Foucault, Education, and Me: Accountability, Assessment, and Authorship

Foucault, Education and Me: Accountability, Assessment, and Authorship... a paper presented in C&I 8150 by Ann Moeller to Professor Thom Swiss,  November, 2008...

In Who's Afraid of Postmodernism, Smith says (about Discipline and Punishment,)  that Foucault traces the historical development of penal theory from torture to punishment to discipline...and shows that "if anything, the later developments are more brutal.  The story of change in punishment is not a narrative of progress, let alone a story of the triumph of the humane, but rather the substitution of one form of domination for another" (89).  According to Foucault's analysis, Smith claims, the changes in the penal system "were not motivated by a desire to be more humane...but rather were a means of dealing with political...problems that attended the public display of torture....What began to happen was the opposite of what was intended:  instead of enforcing new allegiance to the king, the spectacles of torture tended to make the people identify with the criminal.  So punishment gradually became less violent and more secret" (89-90).  From here, Foucault proposes that what occurred was the formation of what he called a "disciplinary society,"  the goal of which is the "formation of individuals by mechanisms of power.   Society makes individuals in its own image, and the tools for such manufacturing are the disciplines of power" (90).  The first of three ideas I want to explore is the application of Foucault's theories of power and discipline as they connect to testing and accountability.  

Accountability

  First, I want to explore some ideas about how teacher/school accountability seems to tie into  Foucault's ideas about "normalizing judgment."  Gunzenhauser (2005) explores Foucault's theories "to analyze the ways in which the high-stakes accountability movement has appropriated the technology of the examination to redefine the educated subject as a normalized case....I contend, high-stakes accountability has so dominated discourse and practices in public education that dialogue about the purpose and value of education has been circumscribed to dangerously narrow proportions" (242).   He refers to Foucault's comments in D&P that, "... educators are encouraged to remake the individual as a set of attributes, each assessed by its deviation from the normal," and Gunzanhauser writes,  "In the context of high-stakes accountability, the examination has a particularly effective role to play to foreclose dialogue about student learning.  School are encouraged to talk about scores rather than students, scores rather than learning" (249).  

       Gunzenhauser goes on, "As Foucault articulates, the examination is one of the most powerful tools of normalization.  For Foucault, normalization is one of the effect of an expanded disciplinary apparatus found manifest in public schools....Foucault explains [that] the history of the school is a history of the exercise of power over children.  Public schooling developed partly as a way to discipline wayward youth, to get them off the streets and make them useful.  Over time, public schooling has continued in its role of creating and reinforcing the bounds of what it means to be normal and sorting students according to the relation of the normal" (249)

         

       In Discipline and Punishment Foucault says:  "The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgement.  It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish.  It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them.  That is why, in all the mechanisms of discipline, the examination is highly ritualized.  In it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth.  At the heart of the procedures of discipline, it manifests the subjection of those who are perceived as objects and the objectification of those who are subjected" (184-85).   It is here, although I am still struggling with this, it seems that the paradox lurks. The examiner is seeking a record of accountability, but in so doing, is turning the object into a "case."  Gunzenhauser points out that examinations have the effect of "categorizing students and making work more efficient," (250) .... allowing us to "study students as individual cases" (251).   But Gunzenhauser concludes, at least in part, that the measurements (the examination itself) "...becomes powerful not because of an epistemological basis, but because of the way in which it is used (by how power is exercised through its use)" (251).  And this is the point: testing is supposed to be one measure - one measure that does not take up all the time, does not erase the ability of child and teacher to question and explore outside the "measures" that will define who is accountable.

         Add to this the voice of Levitt (2008) who asks, "...is it possible to hinder education by considering it only a transmission of knowledge and evaluating all students based on a single standardized test.  This leads us to the often asked question:  "Is the purpose of school to encourage learning and creativity" (49).   She goes on, "Foucault perceived power as the effect of attempting to act in the world, to use discourse, and to express thoughts....Foucault prompted inquiry, dialogue, and debate to clarify ideas or regimes of truth....Foucault asks one to engage in analysis, reflection, and change - applied not only to others, but to oneself, as well" (48). 

        The child, Gunzenhauser demands, needs to become educated, not constantly measured so that records of accountability take over the purpose.  "Measuring becomes the project of the schools," (251) he says, and  "With the advent of high-stakes accountability the role of the examination has never been more powerful....Seen this way,  NCLB [for example] is not so much the perfection of disciplinary surveillance but a more transparent technology of control" (251-52).  Overuse;  misguided use.  

