Bourdieu, Education, and Me

I care about this class because I’ve seen what it can do to you. I’ve seen it change you. You have to decide if you want to be here. You won’t have experiences like this again. Not in this school. This class matters to me. Something cool and magical is gonna happen if you stay. Be grateful. I expect something of you. Rise up.

(Field notes: September 6, 2007)

Introduction

Ms. Gage, the teacher in the excerpt from my field notes above, spoke these words to her students during the third day of school. She was upset with the juniors and seniors in her documentary film production and analysis course because the discussion the day before had not gone as she had hoped. Frustrated with the group’s interactions with one another and the material, she sought to redirect them with what she referred to as a “talking to.” On multiple occasions, Ms. Gage explained to the class, as well as to the researchers, that she believed students were not learning how to think “deeply” in school and she felt a personal responsibility to challenge them to do so. Indeed, when Ms. Gage tells her students that they will not have an experience like this again, not at this school, she does not exaggerate. Interviews with administrators and students confirm that this documentary film class is a unique offering, one that the teacher has fought for, developed, and raised funds for through grants for nearly a decade. Ms. Gage has been able to keep the class again this year, and through the support of other teachers and university staff, she has developed it into a larger digital media program despite dropping enrollments and the threat of school closure last spring.

I begin with the words of Ms. Gage and a description of this particular situation because my goal in this paper is to use the theories of Pierre Bourdieu to better understand the context of this classroom and the social identities constructed therein. As a research assistant on this project which analyzes critical engagement in this high-poverty, urban high school English classroom, I could not help but think of Ms. Gage and her students as I read Swartz’s text on Bourdieu, and several questions frame my thinking as I begin making connections between my observations and his work. How are students’ identities shaped by their social conditions and in what ways do they resist or give in to those conditions? What strategies do they use in the practice of identity making and how does literacy learning inform those strategies? How does Ms. Gage define and redefine engagement for her students knowing they come from high-poverty social class backgrounds? Finally, how does all of this shape students’ visions for their futures and agency in their design of them?

These questions are big, I realize, and this paper will serve as only a starting point for thinking through them. Following Bourdieu’s advice, I will attempt to think about these questions on both the macro and micro levels without necessarily delving into transcripts of data or language analysis – although this will come later. What follows, then, is a view of the research context through the lens of a number of Bourdieu’s constructs: field, habitus, social reproduction, and change.

Field and Legitimacy

Bourdieu writes that power resides in the “belief in the legitimacy of the words and of him who utters them” (cited in Swartz, 1997, p. 88). On many levels, the school where we conduct this classroom ethnography is in what Bourdieu might call a crisis of legitimacy. School enrollments in this large metropolitan district have been dropping consistently over the past decade, and this particular school is no exception from the trend. According to a local newspaper, the drop in enrollment is due in part to a “school choice” program. This program allows parents the flexibility to choose the schools their children will attend regardless of proximity to home neighborhoods, but increasingly, it also means that middle-class families are choosing to send their children outside their home districts.

Many students who attend the high school do not live near it, and those who do, are often part of a lineage of relatives who have attended the school and seek to maintain tradition. The school is also a site for Somali and Latino English Language Learners (ELL) in the district, and 78% of the school’s students qualify for free and reduced lunch. As such, students tend to bus from various locations and the school struggles to maintain active after school programs – athletic, academic, and otherwise.

Bourdieu’s concept of field is an important one here because it offers a way to understand the ways in which economic and political interests are in play, despite the ways in which they are misrecognized by society. Instead of recognizing how schools are subject to dominant ideologies of open choice and freedom of the market, parents and the media might see “failing” schools instead as the result of offering the wrong “choices” for students – or a matter of what Bourdieu refers to as “taste.” The concept of field denotes social spaces of “production, circulation, and appropriation of goods, services, knowledge, or status, and the competitive positions held by actors” (Swartz, p. 117). As such, public education might be viewed as a field in struggle with other fields such as business as it fights to define itself outside the social constraints of market thinking, while, according to Bourdieu, it defines itself through that very struggle. When a school such as our research site fails to meet standards as determined by a dominant group, it also serves to legitimate that standard. Bourdieu points out that while standards are absolutely arbitrary, the consequences of failing to meet them are not (Swartz, 1997). For this school, failing to meet the arbitrary standard of a “sellable” school could mean failing to exist at all.

