Pierre Bourdieu and Literacy Education

James Albright, Allan Luke, James Albright, Allan Luke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135599492
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this volume scholars from around the world focus on how a Bourdieusian stance can enable a powerful socicultural and cultural analysis of literacy education theory and practice and serve as an effective tool in analyzing relations of hierarchy and domination. Although there has been a growing body of Bourdieusian-inspired research in various sectors of education, this book is the first to present both theoretical and practical articulation of his ideas in the field of literacy education. It brings together three major clusters of work:

• Rethinking of the doxa of the social fields of language and literacy education
• Explorations of alternative objectifications of educational fields forming around cultural and linguistic minorities, new media and technologies
• Studies on the formation of the literate habitus in homes and classrooms, curriculum and schooling, and addresses theoretical, policy and practical directions

Pierre Bourdieu and Literacy Education is intended for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students in literacy education, sociology of education, and curriculum theory, and as a text for advanced courses in these areas.

Part I
Objectifying the field

Chapter 1
Introduction

Renewing the cultural politics of literacy education

James Albright and Allan Luke

Literacy education is indeed at a historical crossroads. If we are to take educational policymakers, politicians and the media at their word, it is the same old great debate replayed over and over again: declining standards, loss of the literary canon, troubled and unruly students, irresponsible parents and overly permissive teachers. These, we are told yet again, can be fixed by marketization of schools, increased testing, a return to the basics of reading and writing, better teachers, and a more disciplined approach to child-rearing, education and schooling. In this way, a neoliberal focus on tightened accountabilities and steering mechanisms blends seamlessly with a neoconservative educational fundamentalism: economic and bureaucratic rationalism in the delivery of the basics. This is the public policy doxa of literacy education.

Yet the social facts of the matter speak with a compeling and different simplicity: the continued and increased impacts of socioeconomic disparity, exclusion and marginalization of cultural and linguistic minorities, and the inability of these same systems to engage with and address the major social and cultural, technological and economic shifts in nations, communities and emergent transnational corporate spheres of influence. Further, we know that a decade of this particular policy approach has increased global and local disparities between children of rich and poor.

Bourdieu’s trenchant vocabulary for talking about the systems of unequal and inequitable exchange in language and pedagogy, material and symbolic resources is more relevant than ever. From the French postwar system that he and Claire Kramsch (Ch. 3) experienced, to the worlds of inner-city students and migrants described here (Hill, Ch. 8; Grant and Wong, Ch. 9; Pahl, Ch. 10; Zacher, Ch. 13; Curry, Ch. 14), to Canadian workers described by Heller (Ch. 4), to those linguistic minorities subjugated by hegemonic monolingualism (Uhlmann, Ch. 6; Goldstein, Ch. 11)—the matter still is one of reproduction and counter-reproduction. As these chapters show, this is not a matter of an iron-cage structuralism of class, gender, and cultural reproduction. It is a complex system of generational and intergenerational exchanges of capital, the ongoing interplay of positions and position-taking in relation to the structuring fields of school, workplace, civic, and media cultures.

Concurrently, the digitalization of text production has altered what counts as literacy in many ways, and the use of online representational forms is supplanting, augmenting, and appropriating print per se, altering its author/ reader relations of exchange (Pahl, Ch. 10; Rowsell, Ch. 12; Dressman and Wilder, Ch. 7). This is to say nothing of the impact of cinema, video, and online texts on emergent claims about what might influence and reconstitute the canonical elements of the quality children’s literature, academic study, and class-based literary taste. That is, the developmental sequences and systems of exchange that are hallmarks of the old literacy are being disrupted by convergence and crossover with the new literacies, even as schools and systems offer bare-bones policy and curricular attempts to incorporate new modes of representation and forms of life.

We return to questions of habitus, capital, social field, and exchange not simply as sociologists and socialists seeking a golden lining to social theory, but rather as researchers and teacher educators seeking to know how Bourdieusian frames can enable us to do schools, pedagogy, curriculum, and all this affiliated work differently, in normative social directions that are committed to the egalitarianism and equity that Bourdieu professed in Acts of Resistance (1998).

Two decades on, researchers and teacher educators work from many stereotypes about Pierre Bourdieu’s contributions to the field of education. One assumption is that Bourdieu’s explanation of class reproduction in schooling is a structuralist determinism that takes the forces of primary socialization as given and thereby subjugates the human agency and potential of teachers and students. Such a view, further, does not map handily onto close analyses of discourse interactions and cultural dynamics of schools and classrooms that stress the fractures and gaps in classroom life, the idiosyncratic turns of discourse, and the very possibilities of the remaking of identity, capital, and social relations explored in this volume.