Assessment

       Labeling the second idea I want to explore  - assess "ability"  -  could appear redundant, since I just finished talking about accountability and testing.  It is not.  Because I am particularly interested in studying the assessment of writing, I went in search of a way to try to look at applying some of Foucault's theory to the concept of writing assessment.  One of the things I found was quite surprising, but worthy of entry here under the category of "assessing literacy and learning."  In an article entitled, Happy to Comply":  Writing Assessment, Fast-Capitalism, and the Cultural Logic of Control,"  Tony Scott discusses his study of the two high schools in Kentucky.  The State of Kentucky (since 1991) has been using a large-scale writing assessment, and Scott decided to see what he could find out about how this testing affects writing pedagogy and composition processes.  Scott concludes that the assessment "makes learning writing synonymous with learning bureaucracy...." teaching and students' development as writers is subsumed by an explicitly bureaucratic framework that carries it own philosophy of literacy and learning, prescribes the form and content of the texts that students produce, and decrees the standards by which they will be evaluated" (141).  Scott ties in Foucault's theory when he argues that the " 'all assessment all of the time' approach to writing education identified in the study reflects a more general trend in assessment from a logic of discipline to a logic of control. [Similar to Gunzenhauser's conclusions above...]  The assessment erodes barriers between broad organizational procedures and goals and day-to-day classroom activities and subsumes teachers' and students' creative labors under a bureaucratic framework.  The result is highly rationalized literate activity that is explicitly employed toward the ends of a bureaucracy" (141).    Why does this fascinate me so?  Read on.

       I don't want to belabor this too much, but I want to try to explain Tony Scott's study in a way that makes sense on a couple of levels.  So, first let me summarize why I found myself unable to turn away from the pages of this study.  The "power" of the assessment was turned inside out.  The students in the studied classrooms were told exactly what to do and how to do it.  They studied the rubrics and samples of already evaluated work as they diligently prepared their writing portfolios.  In twenty pages, Scott describes the on-going procedures in two classrooms.  The activities included very proscriptive lessons.  Here is the genre.  Here is the audience, the purpose, the plan.  Here are the scoring levels - novice, apprentice, proficient, and distinguished - and the six scoring criteria which will be used.  In one of the classrooms, the students receive a copy of a student sample from the State's "benchmark portfolio" which is distributed to the teachers.  (The teachers receive these samples to help them learn how to score the passages.  They participate in calibration sessions, and when they consistently demonstrate their ability to match the state's score, they are ready to take over the task of scoring the students' work at their own schools.)  

   

       Scott watched as the students, in their classrooms, took sample portfolio items (from the State's samples, as mentioned above) and, guided by their teachers, discussed every aspect of the items - evaluating whether the sample fulfilled the required purpose,  addressed the audience, demonstrated appropriate persuasiveness,  represented good vocabulary choices, and so on.  The goal in this class was, Scott writes, "...to facilitate the students' internalization of the scoring criteria and refresh their understanding of one of the required modes....Throughout the school year...virtually every aspect of students' writing was in some way subsumed by the state-wide assessment and system of accountability.  Students learned the nuances of the five required genres through explicit definitions and other materials--such as outlines, checklists, and examples-- distributed by the district and state.  Students drafted and redrafted the five required pieces, and revision decisions were based on students' and teachers' applications of the scoring criteria....The minimum goal in both classes was the minimum goal for the state assessment more generally --a proficiency rating.  At the end of the year on a date that was identified by the state department of education, students handed their portfolios in to their teachers....Every school's accountability scores are made public.....English teachers are evaluated, in part, according to how well their students are scoring on their portfolios [Gunzenhauser again...] From a purely bureaucratic perspective, the Kentucky portfolio system has been thoroughly effective....However, the drawbacks of such a thorough subsumption of teaching and student labor under the umbrella of a bureaucratic system were ...evident....students' sense of agency over the writing they produced was significantly affected, as was their conception of literate activity more generally. The assessment method itself is a powerful means of enacting systematic control and conditioning students to organizational work in fast capitalism. A significant amount of intellectual freedom is sacrificed to bureaucratic imperatives" (146-49). Foucault?  Yes, I do believe so.

