Sociology for Education Studies

Connecting Theory, Settings and Everyday Experiences

Catherine A. Simon, Graham Downes, Catherine A. Simon, Graham Downes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429673542
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Sociology for Education Studies provides a fresh look at the sociology of education, focusing on themes such as habitus, hegemony and intersectionality. It supports students in applying sociological theory to their own educational experiences and developing an understanding of why social orders appear to be predetermined, why the state continues to create education policy in certain forms and, crucially, how to make it better.

The book explores the multi-faceted perspectives that influence the sociology of education and presents examples of the applications of sociology to a wide variety of different educational contexts, including education in schools and in the community. Chapters cover topics such as:

• Morality, education and social order
• Spaces of invisibility and marginalisation in schools
• The global political economy of education
• Rethinking the 'international perspective' in Education Studies

This accessible book is an essential read for students of Education Studies as well as those involved in teacher education and training.

1Sociology and education

Graham Downes

Introduction

The academic study of education and society has always suffered from something of an identity crisis. Part of the problem is that education itself is a nebulous set of concepts that traverse social practices, political debates, moral issues and social theories. What Education Studies do have in common is a tendency to focus on context: they are always bounded so that one can say what education is at the moment it is being discussed. This complexity is something that should be celebrated rather than excessively problematised. The relationship between theory and context provides an interaction that can generate new contextual insights (through the application of theory) and new theorisations (through the application of context.). What emerges from this process is what Merton terms ‘middle range theory’ (Merton, 1967: 39). Such theories mediate between more abstract ideas and social systems and, as such, can be subjected to empirical scrutiny. By contrast, deductively constructed grand theories are often difficult to verify (Merton, 1967). As such, education can become a useful tool in bridging the gap between overly instrumental empirical approaches that purport to be value free and over-abstract grand theories that are, in Popper's terms, beyond falsification (Popper, 2002).

Sociology in Education Studies

With reference to the study of education, perhaps a more applied set of academic categories might be more productive in reflecting the importance of context in the field, for example: education policy (applied political science), pedagogy (applied psychology) and sociology of education (applied sociology). Such academic approaches, we argue, offer the potential for the development of radical and purposeful insights into how we educate and how we should educate. This, we propose, is the basis for the existence of Education Studies as an academic endeavour in its own right. This book focuses on one such applied discipline that potentially constitutes Education Studies. Whilst the sociology of education has traditionally been an essential part of sociology writ large, we suggest that it should be seen as more detached from the more general discipline of sociology and in doing so, it can find its own methods and knowledge that, whilst referencing grander theorisations and approaches, produces something distinctive. For example, it is worth noting that whilst relevant to a discussion of education, the concept of ‘discourse’, as defined by Foucault, is not specifically about education. However, subjecting the theory to scrutiny in education contexts generates new theoretical parameters, nomenclatures, values and tensions. This is useful both for wider theoretical discussions and for developing new insights into educational practice.

The obvious questions emerging from this bold set of assertions are: (a) What constitutes a sociology of education? (b) How might this be bounded in the study of education (Education Studies)? For us, the question can be broken down into ‘How?’ (methodology) and ‘What?’ (knowledge base).

The ‘how’ is relatively straightforward: educational methods inevitably have to follow those dictated by wider sociological theories and the accepted, discipline-specific methods of working. However, it should be noted that the relative value of these received methods should be open to challenge and reordering based on context-specific problems as they present themselves. For example, theories of morality may well need to be applied in different ways because morality in educational contexts tends to play out in distinctive ways compared to other contexts. This is because (a) education has its own, distinctive normative discourses and (b) these discourses tend to have their own distinctive patterns of linguistic modality in relation to such discourses. In this sense, retroductive approaches to knowledge have significant potential in the field of sociology of education (Danermark et al., 2002). In acknowledging the complex and polyvalent nature of the empirical domain, researchers can develop new insights through consideration of the world as it can be, rather than the world we can observe. In order to do this, it is necessary to consider theoretical possibilities alongside observable phenomena. As such, empirical observations alone are not enough to generate meaningful insights about educational knowledge (Collier, 1999).

With reference to ‘what’, sociology of education is distinctive because it focuses on the external conditions that affect educational outcomes. By this we are referring to the social structures that exist beyond the educational institution but are internalised by and/or have a significant impact on what happens in education. We contrast this with the narrower focus of psychological theory and its application through pedagogy. This is important because we know that the main tenets of sociological analysis (class, ethnicity and gender) have a significant impact on educational outcomes (Dorling, 2015; Feinstein, 2003; Savage et al., 1995). However, explaining the link between wider social structures and such educational outcomes is much harder to explain. Part of the issue here is that theorisations of social structures themselves are multi-dimensional, tending to be reducible to economic, political and/or cultural causes. A potentially fruitful way of creating a more coherent set of theorisations is the generation of intersectional social accounts that cross-reference these dimensions (Gillborn, 2010). As such, more modern approaches to both statistical analysis and critical theorisations tend to generate intersectional social models (Hancock, 2015).

