and Ball, 2001, p 16). In a similar vein, Smith (2003) discusses the ethos1 of schools, connecting ethos with the notion of habitus and communities of practice. He states that a school’s ethos is constructed through an interaction between the culture mix of teachers, pupils, parents, and the local community … and is mediated through organisational structures and processes, and also by staff culture, climate and competence. It … includes the qualities of the learning environment, … and the habituses brought to the school by pupils and staff and those that emanate from … the external environment. pp 466-467).
I have described the schools I studied elsewhere (Tranter, 2005). In very brief summary, at all three schools there is a disproportionately high level of complex and aggregate disadvantage within the school population, with high levels of poverty, inter-generational unemployment and individual and family transience. In each case the individual history of the school, the cultural and socio-economic mix of the students, the range of subjects offered, the leadership of the school and the expectations, morale and continuity of the teaching force conspire with the students’ community and family habitus to mediate against students gaining entry to university. As Thrupp explains:
Schools develop processes that reflect their SES mix. … Working class students who attend a working class school may often fail not only because of their own background but also because they are attending working class schools which cannot offer middle class type of resources and processes. Conversely working class students who attend a middle class school are more likely to succeed because they are exposed, despite their individual class backgrounds, to the contextual benefits of a middle class school mix (1999, pp125-126).
This point is illustrated by one of the students I interviewed who had attended a more middle class school before moving to one of the case studies:
"[middle class] schools are stricter … so you actually push yourself, and you get better marks and then you think, well f…, I’ll go to uni."
Why not University?
During the interviews I conducted with the students I talked to them about a local newspaper article headlined "Our Great Uni Divide" (Williams, 2000), highlighting the differentiation in university participation between the northern and eastern suburbs of Adelaide, and I asked the students why they thought this might be so. As the interviews progressed I felt increasingly uncomfortable asking this question, becoming aware that I was imposing my own privileged value system on the students – placing them and their peers in a deficit position. Nonetheless, they showed little discomfort, their reflections revealing quite remarkable insights and a profound understanding of the inequality, which so limits their life choices. They acknowledged Sociology in Question Bourdieu notes, "the notion of habitus encompasses the notion of ethos, and that’s why I use the latter word less and less. … I have come to use almost exclusively the concept of habitus" (1993b, p 86). that university is not part of the lived experience of their parents, their communities, themselves. Not part of their taken-for-granted way of being in the world.
Not many of our parents went to uni. If you think about this, and so, that’s why we’re in the northern suburbs … and I think that’s, we kinda, look at our parents and go, well, they’re not doing too bad, I don’t need to go to Uni, it’s a waste of money, waste of time. I can just go and get a job like my parents and, bum around for a while, and I reckon that’s what it is…. It’s kind of just the whole influence. We don’t have real educational influences, you know.
The students recognise that the expectations of their parents and communities are different from those placed upon students from higher socio-economic backgrounds and that their life choices are different too: They have parents that are in a high socio-economic background, you know, with more money and for them the parents push them more than the average income person. They have higher expectations…"
It’s because the people in, like other areas, their parents are business-class people. They’re like, into uni, and so they would want their child to go to uni as well. So, there would be a lot of pressure to them to succeed and, over here there’s more working class families where parents didn’t actually get to do that type of work and yeah, if a student here like does not achieve well in school, it’s not really um, demeaning to them, you know, they’re not going to be ashamed or… but in another, another area where it’s rich and stuff, yeah, failing high school would be really, you know, bad".
The concept of shame in this last quotation forms part of one’s habitus too and was raised by a young man from a South-East Asian background who was under considerable pressure from home to succeed. For this student, there was no choice:
I have to pass high school and go to uni. … yeah I’ve always been brought up um with the knowledge that I had to pass high school so … so not passing high school wasn’t an option for me, so I’m here.
This young man did eventually get to university, but had to repeat his year 12 in order to do so. He was one of a significant minority of immigrant students at the first school I visited, many of whom felt considerable pressure from home to complete their year 12 and gain entry to university. The school’s culture of academic non-achievement is mediated by the aspirations of the immigrant families, although not enough to ensure that any but a small number manage to gain a place at university each year.
The comments above, and many others like them, demonstrate that the students themselves clearly recognise their class positioning and the unequal distribution of opportunities life had dealt them. While I, and others like me, had grown up with the blinkered vision of the dominant middle class, seeing my life experience as the norm, and largely protected from the realties of poverty and exclusion, these students knew that they were "underprivileged". They were very aware of the stigma of living in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, in suburbs which constantly receive negative media coverage, and of attending schools they variously referred to as "ghetto schools", retard schools" and "schools for drop outs" (Tranter, 2005): "Because a lot of people think northern suburbs school, they’re not going to go to university they’re just going to be on the dole or leave school at year 10, or whatever…these sort of stereotypes affect the people that live there, they start to believe that that is the way that they are and that’s all they can achieve.