    

       Scott goes on to trace the history of writing assessment;  he addresses the advantages of portfolio writing over timed writing assessments - specific audiences and purposes, more control over the content, revision, feedback.  But, he concludes:  "...the Kentucky system shows that when they [portfolios] have become mandatory in writing programs, writing portfolio assessments can actually be a means for test designers and administrators to exert more control over the work of teachers and students.  Changing the means of testing does not necessarily undermine the organizational logic and goals of testing.  The Kentucky system is an example of how the movement from 'objective' assessment to an assessment that is more a part of the everyday work of classes might even be read as a movement from a logic of discipline to a logic of control.  Testing has certainly long been used and recognized as a means of 'discipline' in the Foucauldian sense of the term" (150).

      So, where am I going with this?  Well, on a simple level,  assessment and control.  No matter how we assess, we can mess it up.  Portfolios offer some advantages which timed essay writing can't achieve - having a real audience, having some control over content instead of writing to a one-and-only-prompt, revising, getting feedback.  Since writing is (isn't it?) an almost indisputable method of learning, it is obvious to see (isnt' it?)  that no matter how hard we try to come up with a way to evaluate student writing, we can mess it up.  When do we let it (the writing) really be authentic? How do we encourage the real voice inside the (student) writer without exercising unbearable control over what is said and how it is said?  Whether they are trying to prepare themselves to gain access to the university (or are already "in" the university) we tell them they need to find their own authentic voice, while at the same time "controlling" that voice to ensure that it is in sync with the normalized and formalized.  (I think we got into this a bit one evening in class a couple of weeks ago, and I'll end this part with it in the paragraph after next.)

       But, on a more complex level, before he wraps up some of his concerns about the Kentucky writing assessment system (I'm coming to that)  Scott goes on to talk about some of the cultural studies scholars - Hardt, Negri, and Lazzarato - who have taken Foucault's concept of "the society of control," and "more fully differentiated it from discipline than does Foucault himself" (152).   Scott discusses the "society of discipline" as characteristic of the industrial society, and the "society of control" as a "fast capitalist phenomena" (152,) and he gets into some intriguing ideas about how society exercises control over workers by fostering attitudes which help them feel "creatively and emotionally invested in the success of their companies" (152).  I found this excellently intriguing, and I wanted to mention it at least.  I hope to go back to it in my own studies, but Scott strays quite far from the Kentucky writing assessment in this part of the article, and I need to go back to his conclusions.

         The logic that drives the Kentucky writing assessment, Scott claims, is "a logic of control - a 'perpetual circuitry of social production' " ....The beliefs and assumptions that inform the assessment procedures are myths...widely shared in the culture.... During assessment years, the demands of the system are too great to leave room for much exploration of different genres or to explore how writing might be evaluated in different ways. Students are encouraged to produce certain texts according to institutional guidelines without being encouraged to ask why or to pursue topics and genres that aren't required or valued by the assessment.  Personal success is subsumed by the goals of the bureaucracy, as favorable scores are sought by students, teachers, and the organization itself....Teachers coach students to produce texts according to what 'they' want, but who exactly 'they' are remains murky" (155).  Apparently, the Kentucky writing assessment system has been controversial and much-discussed, but this is my first look at it.  Tony Scott's study drew me - through his use of Foucault and others - into a new way of "gazing," I think.   My current view is from a setting in which we have some control over the decisions about whether to test or not to test, and the debate doesn't get easier because of this - in fact, I think it gets more complicated.  Reading Scott's study gave me a new way of looking at (and discussing) how the pervasive testing in American public education "...is uncritically accepted as a means of raising standards and evaluating the effectiveness of teachers and schools....the curriculum is shaped to conform to the measurements....education ...becomes a means of generating highly prescribed outcomes, and students become the agents who produce those outcomes" (158).  Poorly thought-out, poorly managed, and poorly understood control!

       Authorship

          For the third and final idea in this Foucault exploration, I actually had chosen a couple of other articles I wanted to incorporate into my discussion, but I am feeling now that I need to rein this in.  Foucault's commentary on authorship, which I talked about in my Foucault notes in an earlier posting, simultaneously pleased and frustrated me.  At times I thought I "got," what he was saying, and at times I wanted to scream,  "Why would you, an author, say this about authorship and ideas and ownership?"

   

         But, now I want to come to the final part of my Foucault paper by addressing some of his ideas about practices (care) of the self - particularly his idea of "self-sponsored writing."   I thought I could tie some of Foucault's ideas about sexuality and gender into this as well, but I fear that in the interest of time, I need to try to go back and do some of the sexuality and gender commentary in a posting of "notes" on the blog, instead of in this paper.

