Children's Bodies in Schools: Corporeal Performances of Social Class

Corporeal Performances of Social Class

S. Henry

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781349495184
  9781137442628
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137442635
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Bringing together sociology of the body with powerful examinations of educational theory and social class, Henry examines how children's experiences of school and pedagogy are shaped by their bodies and the ideas of social class and class identity that their bodies carry.

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Children’s Bodies and Corporeal Expectations of Schooling

Abstract: This chapter foregrounds the central question of the text: how are children’s corporeal performances—shaped by their social class upbringing—interpreted by teachers and how might these (mis)interpretations influence the social reproductive effects of schooling? It asserts that important theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu and Annette Lareau can help researchers understand the corporeal performances of children in different social class backgrounds. Self-control is explored as a central mechanism by which different corporeal performances become advantageous or detrimental in navigating the somatic expectations of school. This chapter concludes by arguing that neoliberal educational practices have detrimental consequences for children’s development of authentic forms of self-control.

Keywords: corporeal performance; self-control; social class

Henry, Sue Ellen. Children’s Bodies in Schools: Corporeal Performances of Social Class. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137442635.0004.

An invitation

What is your first or near-first memory of instruction on how to move your body in a particular way? Maybe your story comes from the world of sport, having a coach demonstrate the right way to throw a ball, run and kick simultaneously, or run backward. Perhaps a parent or family elder told you to “sit up at the table,” or “chew with your mouth closed,” or some other sort of instruction related to eating.

Or, perhaps your story takes place in school: a teacher giving a direct lesson on proper desk posture, hand position when holding a pencil, or appropriate position for reading. One of my most profound memories of instruction for the body occurred at school, but the lesson was given by my then dearest friend Meredith, in 7th grade. We were in the school cafeteria. Over our lunches of hamburger and tater tots, we talked about our days, and whether we were going to have a sleepover at her house that weekend. As lunch ended, we got up to empty our trash and return the trays to their cart. As I walked back to Meredith to go to our 5th period class, she conveyed something that even then I knew was important.

“You walk so heavy and swing your arms too much,” Meredith critiqued. “Don’t stomp and keep your arms at your sides, here, like this,” she said, as she demonstrated the daintier, feminine gait that she thought was appropriate for all girls. Indeed, her walk did appear different from the way I felt my body moving when I walked. I walked with a distinct purpose, a direction, fast and focused. Meredith’s walk was more graceful and gentle, aiming in a direction but not nearly as hurried and stiff as my gait. Meredith’s instructions were jarring in their force. Her critique reminded me that I was visible and that others were watching. She framed the gendered and classed social environment in which I was operating at school and she gave me clear advice on how to participate more appropriately (expectedly) within it.

Such lessons are ubiquitous, particularly in school. This ubiquity has the paradoxical effect of concealing our awareness of the comprehensive impact of these lessons. The fact that teachers, parents, and other children are consistently giving feedback on corporeal presentation and performance has a puzzlingly persuasive influence on our consciousness of our bodies. The ways in which we move our bodies throughout our lives—the gestures we make, the way we hold our hands, our gait, our stance, our facial expressions—are the comprehensive expression of a lifetime of ordinary moments and points of feedback. As literary theorist Kenneth Burke articulates with regard to the development of rhetorical skill, we might best think of how we corporeally move through the world as the totality of a life’s persuasion rather the result of one key lesson. Corporeal performance grows over time not “through one particular address, but [through] a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reinforcement . . .” (Burke 1969: 26). In other words, the lessons we receive about our comportment are extraordinary due to their ordinariness.

My important lesson from Meredith many years earlier was catalyzed in my mind after a day spent supervising elementary student teachers many years later. It was early September in a kindergarten classroom, in a school with a growing Latino population and 58% of the students on free and reduced lunch. The student teacher was leading the children in a typical morning meeting activity that included counting the number of days of school that had passed. The seasoned cooperating teacher, a white man in his mid-forties, drew a seat next to mine as we both watched the student teacher. He leaned over to me and claimed, “I can predict right now who is going to have to repeat kindergarten.” The statement shocked me. “How?” I asked him. Aware that very little of the “treatment effect” of schooling had happened at this point in the year, that no standardized measures of reading or mathematics skill had been given, I was curious about his rationale. This veteran teacher explained his logic by noting how some children “knew” how to sit on the carpet during circle time, that some children were more skilled at raising hands to be called upon, and that some children in the class had proper pencil grip. Adding to his calculus, he noted that some children had come to school knowing the alphabet, some had letter-sound correspondence acumen, and some could even write their names. But he began his explanation by remarking on the qualities of children’s bodies, and the children’s differential capacity to control their bodies in school-appropriate ways. I recall leaving that day wondering how this teacher was seeing the children’s bodies as indicative of academic capacities that were, ostensibly, to be learned at school.