The students are already conscious of their positioning in society, the limits placed on them by that positioning and in this consciousness they have begun to question and reflect, thereby enabling the possibility of transformation. I became aware too that the interview process itself was likely to reinforce this tendency for the students to reflect on their positioning and possibilities for their future. For some of the year 10 students in particular, I was the first person to talk to them about the possibility of university.
Suzie: In year ten all we've had is going to TAFE and doing TAFE accredited courses, they haven’t said anything about moving onto Uni.
Matt: Yeah, and no people come out here from the Uni, apart from you.
Suzie: You're like the first person in our high school from University that we've had.
Int: Right, so your teachers don't talk to you about it as an option either?
Suzie: No.
Despite my discomfort about asking students to reflect on their relative disadvantage therefore, I could also gain comfort from recognizing that my research questions may have helped some students consider the possibility of higher education for the first time.
Teachers
In most cases teachers are amongst the only people the students meet who have any experience of higher education, hence the role of teachers in encouraging, or discouraging, students is crucial (Tranter, 2005). But these are ‘hard to staff’ schools, often avoided by teachers and relying on a much higher proportion of recent graduates and contract staff than is usual The schools, and the students, have to manage with a constant "churn" of reluctant transferees and short term staff (Thomson, 2002), many of whom are ill equipped to cope with the complexities of the schools. The high level of staff turnover was highly disruptive; the year12 Chemistry class at one school had five teachers the year I visited, and the last one did not return at the beginning of term four. The students know that teaching is not easy at these schools. In fact some of the teachers are quite open in comparing the students negatively with other schools.
They say look, I taught at these schools, - and they’ll tell us what, like what’s wrong with us and our attitude and everything, and some of us it gets through and some of them it doesn’t. And a lot of them, if another contract comes up, they take it, because - they feel like, they’re-. Like the teachers must feel they’re not achieving anything either!
They value highly teachers with whom they are able to develop a positive relationship. Unfortunately relationships aren’t able to develop when teachers are constantly moving. You can’t do that with teachers here, we’ve had teachers that leave all the time so, that’s why at this school there isn’t that much um, communication between teachers and students, because the ones that we did years 8, 9, 10, 11 with, they’ve gone!…So, it’s hard to build up any kind of a relationship …
At all three schools the students recognise that the teachers are prepared to put in the work if the students are. If the students are not prepared to work, however, neither, it seems, are the teachers, at least according to the students: If you’re prepared to work hard the teachers are prepared to work with you, if you know what I mean? If you work, like, if you make the effort to put all you’ve got, then they make all the effort to help you, but… Oh, they’re very determined to keep some of us here. But they don’t make any effort for those who are… pains.
The teachers will work with the students who have engaged with the dominant forms of cultural capital so integral to schooling but many of them reject or ignore those students who either can’t or won’t engage. The teachers themselves talk about the huge challenges teaching in schools like these:
There is no greater uphill battle in my teaching experience than what is right here. … This is a real work out. This is high order teaching skills every single day to get kids involved and interested and learning something.
How are you supposed to succeed - when you get a bunch of kids who have - the most variant, like the h-u-g-e-s-t!! amount of differences between the top of the class, who are just normal average student, can read/write whatever, and the bottom of the class who can barely string a sentence together. … And you’re supposed to - be able to teach - all of them, the same level….
As a teacher you need to have the resilience to actually, not get put off by the fact that kids aren’t learning. The teacher has to keep going. So there's got to be something that actually keeps you going, so that, even if only ten are doing it, I'm still doing it for these ten, and I hope, I'm going to attract more kids into it.
Teachers are often struggling, sometimes reluctantly, working within an institutional habitus that is discordant with how they see their role as teachers. The impact on standards and expectations is often then quite detrimental:
...and so staff develop their own ways of dealing with it. … and some of those methods of dealing with, it are not very conducive, to making the situation better. They actually continue to contribute to, a culture, of non-achievement. And I say that because I could just about quote the year 8s I spoke to … who in fact, basically say that. They're picking up from the classroom that, not every teacher, but they pick up that there's this view that you really don't have to do it. And nobody’s really going to make you much, and that you, if you wanna do it, you really have to develop that inner urge to do it….
… I actually see it as people’s emotional way of coping, is to drop their expectations, because, if they maintain their expectations, they probably … can't emotionally survive.
Standards and Expectations
A number of the students talked about the shock they felt when they arrived at year 12 and first met a state benchmarked curriculum: …year 8, 9 and 10, they just kind of let you do what you want. You bludge around a bit, and when you hit year 11, it gets a bit harder, but I don’t think they really prepared us for year 12, because I went through my other high school years thinking, yep, this is going to be easy. I’m going to do this fine and then through year 12 I mean, I went whoa, this is really hard….I did very good in my junior years, and then I’m absolutely doing really bad in year 12 because I just didn’t, I wasn’t prepared for it. I wasn’t prepared to do the work because, I hadn’t had to do it before.
… that’s why I found it so hard in year 12, because, the fact that we are lower and then when they put us in year 12 we have to do the work that the rest of the state is doing, and maybe that’s why it was so hard to adjust to it.