          Mark Faust, a professor of English education at Athens, Georgia, turns to Foucault to make a connection between his idea of self-writing and what successful educators say about their lives beyond the classroom.  In an article from the International Journal of Leadership in Education, (1998,) entitled "Foucault on Care of the Self:  Connecting Writing with Life-long Learning,"  Faust makes this point:  "Even a brief summary of Foucault's work in this area (the care of the self) is suggestive of the overall relevance of his findings for educational leaders....the attention Foucault gives to writing provides an interesting framework for understanding the appeal of organizations like the National Writing Project, and practices like the creation of teacher stories, narratives and portfolios" (182).  From personal experience with the Minnesota Writing Project (and because of the link which the director of the MWP makes for those of us who teach the College-in-the-Schools Composition, Literature, and Speech courses through the U of MN,) I  was pleasantly surprised to find (and eager to see) what Faust had to say about Foucault's ideas on self-sponsored writing.

       At the time of his death, Foucault was writing his work on the history of sexuality, and in the process he discovered some Graeco-Roman literature - composed in the first and second centuries AD - which describe practices "which permit individuals to [sic] effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality."   Faust goes on to say that Foucault refers to these practices (such as meditation, exercise, counseling, conversation, philosophical speculation, reading, writing, and so on,) as 'technologies of the self '(182).  

       Foucault goes on to identify, Faust says, three categories of "practices of the self."  Foucault called the risk-taking practices 'testing procedures,'  the method of goal-setting as 'self-examination,' and the critical-thinking, [Foucault's]  ' labour of thought with itself as object,'  - the purpose of which is to 'cultivate self-awareness and a discriminating mind' (184).    Faust reminds the reader that in the last of Foucault's works to be published, he directly links writing to taking care of the self, honoring it and describing "the real product of writing" as the "ongoing sense of self."  And, Faust goes on to mention the work of literary critic Lee Quinby, who, in referencing the works of Thoreau, Agee, Kingston and others, says that they "appear to use writing as an 'askesis' or 'progressive consideration of self, which is a process of acquiring and assimilating truth as a function of self-creation' (186).  

          I do not need to be convinced of the value of this theory, nor of its truth;  the MWP philosophy leaves no doubt because it operates on the "try it, you'll buy it" theory.  It would not be possible to over-estimate, in my opinion, the value of  nurturing self-writing in the lives of teachers.  It cannot help but make us better teachers.  //  I think that Faust overrides the wide variety of teacher self-writing, and jumps to a category of writing called "teacher narrative." And, although I like to look at this task more broadly, I can go there - to the teacher narratives.  I believe he is supporting the idea that as teachers self-write, they create the stories of the classroom, of how students understand, of how students strive, of what they intend, of the ways that social processes enhance or inhibit progress, of how personal identities - both of teacher and student - impact everything.  And although I "get" the resistance that exists regarding the use of teacher narratives as a "source of research data....from those who fear an erosion of quantitative precision and scientific rigour,"  who among us would not rise to defend the priceless knowledge which teachers hold and can tell in their stories?  Those who do this understand Faust's claim that we teachers should be invited to create portfolios of our own, invited to step back and re-examine our teaching in light of our goals as learners (190).  He talks about the 50% of new teachers who leave after five years and the 80% who leave after ten (191,) and then he humbly adds that he is not so naive as to think that writing the self will turn this statistic around.  Instead, he offers the possibility that self-sponsored writing can improve the quality of life for teachers - can be a valuable staff development tool.  This application of a theory from Foucault is ultimately appealing - I have seen it at work in self and colleagues.  

           To maintain the energy and enthusiasm for the work of the classroom Faust knows that "...writing curriculum involves envisioning possibilities; it means imagining what students might be experiencing while being a student oneself"  (188).  It means, Faust goes on to cite Gordon Wells, "(fostering) a continuing dialogue, in which the students are equal partners with their teacher in the co-construction of knowledge and understanding" (188).  We bring more of our best to the classroom when we "write ourselves."