Social structures and educational institutions

Whilst intersectionality helps to potentially complexify the evidence base from which social scientists work, it does little to resolve the seemingly intractable debate between structural approaches to social issues and agentive approaches. Although this debate plays out across the sociological discipline, it takes on a distinctive form within the educational field. With reference to Durkheim, specific organisations of rituals and enacted practices constitute educational institutions in unique ways (Durkheim and Fields, 1995). Specifically, education has a tendency to be highly ritualistic with a strong emphasis on routine and symbolism that is, for the most part, easily identifiable. For example, schools are predicated on timetables that are constructed from a set curriculum. This curriculum and its organisation are easily transferable between schools and easily recognisable from outside the school environment, and thus exhibit a high level of linguistic modality (Fairclough, 2003). Such constructs are further reified through the extensive use of symbolism such as the use of bells, specific resources, as well as practices that necessitate the shifting of behaviour from one part of the school day to another. There are also strong boundaries between different actors and the division of labour (Bernstein, 2003). Teachers are easily identifiable from pupils and, likewise, head teachers are distinguishable from both. But these ritualised elements of education only represent some of the social structures that constitute education. Wider social structures are also internalised by educational institutions that, in turn, become internalised by wider social structures. Perhaps most prominent amongst these is social class. A plethora of data has demonstrated the strong historical link between educational outcomes and social status (Feinstein, 2003; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2011). Those such as Bourdieu have theorised about the various ways in which education has a tendency to discriminate against those from lower socio-economic status groups (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). Some of these issues can be attributable to ritualism but, for the most part, their roots are in wider, culturally constructed elements. In particular, normative values that are closely associated with status are played out through various discourses that include moral and aesthetic dimensions (Bourdieu, 1984). Education itself is synonymous with such a cultural milieu, and it is worth noting that it is not universally seen as a social good by all social groups (Willis, 1977).

Wider sociological debates centring on the ‘cultural turn’ (Hall and Morley, 2019: 9) take on a unique significance in the study of education. This debate has historically focused on a humanist/structuralist dichotomy that emerged in the field of cultural studies (Hall and Morley, 2019). Whilst the relationship between social structures and social agency cannot be reduced to a unified approach, more contemporary approaches have attempted to ameliorate the division between the two and at least recognise the existence of both within social formations. These approaches tend to focus on what might loosely be referred to as ‘social reproduction’: the reproduction and evolution of existing social structures through human actions (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). These models tend to emphasise that whilst we have the ability to choose between almost limitless possibilities of social agency, our actions have a strong tendency towards the reformation of existing patterns of interaction: we tend to reproduce what is familiar to us (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). Some approaches emphasise the material aspect to this phenomenon. The existing material boundaries that define the social world mean that we can only act in ways that they afford (Olssen, 2010). For example, whilst we have the choice to drive a vehicle in almost any direction we like, in reality this is very difficult and we tend to constrain our activity in ways that adhere to the materiality of the environment; that is, we tend to stick to the road. This is also true of education contexts. For example, schools also have material constraints, partly because they are inherited (building new educational structures is very costly), partly because they have to exist within wider pre-existing structures (they cannot be built anywhere), and partly because historical social relations have required children to be together in a manageable collected space so as to enable other forms of activities to occur, such as work.

It can be argued that such materiality is the historical material product of pre-existing economic relations, but this should not detract from the significant role that such materiality plays in reproducing existing social structures. Even if the political/economic systems changed radically, it is difficult to envisage how education systems could reflect such changes through a concomitant radical shift in the way they are organised. In this sense, schools are distinctive in their relatively fixed state. Other social practices – such as those associated with medicine – have been able to evolve in a way that makes them unrecognisable from their historical antecedents. Education has developed very little since elementary state education was introduced in 1870.

Compulsory state education

It should also be noted that material and cultural dimensions of education cannot constitute the entirety of the education system as we know it. The very fact we have a compulsory education system is a state-sponsored act that has endured over time. Many will point to the link between education and economic productivity as a reason for the need for universal education, and there are plenty of examples of political justifications that refer to economic issues as the reason for investing in compulsory education (Blair, 2002; Forster, 1870; Gove, 2012). Others have provided more complex accounts that refer to the need to address new social outcomes produced by the expansion of capitalism. Such justifications point out that the concomitant rise in urbanisation and social relationships whereby workers were not tied to landlords, as in previous feudal arrangements, had led to a greater need for social control (Green, 2013). Thus, education can be seen as an outcome of capitalist economic arrangements as much as it is as an intervention in such arrangements.

This model has been made more complex by those who point out that, whilst one can attribute political interventions (such as education) to capitalist economic arrangements, they cannot be predicted and are thus contingent (Jessop, 2010). Put more simply, whilst many causes of action can be attributed to capitalism, it is not possible to identify which of the outcomes that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Series Editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Sociology and education
• 2 Education and habitus
• 3 Education as hegemonic structure
• 4 Spaces of invisibility and marginalisation in schools
• 5 Morality, education and social ordering
• 6 Turning ‘intersectionality’ on its head as we navigate 
our journeys through difficult dialogue
• 7 The ever-present discourses in education: Discourse 
and educational change
• 8 A global political economy of education: The origins
• 9 The global political economy of education in the twenty-first century
• 10 Rethinking ‘international perspective’ in Education Studies: 
‘Knowing’ education in the global era
• 11 Education, urbanisation and the case of ‘the child in the city’
• 12 Enacting the international vision of inclusive education: 
A UK case study of profound and multiple learning difficulties
• Index