At all three schools both the year 12 and year 10 students commented that years 8, 9 and even 10 were virtually a waste of time; that students can get away with doing no work and still pass. Many students were well aware that they were working at a different, lower standard than students they knew elsewhere and realised that this was not serving them well.
… like I was telling one boy about my Maths work, and he’s in Year 9, and he’s like, ‘we’ve already passed that’….He’s like - ‘didn’t you do that in Year 9?’ and I’m like ‘No’. (Laughs) And he’s like ‘Wow! So we’re like doing your Year 10 work?’, and I was like ‘Oh - yeah’. But - so I think we’re a bit behind. In particular, several of the year 10s actually complained that they had less homework in years 8 and 9 than they’d had at primary school! They recognized that they were not being sufficiently prepared for the senior years of school. In a way it's going to hit us heaps bad when we get into year eleven and twelve because we don't really have homework in year eight, we don't have any in year nine we have like a tiny bit, maybe once a fortnight, and then year ten we hardly have any homework as well.
From the teachers’ point of view, however, the students arrive at the school ill-equipped for the academic curriculum, lacking the cultural capital to help them achieve in the field of education:
I teach a lot of very intelligent kids but I think the bottom line is they have grown up in a particular culture which works against academic success … No I don’t think it’s about intelligence, unless intelligence is a kind of behaviour or a set of behaviours, which it may be actually. But in terms of ability to grasp concepts I think that there are just as many of them who can do it but they are very disadvantaged by lots of things.
I think that, you develop your concepts through the reading that you do, and the talking that you do, and the things that you hear and understand and take in. And, if your language development isn’t flash, this means, that not only can you miss the surface meaning of things, but of course you miss the sub-text, as well, which is where you get a lot of your more subtle sort of concepts and things like that. And these kids’ language development, can be appalling! And, so, I have this sort of theory, that their … just their conceptual development’s behind, where kids of similar age and stage (are), and therefore, and that's where I think a lot of their sophistication lacks, and, their ability to, communicate as effectively. … And when you read some of their unadulterated text, you actually, I mean, I have had year twelve stuff … where you actually have to sit and read it out loud, to get the sort of phonetic sound of what it is you're reading.
This second teacher talked about how the students actually speak a different language, or dialect, and that they haven’t learnt to write in a range of different styles, so when they do write they use their local form of English, rather than the middle class ‘Standard Australian English’ of the school system and the dominant culture. Barnett and Walsh note, (1999, p125) "the recognition of class-based dialects are vital in understanding educational disadvantage". Middle class children arrive at school with the Standard Australian English of the schools already part of their habitus, or their ‘virtual schoolbag’ (Thomson 2002). They don’t need to struggle with the discontinuity between the language of the home and that of the school experienced by working class students (Barnett and Walsh, 1999). They have the cultural capital to survive and thrive at school.
Conclusion
In the discussion above I have attempted to show how Bourdieu’s theories are a useful way to analyse what it is about the schools I am studying that means their students are so much less likely than students at middle class schools to complete year 12 and move on to university. For marginalized groups, the way they see and experience the world, their habitus, is not valued highly in the school system and is discordant with the habitus of the field of education. For many working class students this discordance leads to disengagement and failure at school, with very low rates of year 12 completion and access to further education.
Through my research I have become increasingly aware of how the education system, both school and university, is instrumental in the reproduction of social inequalities. I have had to challenge my perception of education as a force for social justice and recognize that in fact schooling has tended to perpetuate the privileges of the dominant classes, normalizing the cultural capital and habitus of the middle classes while pathologizing and excluding those who don’t have ready access to the cultural capital of the elite (Reay, 2006). Bourdieu’s emphasis on reflexivity has helped me to recognise my own privileged position within the field of education and has challenged me to question my taken-for-granted values. While still convinced of the importance of more equitable access to the benefits of university education, I am more ready to recognize the validity of other options and the need for these to be recognized as different but desirable aspirations (Watts and Bridges, 2006). I have also become much more critical of universities themselves as instruments of the privileged, working to sort, select and exclude those students who do not have the academic and cultural capital or habitus to "fit."
My reading of Bourdieu has allowed me to see the social world and myself with new eyes and helped me make sense of the injustices that have troubled me for so long. As Bourdieu explains, it is "by expressing the social determinants of different forms of practice … (that) gives us the chance of acquiring certain freedom from those determinants (Bourdieu 1990 p 15). Like one of Charlesworth’s informants from his Phenomenology of Working Class Experience (2000), I have found that Bourdieu has explained issues I had always felt, but not previously understood:
"Is it ‘ard this Bourdieu to read, like? ‘Cos them bits ye’v read to mi, the’r fuckin’ spot on. Ye’ know it’s stuff A’ve allous (always) felt but A’ve never bin able to explain. Ye know, like when Ah wo at school an’ college, an’ it all meks perfect sense ahr (how) he explains it but Ah wun’t never Ah (have) thought o’r it like that."(*)
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