        Finally, Faust offers this:  Foucault reinterpreted a "way of writing that was widely practised at the time - Graeco-Roman - despite having been soundly criticized by Plato" (188). It was a practice centered on the creation of 'hypomnenata,' which literally means copybooks or notebooks. Plato's attempt "to discredit writing as a legitimate way of establishing truth failed to limit the growth of what was then a 'new technology' (189). Foucault argues that others have overlooked "the profound significance of  'the hypomnemata'  as expressions of  'the idea of a self which had to  be created as a work of art' " (189).  As teachers of composition struggle with the painful joy of trying to help students "speak" their messages in clearly written, authentic, willing voices, (during writing assessments and beyond those assessments) who among us wouldn't enjoy "owning" this application of another of Foucault's theories.

     

Works Cited

Faust, Mark A.  "Foucault on Care of the Self:  Connecting Writing with Life-long Learning," International Journal of Education, 1998, 1:2, 181-193.

Foucault, Michel.  Discipline and Punishment.  trans., A. Sheridan.  New York:  Vintage Books, 1977/1995.

Gunzenhauser, Michael G.  "Normalizing the Educated Subject:  A Foucaultian Analysis  of  High-Stakes Accountability,"  Educational Studies, 2008.

Levitt, Roberta.  "Freedom and Empowerment:  A Transformative Pedagogy of Educationa l Reform," Educational Studies, July-August, 2008, 44:1, 47-59.

Smith, James K. A.  Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?  Grand Rapids, Michigan:  Baker Academic, 2006.

Scott, Tony.  "Happy to Comply":  Writing Assessment, Fast-Capitalism, and the Cultural Logic of Control,"  The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 30: 140-161, 2008.

Bourdieu, Education, and Me: Language, Power, and the Bully

Paper submitted to Professor Thom Swiss by Ann Moeller, October 15, 2008, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for C&I 8150...

In Culture and Power, David Swartz talks about how cultural capital affects educational attainment, and one of the comments Swartz makes is that, "Bourdieu finds it useful to think of culture - especially in the form of educational credentials - as a kind of capital .... His concept of cultural cpital covers a wide variety of resources, including verbal facility, general cultural awareness, information about the school system, and educational credentials (198).  Swartz goes on to comment that Bourdieu believed (saw, observed) that parents pass on their cultural heritage to their children, and that most higher educational degrees in France are held by children whose parents are professionals.  By examining some of what formed Bourdieu's own educational unbringing,  unpacking some theories about how parents interact verbally with teachers and inform themselves about educational opportunities for their children, and by exploring some of the ideas which Bourdieu offers about the power of language, I have been prompted to process some of my own observations.  I do not believe I have seriously put this question to myself in the past:  In the world of positioning for power, do (how do) teachers bully parents?

     I went in search of information about Bourdieu's own early education.  According to Michael Grenfell in Pierre Bourdieu:  Agent Provocateur, Bourdieu's father was an "itinerant scarecropper turned postman," who never complete his eduction and wanted his son to have more (8).  Since his mother had been schooled through the age of sixteen, she "understood the need to leave (rural) isolation behind in ordet 'to get on' " (8).  So, between the ages of 11 and 16, Pierre was a school boarder in the lycee where he literally endured a world "centered around a gigantic seventeenth century building:  long corridors, white walls, and cold dormitories" (9).  He endured the cold, picked fights, and could not get his parents to understand the troubles that existed between ('us and them') the teachers and the boarders - the way the teachers treated the students, the way the students informed on each other (9-10).  Some of his ideas about space, cultural capital, power, and domination must have had their roots in his own earliest brush with school society.  In an interview, he reportedly quoted Flaubert's remarks that "anyone who has not known boarding school by the age of ten knows nothing about society" (9).  While boarding was a trial, the activity in the classroom offered the opportunity for intellectual discoveries, and Bourdieu embraced that opportunity.  Bourdieu climbed "from marginal cultural and social origins to the apex of the French intellectual pyramid, the College de France" (16).  Bourdieu is a product of the Ecole Normale Superieure, (ENS,) which Swartz refers to as "France's highest expression of the academic meritocracy" (17) and Swartz goes on to add the names of Foucault and Derrida as two more examples of "outsiders to the Parisian intellectual heirs" (18).  But it does not seem particularly surprising to learn that Bourdieu perceives hiself as an outsider to the academic establishment and that he holds a "sharply criticl attitude" toward the institution which helped him rise (18).  In fact, Swartz notes that one of Bourdieu's ENS peers felt he had a deep desire for revenge against the "Parisian intellectual world that dominated the Ecole" (18) and points out that in The Inheritors, Bourdieu presents his ideas that French university culture is "hostile toward the popular classes" (18).  Bourdieu's pre-teen years seem to offer some insight into the root of his ideas about society, culture, language, power, and control.