Field offers a way of thinking through resistance to domination as well. Perhaps most significant within Bourdieu’s notion of resistance is that struggle takes place “within the logic of reproduction” (Swartz, p. 121). In other words, because the struggle is a fight over legitimacy within the field, there is little social transformation. Thus, even as this school attempts to make itself legitimate, it can do so only in the eyes of a larger field of power which determines its legitimacy. Thus, the field never changes, only the potential position of actors within it. Fields impose on actors the rules of the game. In this case, the game to be played is that of being perceived as better than another school despite the social constraints of funding, bussing, attendance, and their link to poverty.

Habitus

Beyond the institutional context, influenced as it is by a struggle for legitimacy, I am interested as well in how that struggle informs identities at a group and individual level within the classroom – in both productive and restrictive ways. The excerpt that starts this paper offers one example. Due to a struggle for enrollments at district level, Ms. Gage must sell her class as a “magical” one that will “change” her students. At the same time, she expects “deep” thinking and prolonged effort from her students despite the movement out of her class that she witnesses weekly. An important aspect of this research, then, is whether her students take up or reject her challenge for them and the particular strategies they utilize to do so.

Applying Bourdieu’s notion of habitus offers an understanding of the impact of the institutional context as embodied in individuals. Bourdieu argues that cultural capital exists in three forms: embodied, objectified, and institutionalized. The first of these is the dispositions internalized by individuals while the second refers to objects that require particular abilities to use and the third to the educational credentialing system. Each of these influence individuals’ habitus, or the “deep structuring cultural matrix” (Swartz, p. 104) that mediates action. In other words, the struggles within fields of power at the school level inform the dispositions, beliefs, and perceived opportunities of its students. When other students see their classmates leaving the school and hear about how their school compares with others in the district (something many of them spoke about), they internalize structural disadvantages and come to believe that certain opportunities, such as a rigorous education and college, are “not for the likes of us” (Swartz, p. 106). They begin, as well, to view their hopes and chances in light of others’ expectations of them. Indeed, the individual who is socialized into such thinking is not in opposition to society, according to Bourdieu, but is “one of its forms of existence” (Swartz, p. 98). Society is reproduced with little energy exerted through the class habitus of individuals.

Change

Swartz makes clear that Bourdieu’s theories of capital, habitus, and field are better suited to understanding social reproduction than they are to understanding change, but that does not exclude the possibility for locating agency in the everyday practices of individuals. Agency, too, may be misrecognized. Bourdieu refers to actors as “strategic improvisers” who act upon opportunities within constraints. Habitus, according to Swartz, privileges action that is governed by a “practical sense” of how to move in a social world (p. 115). What is practical to do, say, or believe depends, then, on the best method for getting along in the world.

In a way, Ms. Gage attempts to bring students into what Bourdieu refers to as a situation of crisis which “disrupt[s] the immediate adjustment of habitus to field” (Swartz, p. 113). Only in such moments is a redistribution of capital possible. At the same time, he points out that not all moments are taken up because resignation to habitus is far easier than revolt – although certainly there are consequences for both. My interest, then, lies in identifying the moments where Ms. Gage attempts to open up a space for revolt for her students while realizing that structures continually constraint their possibilities. Given the nature of our conversations with Ms. Gage and her students, it is evident that they see fairly clearly the power relations that structure their lives and struggle to locate the resources to change them. How, then, do they begin to chip away at a habitus shaped by disadvantage?

One way in which Ms. Gage attempts to open up space for resistance and change is through production. As a documentary film making course, she engages her students in constant analysis of representations and definitions of their identities and social worlds, what Bourdieu refers to as the struggle over classification. Critical readings of the world around them encourage students to see their own lives differently and more importantly, to produce alternate visions of social worlds in their work. This engagement in the fight over symbolic representation is one way in which students begin to locate agency within structures – by recognizing and talking back to those structures. The strategies which they employ, even at a micro level, become what de Certeau (1984) calls the “everyday creativity” with which individuals subtly “rent” capital where they might otherwise not own it.

Conclusion

I have merely skimmed the surface of possibilities here for using Bourdieu to grapple with the data we have collected from our study. On a broad level, applying this theoretical framework seems to make obvious sense, but on a more micro level, writing through a few of my ideas also points to the nuances of Bourdieu’s work which may be valuable at the level of language and body as well. Perhaps most valuable for my future research is how readily Bourdieu applies to the orchestration of identities as socially constructed responses to surrounding structures. Despite the constraints, I view this still as what Holland and colleagues (1998) describe as an authoring of the self. In addition, as educators and researchers, we need to be less afraid of crisis in our work if it is truly where the potential for change resides. Bourdieu reminds us to return as well to the ways in which the struggle over identity is always tied to learning and status within educational systems. Thus, any production of self always bears political, social, and economic consequences.

References

de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life.

Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Swartz, D. (1997). Culture and power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.