Bill writes:
"Somehow, Martin, it would seem as if Willis' work does not counter the
claims
by B&G. The bottom line -- that the working class 'lads' fail -- seems
consistent with what B&G claim are the experiences of success and failure
that
become the internalized seives through which classes separate from each
other.
That the boys actively participate -- themselves making the decision to
fail --
is perhaps one the details of the processes through which people enact and
constitute society."
Surely this begs the question 'whose definition of failure?'. In my first
year of teaching - long,long ago in a Glasgow housing project many years
before that city's economic renaissance - I went through a reframe which
saved my career. Those kids were mostly brilliant problem solvers. It is
just that the problems they were solving were not ones that schools, as
institutionalised manifestations of middle class British cultural values,
thought that they should be legitimately paying attention to. According to
their own objects they were (usually) not failures. Indeed, for them, being
seen to please me was one indicator of failure.
My observation was and is that it is the teachers who are able to validate
their students' contexts who become acceptable and relevant them, and are
then able to engage with them in helping to make visible the contradictions
of their own objects. (Not that I had the slightest idea that was what I was
doing at the time. My object was survival)
Phillip Capper
WEB Research
PO Box 2855
(Level 9, 142 Featherston Street)
Wellington
New Zealand
Ph: (64) 4 499 8140
Fx: (64) 4 499 8395
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 01 2001 - 01:01:33 PDT