     I began reflecting on the Bourdieu experience (including not being able to get his parents to intervene for him) and which "teacher comments" (made to my own parents) had most motivated me during my first thirteen years of experience in the educational system. My thoughts led me to ask myself, "How do teachers perceive parents' expectations of their children, how do teachers perceive parents' right-to-know, and how do teachers position themselves when engaged in verbal exchange with parents.  I found myself thinking about how I answer those questions, in relation to my own students, when my Bourdieu reading led me to a 1995 research study by Diane Reay entitled "Making Contact with Teachers:  Habitus, Cultural Capital and Mothers' Involvement in their Children's Primary Schooling."  In this article, Reay relays her ethnographic study of parents' involvement in two different primary schools in London.

       Reay's study explores how differences in race, ethnicity, social class, and marital status affected the way mothers had verbal contact with the teachers of their children (272).  Reay's study purposefully applies Bourdieu's theories, and she writes: "For Bourdieu there are no verbal interactions that are not embedded in relations of domination. Rather, every linguistic interaction is the conjuncture of, on the one side, a linguistic habitus and on the other a linguistic exchange," their social competence their right to speak - and that includes their sex, their age, their religion, and their economic and social status" (271).  Reay's study goes on to share that the mothers who were part of the study identified "approachable teachers," but often say the outcome as unsatisfactory - just people "talking past each other" (274).  Mothers who were working class often came away from a parent-teacher conversation with less than they were seeking, mothers found that they felt better listened to when fathers were present during the parent-teaher conersation and mothers often felt that "real" issues which they wanted addressed, (such as curriculum which positively addressed issues around Black self-identity,) were not taken seriously by the teachers in the conversations.  Instead the parents were "fobbed off" told that their sons and daughters would catch up, learn the material and leave the school prepared (277).  Reay's conclusions suggest that the working-class mothers "brought to the educational field a hbaitus often shaped by educational failure" (278). They were not necessarily able to articulate to the teachers their concerns.  Instead they were hesitant, questioning their own ideas and unable to articulate their criticism of the teaching practices to the teachers during a conference session.  They often left feeling they were not being listened to (279-80). Bourdieu's theory about how we use our language to position ourselves in avenues of power over others has brought me to question the ways that school personnel talk to parents.  Do we, (do I) I wonder, speak differently to parents based upon arbitrary assumptions?

       If a parent questions curriculum or pedagogy, does a teacher form his response based upon how he judges that parent's ability to out-maneuver him?  Do teachers listen to (and speak to) professional parents differently from how they listen to parents who are blue-collar workers?  Do teachers assume that some parents need to be given thorough explanations of and justification for what is being taught and how it is being taught, while other parents can be given cursory explanations?  And how does the conversation change if parent and teacher are the same gender?  Different genders?  What if a parent's concerns have to do with equal opportunity in the classroom - whether an issue of ethnicity or class or gender?  Even if teachers think they are listening, do they really take the questions seriously?  And later, do they thoroughly re-examine their own behaviors/decisions/practices in the classroom?

 

     My questions come now, as I reflect upon the various educational settings in which I have taught.  Until my current position in a privage school in southern Minnesota, my teaching had been done on the campus of a pulic university and in public high schools.  I look at the population of parents who send their children to the high school where I currently teach, and I wonder about the way in which "powerful" parents position themselves with respect to school personnel;  fortunately, I have also begun to wonder about the way that teachers and administrators position themselves when involved in dialogue with parents.  Having thought about Bourdieu's ideas on capital and language and power, I wonder, now, how many parents would say - as parents in Reay's study do - that they feel their concerns are well-listened to by my colleagues and by me in my current setting.  Bourdieu's ideas about power have me questioning the way I am perceived when being asked to answer parents' questions about curriculum and pedagogy.  What do parents ask about?  The amount of homework?  The number of minutes of child receives one-to-one help?  Do male students receive extra attention in the question-and-answer sessions?  Does the curriculum address feminist issues, cover authors of color, attend to the needs of students who are visual learners?  How is feedback given to the students?  Reading Bourdieu's theory about language control makes me reflect upon questions I am not certain I have examined fully enough in the past.  Which parents' questions do I strive mightily to answer?  Which parents' concerns to I internally brush off, telling myself that nothing more can be done?  Do certain parents intimidate me?  Why?  Are the intimidations - going both ways - addressed fully to the benefit of the children - or not?

