Re: on C&C
Charles Bazerman (bazerman who-is-at humanitas.ucsb.edu)
Mon, 25 Dec 1995 11:02:03 -0800 (PST)
Some Bourdieu-esque thoughts on the cultures of the classroom.
For a classroom culture to be engaging to students, we might say
that the classroom needs to make available possible positions for the
students that allow them to deploy their predispositions (habitus) in
effective and powerful ways--another Bourdieu-eque way of saying that is
that the field of the classroom needs to
provide some homology with the prior experience or habitus of the student.
A Vygotskian extension would be that the forms of participation
in the classroom available for students in the various positions they
take up should provide rich zpds that allow for the kind of growth that
would appeal to students and be approved of and supported by the
educators stage-managing the class-room. This thought is
non-Bourdieu-esque because B jwould see the field of the classroom as
totally a field for agonistic struggle for the gain of power. If
however, if we give a broad enough reading of power to encompass
cooperative success and cognitive growth and increasing behavioral skill
(which B might admit as the amassing of cultural capital) and the
satisfaction of desires (the Deweyan point about the classroom being
life), then perhaps we might understand the class as a field of activity,
with its own values and cultures derived from the relation to the
surrounding fields and institutions as well as the habitus/resources ecah
of the partticipants brings into the field of the activity. (Chapter 1
or 3 in THE FIELD OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION might be useful on this, if you
don't get put off by the agonistic power orientation--in some ways B
seems to be a traditional structural conflict theory.)
Here I have given a very different spin to education than B
himself does, as in REPRODUCTION, largely because I have talked about the
classroom itself as a field of participation (a la Dewey) rather than
pointing out its subordinate role vis-a-vis other surrounding fields of
power. For an educational institution to maintain itself, however, as B
points out it must establish a successful border relationship with the
surrounding fields of participations, whether it involves a reversal or a
continuity of values across that border. What is most important is that
there exists some homology in the production from the field with the
needs, desires, values, produced elsewhere within other relevant fields.
That is, to put it bluntly, that the kids produced seem somehow fitted to
take up satisfactory positions (successful to themselves as well as
viewed as appropriate to those upon whose good wishes the schools are
dependent) once they move out of the schools into other fields of
participations. This means there needs to be some kind of homology
between the positions develop within the school culture (and the
extensions of their habitus) with the positions available to them after
schools (and the habitus that might provide them success in those
positions).
I think there are lots of limitations to this way of looking at
things, but it also does provide a different angle on some of the issues
of classroom culture that seem to derive from the temporary bonding of
strangers with diverse characteristics into a temporary cooperative
collective around educational activities. If the classroom is life, then
we probably ought to be looking at how students fulfill life-desires
within that field of the classroom--which is of course what several
ethnographies of teenage life, for example, have done.
Chuck