My fascination with the ways children’s bodies were interpreted by teachers was reinforced during another student teaching observation later that same year. This time, at the same school, the scene transpired in a fourth grade classroom. “Brandon,¹ come up here,” commanded Mr. Coates, a white man in his late thirties, veteran fourth grade teacher, and part time football coach for the local middle school. Brandon was a quiet boy of about four-and-a-half feet tall, white, with dirty blonde hair and an oversized T-shirt hanging to his knees, displaying NASCAR driver Dale Earnhart’s signature. “When I ask you to get to work, that’s what I mean,” Mr. Coates explained firmly. Brandon stared at the ground. “Look at me when I’m talking to you. If you don’t look at me, I don’t feel the respect I deserve. Stand up straight –in our school, you stand up straight and look people in the eye when they are talking. Got it?”

What did Brandon learn about his body from this interaction? Was he displaying a corporeal posture of respect consistent with expectations at his home? Was Mr. Coates’ admonition to “look me in the eye” a requirement that was familiar to Brandon? Had Brandon intended to be “disrespectful” with the way he held his body, or was his corporeal code for respect just different from the corporeal expectation of school?

These questions initiated my interest in understanding more about how teachers interpret children’s nonverbal, corporeal performances at school. What sorts of lessons about the body are embedded in the contemporary schooling experience for young learners? How are these lessons shaped by the corporeal learning children bring with them from their home child-rearing experiences? How does our (largely) middle-class teacher population perceive children who come to school with corporeal practices different from their own? This book theorizes on these questions in order to move children’s bodies from the shadows to the spotlight. As a starting point, I map Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social class construction onto Annette Lareau’s recent work exploring the social class nature of child-rearing practices to theorize on the corporeal consequences of such learning. Following this analysis, I examine the influence of neoliberalism on the contemporary context of schooling, and how this ideology shapes both educational practices and children’s bodies in schools. To explore these linkages, I investigate the potential impact of Ruby Payne’s pedagogical advice for teaching poor children and the more recent infiltration of “cultural interventionist” schooling organizations such as the Knowledge is Power Program, or KIPP (Shuffelton 2013: 300). These regimes, which have broad public appeal, also have important and largely hidden consequences on children’s corporeal performances that merit consideration. This text looks at the ways in which a child’s social class and home environment influence her corporeal performance. When she brings her class-based corporeal performance to school, what might happen? How might she be received by her likely middle-class teacher? How will her corporeal performances be evaluated against the likely unconscious standards of middle-class somatic expectations?

Readers will be reasonably asking about the place of race, gender, (dis)ability, and other identities that shape how people (literally) move throughout their lives. The question is an important one, and many authors have explored the corporeal experiences and performances of these identity markers.² In Chapter 2, I explore some recent research on children living in these identities. The larger aim of this text, however, is to extend the current theorizing on children’s bodies and the identity marker of social class. Because social class is a powerful organizing structure in US society, separating it from other powerful influences is necessary to gain a fuller picture of the ways in which social class influences bodily performance and gestures. This is not to argue that individuals live only classed lives; indeed, as a post-structuralist, I believe that our identities are intersectional and contextually framed. While I acknowledge the important interactions between social class and other significant identity markers in the lived experience of children, my goal in this book is to flesh out the co-constructed relationship between corporeality and social class in children.

Social class and social reproduction theory

It almost goes without saying that social class is a pervasive factor that shapes individual and group experience in the United States (Domhoff 2013; Kraus, Piff, and Keltner 2011). Sociology has always been interested in understanding social inequality, how it is made, and the mechanisms that produce it (Ridgeway 2014), but studying social class or socioeconomic status is difficult. One challenge arises from the general assumptions that (1) the economic opportunity structure of the United States is an open one and (2) as a consequence, one’s social class is determined by the choice of how hard one wants to work and how much delayed gratification one is willing to bear. Indeed, a 2005 study conducted by the New York Times revealed that 75% of those surveyed answered “yes” to the statement: Is it possible to start out poor, work hard, and become rich?” (“Graphic: How Class Works—New York Times” 2014). This assumption arises primarily from the notion that upward social mobility is common and likely, even though data suggest that this belief is dramatically overstated. Hertz (2006) documents in his report for the American University Center for American Progress that children from the poorest 20% of US households have a slim 1% chance of moving into the top 5% of income earners. Moreover, Hertz’s (2006) data conclude that for children from the middle 20% of US households, chances of moving up into the top 5% of income earners are less than 2%. The most likely scenario is that a child will remain at his current income bracket when he reaches adulthood (Hertz 2006). Many other studies reach similar conclusions (Isaacs 2014; State and Search 2014; Stiglitz 2013).

Why do Americans cling to the idea of social mobility in the face of data suggesting that the opposite is true? Much of the explanation can be found in the cherished American ideals of freedom, liberty, and democracy, all of which were ideological factors in the establishment of our comprehensive system of public education. As Benjamin Barber (1994) explores in his critical text, An Aristocracy of Everyone, the American public education system is rooted in the enduring hope that education can be a common feature among all citizens and the facet of social life that sponsors an equal contest between individuals who are wonderfully diverse from one another. As Barber (1992) observes, “[d]emocracy is less the enabler of education than education is the enabler of democracy” (14).