     Beyond the arena of direct parent-teacher conversations, I often do find myself wondering about attempts which schools make (or do not make) to be sure that parents are involved fully and equipped with "information power."  Who schedules students into classes, and how are those decisions made?  Are parents fully and equally notified about opportunities which the school offers (or which the community depends on the school to publicize and promote?)  Are opportunities fully explained and offered in a "non-political" manner?

     Finally, as I continued to read some more about the history of education and the evolution of educational practices, I began to reflect upon my own educational history as student and teacher and parent.  I find myself unable to resist the comparison of public and private settings, formal institutional education versus home-schooling.  Even as I did some reading about education in the Medieval Period, and was reminded about how private schools evolved for affluent, masculine patrons, my mind began to wander toward the evolution of the church-school and the "mission" for which school are created.  Positioning and power in the conversation between school personnel and parents takes on new and more complicated layers when the teacher is also an authority figure in realms that go outside of the content classroom.

        Finally, I began mentally reviewing all the literature film, and story which depicts traumatic confrontations between parents and educators. Bringing Bourdieu into that mental review draws me to ponder again how his theories on power and language impact my choices. How do I listen and position myself in visits with parents over issues of curriculum and pedagogy?  My Bourdieu explorations go off onto many tangents, but this one - the question of now teacher communicate verbally with parents - has me questioning all the ways in which "fair-minded" educators can misuse power.  Are we really listening to parents or are we definding our space?  I was challenged by Reay's study, and her use of Bourdieu's ideas, to recall the importance of asking often and thoroughly how I position myself when communicating with parents.  

Works Cited

Grenfell, Michael.  Pierre Bourdieu:  Agent Provocateur.  London:  Continuum Press, 2004.

Reay, Diane. "Making Contact with Teachers:  Habitus, Cultural Capital and Mothers' Involvement in Their Children's Primary Schooling."  Michael Grenfell and Michael Kelly,  eds.  Pierre Bourdieu:  Language, Culture and Education:  Theory into Practice.  Berne: Peter-Lang AG, Eruopean Academic Publishers, 1999.

Swartz, David.  Culture and Power:  The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.  Chicago:  The Uiversity of Chicago Press, 1997.

Foucault: October notes

Wishing to search out some information which could help me understand what formed Foucault's background and what drove his work, I went in search of his personal story, finding Gary Gutting's proposal that any of several "versions" could identify him.  He might be proclaimed ,"the son of a prominent family, a brilliant student whose writings on crime and sex made him a major figure in every humanistic and social scientific discipline," ....  a brilliant but emotionally son of an authoritarian physician, (who) hated French society, and despite intellectual success spent his life seeking extreme sensations (limit-experiences, as he called them,).... a fiercely independent person, committed from the beginning to his own and others' freedom, a hero of the anti-psychiatry movement, of prison reform, of gay liberation" (Gutting, Foucault:  A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2005).  What I found revealing about this "exercise" that Gutting performed in the "Short Introduction" is that he concludes his remarks about the many things that Foucault might have been by saying this:  "None of these stories is false, but their mutual truth keeps us from forming any definitive picture of Foucault's life, which is just what he wanted" (4).  Gutting goes on to suggest that Foucault's "interest in and sympathy for those excluded by mainstream standards" may help to explain his comment shortly before his death - "The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning" (6).   //  While it seemed that he might have decided to write to "escape from any fixed identity, to continually become someone else," (10) it was in so doing (becoming a writer) that he "achieved quite a distinctive identity" (10)  //  In his essay,  "What Is an Author?"  (reprinted in Rethinking Popular Culture, Mukerji and Schudson, eds.) Foucault seems (to me) almost to play with the concept... arguing that if the one whose name appears on a text turns out to be someone else - what does it matter?  Or, if we were to find that someone else wrote both the work of Bacon and Shakespeare - what does it matter? (451).  It seems in this essay that he is proposing the theory that the question "who is the author" does not really matter.  He writes, "We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author.  Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity" (462).  //  Maybe this is part of the enigma that is the person of Foucault - a desire to be known - a desire not to be identified.   //  In The Archaelogy of Knowledge, Foucault admonished his would-be critics in this way:  "Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.  Leave it to our bureaucrats and police to see that our papers are in order" (240, cited by David Ingram in Chapter Nine, "Foucault and Habermas"  of  The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, second edition, Gutting, ed., Cambridge Press, 2005).