A second assumption is that Bourdieu’s descriptivist science does not set the generative grounds or programmatic agendas for social movements and political actions. These beliefs are in part attributable to the expanse of Bourdieu’s corpus, and indeed its limited systematic application to literacy education to date (for excellent applications to education more generally, see Ladwig, 1996, and recent editions of the British Journal of Sociology of Education, especially vol. 25, issue 4, 2004). If one’s sole engagement were a graduate school encounter with Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990), such a claim about the primacy of class-based socialization and the “black box” model of reproduction might seem warranted. Yet Bourdieu built a body of work that can be taken as a set of generative sociological models and principles, loosely coupled and reiterated as he moved to and from the study of pre-modern to modern and postmodern cultures—from high art to popular culture, from the formation of science and the academy to mass media, from reflections on dialectical to idealist philosophies, from consideration of gender identities to class relations—landing squarely at a pitched engagement with contemporary social issues confronting the state. It is a rich, dense, and at times elusive, corpus that, interestingly, has stayed one step ahead of a secondary literature that has attempted to canonize, critique, and encapsulate it. We take it as something other than the classical unified theory of continental philosophy. Rather Bourdieu’s writing unfolds—from the early anthropological work on the Kabyle to the analysis of postwar French society and academy, to the later critical commentaries on the neoliberal state—as a species of habitus itself: structured and structuring, durable, generative, and in progress. The matter now is not to consolidate it or find its “proper” applications around what he might have meant, but to generate a new wave of critical self-objectifications, expansions, disruptions, models, and reconstructions.

Following on from Jenny Cook-Gumperz’s (1986) landmark, The Social Construction of Literacy, Bourdieu’s work was incorporated into symbolic interactionist and interactional sociolinguistic work with a principal focus on the concept of literacy as cultural capital. This is not surprising, since Bourdieu’s entrée to Anglo-American education through M. F. D. Young’s Knowledge and Control (1971), the prototypical statement on the then “new” sociology of education. That volume brought together elements of symbolic interactionism, structural sociology and anthropology, and historical materialist theory, featuring remarkable work by Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein, Robin Horton, Ioan Davies, and others. In “Systems of education and systems of thought,” first published in 1967, Bourdieu outlined his view of the relationship of pedagogy and linguistic habitus:

all teaching practices implicitly furnish a model of the “right” mode of intellectual activity; for example, the very nature of the tests set (ranging from the composition, based on the technique of “development”, which is the predominant form in most arts examination, to the “brief account” required in advanced science examinations, the type of rhetorical and linguistic qualities required and the value attached to these qualities, the relative importance given to written papers and oral examinations, and the qualities required in both instances, tend to encourage a certain attitude towards the use of language—sparing or prodigal, casual or ceremonious, complacent or restrained. In this way the canons governing school work proper, in composition or exposition, may continue to govern writings apparently freed from the disciplines of the school—newspaper articles, public lectures, summary reports and works of scholarship.

(1971:201)

Yet the subsequent uptake of his concept of cultural capital in the American literature often neglected Bourdieu’s concepts of social and intellectual field, social class, and combinatory models of capital. This had the effect of focusing attention on the value of literacy in the general field of educational exchange without explicating the practices and institutional economies wherein that exchange occurred. This was remediated in part by a stronger emphasis in the 1990s on notions of habitus in an attempt to explain minority and lower patterns of socioeconomic underachievement. Though not explicitly drawing from Bourdieu, James Gee’s (1991) arguments around the educational primacy of “primary discourses” of early cultural socialization refocused attention on the interaction of habitus with the social field of the school. It is extended in promising work that begins to track the longitudinal traverse of human subjects and capital across volatile social fields of education, through work, everyday life, civic participation, and consumption (e.g., Bullen and Kenway, 2005).

With the consolidation of neoliberal discourses and “third way” governance into a new corporatist model of education in recent years, Bourdieu’s work has been selectively mined once again. The concept of social capital now sits centrally within mainstream educational and social policy, with ubiquitous calls for the rebuilding of social infrastructure, networks, institutions, and relations, many of which have been systematically dismantled by the state and the new corporate political economies. Hence, in the discourses of educational policy formation, the concept of symbolic capital—like that of cultural capital before—has been wrenched from a systematic sociological analysis of the complexities of the new political economies of education, corporation, and social life. The enlistment of Bourdieusian ideas in a corporatist agenda is, at the least, ironic.

A great deal has changed since 1968, since Bourdieu and his academic generation did their fieldwork in North Africa, since they made their political and intellectual choices in 1968, and since the rise and consolidation of the corporate, neoliberal state. The ongoing social and political conflict in France underlines the contradictions of opposition to the neofeudal agenda of multinational corporations (see Graham and Luke, 2005), while dealing with the fact that this self-same opposition may lend itself to the further economic and political disenfranchisement of migrant and minority populations in France, across the European Union, North America, Australasia, and elsewhere.

The clearest outline of Bourdieu’s later politics can be found in an extended dialogue he had with the installation artist Hans Haacke (Bourdieu and Haacke, 1995). Haacke earned an international reputation for his art, which challenges the censorship of artists in the United States, corporate influence in art, the resurgent Right in North America and Europe, and political and social amnesia in general. In their dialogue, Haacke and Bourdieu make clear comparisons between their various projects over the years. They discuss the problems of defending artists, writers and scholars from corporate and governmental attacks to their relative autonomy. Further, they analyze the “increasingly subtle strategies of business to subordinate and seduce artists and scholars ... with the extraordinary result that citizens still finance the arts and sciences through tax exemptions ... an extremely perverse mechanism which operates in such a way that we contribute to our own mystification” (pp. 15, 16).

Bourdieu and Haacke develop a generalized political strategy based on an analysis of the symbolic strategies of other actors in the field of power. They suggest that the powerful and sophisticated symbolic weapons of the Right have unarmed those who oppose material and symbolic forms of domination. Bourdieu praises Haacke for the efficacy of his critical actions. Haacke describes his art as not only taking a position but also creating a producti...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Part I Objectifying the field
• Part II Producing the field
• Part III Habitus and other
• Part IV Remaking the field
• Index