Conflicts that exist in sociology also confuse scholars working to sort out these predicaments. While the notions of socioeconomic status and social class are ubiquitous to social science research, sociologist Paul Kingston maintains that inequalities among individuals are not so much categorical as they are gradational. In his work The Classless Society, Kingston (2000) argues that “class structuration in America is weak: for the most part, groups of people having a common economic position do not share distinct, life-defining experiences” (Kingston 2000: 4). Thus, the common but misdirected faith in meritocracy and sociology’s wrangling about whether class exists in American society often lead to the confused use of terms such as “socioeconomic status” and “social class.”

Indeed, sociologists frequently use “socioeconomic status” and “social class” somewhat interchangeably. While similar, these terms emphasize different, yet complementary, components of social life. Socioeconomic status is typically measured through a combination of educational attainment, income level, and occupational position. Such measures are meant to articulate categorical distinctions among groups relative to material resources at their disposal. Social scientists interested in studying social class maintain that this construct gets at important components of people’s lives that go beyond the measurement of sheer material resources (Kraus et al. 2011; Lareau 2003). These scholars see social class as a relative, self-evaluative term, important not only for understanding the impact of access to material resources, but also for explaining individual feelings, thoughts, and actions (Kraus et al. 2011). These researchers often utilize the object measures of socioeconomic status, while adding to the mix a measure of subjective social class status (Cohen et al. 2008). Combining subjective social class rank with the objective measure of socioeconomic status helps researchers link these categorical distinctions to other behavioral patterns, such as “living in different neighborhoods, belonging to different social clubs, attending different educational institutions, eating different kinds of foods, enjoying different forms of recreation, [and] wearing specific clothes” (Domhoff 1998 cited in Kraus et al. 2011: 1).

Sociologist and social theorist Pierre Bourdieu sees these behavioral patterns as important components in explaining how social class is passed onto subsequent generations and reified within the norms of social institutions. His theory of social reproduction, developed from extensive research conducted in France in the 1960s, asserts that cultural capital, habitus, and body hexis are central social structures that set norms for behavior and choices within social fields. I explore these concepts in detail in Chapter 2, but as an overview, Bourdieu defines cultural capital as the “general cultural background, knowledge, disposition, and skills that are passed from one generation to the next” (MacLeod 2008: 13). Bourdieu defines habitus as “a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experience, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions” (Bourdieu 1977: 82–83). In essence, habitus works as an overarching system establishing norms and expectations for individuals, based on the social class status one inhabits. Body hexis refers to the embodiment and use of the body that arises from habitus and cultural capital. As Bourdieu writes, “[b]ody hexis speaks directly to the motor function, in the form of a pattern of postures that is both individual and systematic, because [the body] is linked to a whole system of techniques involving the body and tools . . .” (Bourdieu 1977: 87). Thus, for Bourdieu, social class is inscribed on the body and is directly related to the gestures, posture, and other bodily behaviors often thought of as arising unconsciously.

Bourdieu’s research affirms that children in various social class positions inherit cultural capital aligned with that social class position. Children of upper-class parents experience forms of cultural capital consistent with dominant social institutions, such as school, which confirms unearned advantages in this social field. Children of working-class parents are at a disadvantage when attempting to use the cultural capital accrued in their home environments successfully at school (Giroux 2001). As MacLeod (2008) maintains, through the differential valuing of upper-class cultural capital and the systematic devaluing of working-class cultural capital, “schools reproduce social inequality, but by dealing in the currency of academic credentials, the educational system legitimates the entire process” thereby concealing it from critique (14).

Copious data demonstrate that social class is a powerful organizing construct that shapes children’s experiences in the home and subsequent experiences in schools (Downey, Hippel, and Broh 2004; Duncan, Boisjoly, and Harris 2001; Lareau 2003; McLanahan 2004). Some studies emphasize occupational and educational differences among parents as key to explaining different child-rearing parenting practices (McLanahan 2004; Reardon 2011; Sirin 2005). Such studies typically examine the effects of differences in parental education on monitoring homework, teaching study skills, and reinforcing other “school readiness” behaviors. These studies explain the material differences that result from different levels of education and the correspondence of education with occupation. These factors are then thought to influence parental choices such as time spent with children, family size, age of parents at birth of their first child, and marital status and stability (Sherman and Harris 2012).

Another angle present in research exploring the influence of social class on parenting emphasizes the process of socialization and cultural norms present in families of different socioeconomic status and social class backgrounds. This theme was an early presence in sociological literature, largely due to sociologist Oscar Lewis’ well-known “culture of poverty” thesis (Lewis 1963; 1975). Lewis’ now largely disregarded theory maintained tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Childrens Bodies and Corporeal Expectations of Schooling
• 2  Social Class Inequities and the Body
• 3  Theoretical Frameworks for Understanding Social Class Corporeality
• 4  Corporeal Implications of Contemporary Schooling Practices
• References
• Index