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RE: [xmca] Gratier, Greenfield, & Isaac



Hi Yuan,
 
I'm not sure the degree to which print is actually cultural capital.  If it is cultural capital I would wonder how say the middle class uses it as a symbol of belonging to the middle class, a way in which to promote the exclusiveness of a social group.  I would think that print is too uncontrollable, too broad, and too generalized to serve as an important form of cultural capital.  Now I would agree that certain types of print serve as a form of cultural capital.  When I was growing up in New York the type of newspaper you carried was very much a symbol of class inclusion.  If you carried the New York Times it was a symbol of belonging to the middle class, corporatist world, and it was assumed you have a certain intellectual cache.  If you were carrying the Daily News this signaled a much more blue collar, lunch bucket type of belonging and you could trust this person as a "regular guy."  If you carried the New York Post (this was pre-Murdoch when the Post was a great paper), you were middle class but did not want to be labeled as either corporatist or as overly intellectual.  You did well, maybe white collar, but you could also belong in a neighborhood bar watching a big ballgame.  It was amazing the degree to which the newspaper you carried signaled your membership in the group.
 
What is interesting is that this was never really overtly stated.  Again,when I was growing up there were a number of teachers in middle or upper middle class schools which really promoted the New York Times.  You would walk around the hallways and see individuals carrying it, there were special deals.  But almost nobody I knew actually read the paper to any great degree.  Maybe if they had some extra time.  The idea though that it was a symbol though never crossed our mind.  We were being taught cultural capital).  A half a decade later I was teaching as a New York City high school that was anything but middle class.  No students carried around the New York Times.  As a matter of fact they didn't carry around any papers.  In the teachers room you could only find the Daily News or the New York Post.  Sometimes I would carry in the Times but after a while I stopped for some reason and switched to the Post (which I actually enjoyed more).  Again, I don't believe any of this could have been overtly taught.  I mean you might read in a 70s self help book how important it was that you carry the New York times because of the "aura" that might give you or something, but it wouldn't be the same I think.  You wouldn't carry it in the right way, you would be too self conscious about it, and you would probably give it up fairly soon.  
 
Michael

________________________________

From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of yuan lai
Sent: Thu 12/3/2009 6:00 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Gratier, Greenfield, & Isaac



Michael, I believe there are ways that mirror the "natural way" to teach
cultural capital overtly. I've seen 3- and 4-year-olds from families of
refugee status quickly appropriated the value placed on print, showing
interest in print, wanting to write their names, feeling proud of their own
attempts, not long after establishing a relationship with the preschool
teacher in various activities in a family literacy program, which embeds
print in almost all its classroom activities. For example, the teacher read
to the children while they were eating, pointed out print and signs in the
environment for them as they went out for recess, and wrote notes in front
of them to request materials needed for the classroom. The transformation of
the children's attention, interest, and desire is amazing given that the
children hardly understood English when they entered the program and their
parents seldom read to them or pointed out print around due to low reading
and writing ability in English and in their first language. I've since been
convinced of the importance of setting up a learning environment that has an
emphasis on relationship building.

Jay, until you revealed it, I didn't see it. I reread the section leading to
the hypotheses section and found that there is some reference to praise, but
not at all to criticism.

It appears that the same two classrooms (BC and non-BC) have been studied
from different angles and the findings seem to be consistent with Gratier et
al.'s framework. This article certainly extends their work. Terms such as
style and collectivism do connote essentialization; the authors' data
provide substantiation of the essentialzed norms and communication styles
(although what one sets out to do confines what one looks for) but I think
they could have gone a step further. The example of a father's feeling
uncomfortable when the teacher praised his child does not tell how he may
act or say to people in his in-group. There is also the assumption that home
socialization remains the same after immigration. Given the contrastive
framework in Gratier et al., I see little reasons not to include the
videotaping of the same groups of children (some of them, more likely)
interacting with their parents at home. Or is another paper forthcoming?

 Yuan


On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 4:46 AM, Michael Glassman <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu>wrote:

> Jay
> ,
> It seems to me a playing out - at least to some extent of Bourdieu's larger
> theory.  That increasing the cultural capital of the teacher in relation to
> the class would increase the level of social capital, which would lead to
> some of the findings they present.  A lack of cultural capital (usually
> assumed on the part of the students) would certainly lead to more
> difficulties in communication and the students feeling more uncomfortable in
> class.
>
> But this leads to a fairly radical assumption on the part of the authors
> concerning habitus, even in terms of Bourdieu's theory.  That is that
> cultural capital can be taught overtly, as cultural capital - Bourdieu seems
> to emphasize that we learn cultural capital more or less unconsciously,
> through everyday experience in the right situations (whether it is with
> parents or in a school system where the type of cultural capital that leads
> to easy social capital is pervasive).  I'm not so sure this is possible.
>
> I have another difficult which is that I read habitus as defining class
> distinctions rather than cultural distinctions, and that I'm not sure his
> ideas translate between the two, or make that much sense if they do.  The
> types of cultures like Latino/Latina cultures are going to have class
> distinctions defined by different habitas, defined most easily by different
> levels of economic capital, and different recogntions of symbolic capital
> (and symbolic violence),  To say a population so large has a single type of
> habitus I think is problematic - especially when using a terms such as
> collectivist, which is both categorical and far too broad I think to be
> really salient in describing classes, let alone entire cultures (I think
> level and type of social capital might be more appropriate if you are going
> to use Bourdeiu's theory as a starting point).
>
> Michael
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Jay Lemke
> Sent: Thu 12/3/2009 12:16 AM
> To: XMCA Forum
> Subject: [xmca] Gratier, Greenfield, & Isaac
>
>
>
>
> I don't know how many people have yet had a chance to look at the MCA
> article-of-the-month (Gratier, Greenfield, & Isaac on communicative
> habitus and attunement in classrooms).
>
> I must have missed something, so could someone explain to me how they
> derive the hypothesis that the more culturally attuned classroom will
> have more criticism (by the teacher? or by everyone?) and less praise,
> than the mismatched classroom?
>
> And what do you think generally about the methodology in this work?
>
> JAY.
>
>
>
> Jay Lemke
> Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
> Educational Studies
> University of Michigan
> Ann Arbor, MI 48109
> www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/~jaylemke> >
>
> Visiting Scholar
> Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
> University of California -- San Diego
> La Jolla, CA
> USA 92093
>
>
>
>
>
>
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