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In my initial reading of Discipline and  Punish,  I was intrigued by his concept of 'space.'  As I read his thoughts on surveillance, I thought about the architectural concepts (in schools and in other institutions) where "central viewing" can take place.  Watching.

His comments about viewing of punishment as an entertainment reminded me of the many works of literature which deal with this topic...Scarlet Letter, The Lottery, numerous French and British works... the scaffold rituals, the public viewing of chain gangs, public torture and execution.  And these scenes and reminders caused me to reminisce about the way the educational institutions have used discipline as "entertainment."   //  Foucault's comments about the history of punishment (how torture of the body gives way to torture of the soul/heart/mind) gave me a great deal to think about in the evolution of discipline in the school setting.   I am dissatisfied with modern methods of discipline in high schools today, but I don't think those remarks have much (if anything) to do with Foucault!

Foucault's comments about "vagabondage" (how the criminals who live in society without being part of it are the worst criminals ... and need to be hunted out by the rest of society) did remind me of Bauman's concept of the vagabond and the tourist, but I am not sure how far that comparison can extend.   I hope we discuss that.  Foucault's words did, however, require me to think about how the "culprits" in the classroom are handled.  //  I think that we all too often forget how many people leave "school" with uncomfortable memories of power misused.  

How do we punish and rid outselves of the "non-conformists"?  Do we abandon them to special programs or alternative schools?

Do we ask members of the "school society" to shun and condemn the enemy, the ones who disrupt?  How do we abuse power?  How do we rehabilitate?

In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, (second edition, Gutting, ed., Cambridge Press, 2005,) Joseph Rouse writes in Chapter Four, "Power/Knowledge,"  Surveillance was often built into the physical structures of institutions that were organized to enhance visibility within them;  here especially there was a new architecture of power....Surveillance was also manifest in the creation or extension of rituals, such as the proliferating practices of examination:  scholastic tests but also medical or psychiatric examinations and histories, eployment interviews, prison musters, and military reviews....These practices of surveillance, elicitation, and documentation constrain behavior precisely by making it more thoroughly knowable or known.  But these new forms of knowledge also presuppose new kinds of constraint, which make people's actions visible and constrain them to speak.  It is in this sense primarily that Foucault spoke of 'power/knowledge.' A more extensive and finer-grained knowledge enables a more continuous and pervasive control of what people do, which in turn offers further possibilities for more intrusive inquiry and disclosure.  Foucault saw these techniques of power and knowledge as undergoing a two-stage development.  They were instituted initially as means of control or neutralization of dangerous social elements and evolved into techniques for enhancing the utility and productivity of those subjected to them.  They were initially cultivated within isoloated institutions (most notably prisons, ospitals, army camps, schools, and factories)" (99-100). 

Finally, for now, I will note that I was happy to come across the July-August 2008 issue of Educational Studies, (which I shared with others in the class one evening.)  This edition is devoted to "Interdisciplinary approaches to Educational Reform within a Foucaultian Framework."  I hope to possibly find an article or two which will spark some ideas for a paper!

Popular Culture notes: October

When I went in search of how to define "popular culture,"  I found some ideas I could latch onto, but I also found that the definition seems much more broad than I had suspected.

In the introduction to Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, (ed. Mukerji and Schudson, 1991, Berkeley)  the editors state:  "In this period of rethinking, 'popular culture' is a difficult term to define.  We will sidestep a great many terminological disputes with the inclusive claim that popular culture refers to the beliefs and practices, and the objects through which they are organized, that are widely shared among a population. This includes folk beliefs, practices and objects rooted in local traditions, and mass beliefs, practices and objects generated in political and commercial centers.  It includes elite cultural forms that have been popularized as well as popular forms that have been elevated to the museum tradition.  In this way, we capture some of the subtleties of new cultural theories and can help convey the array of studies that have made traditional conceptions of popular culture untenable" (3).    While the editors go on to explain that "studies of popular culture today are creating a truly intercisciplinary literature" (and this was published 17 years ago) the editors suggest that "no single discipline has or will ever have a monopoly on the study of popular culture;  no discipline represents the 'best approach.'  Each sees a different part of the elephant" (4).  What caught my eye in this text's introduction was the editors' query as to how one determines what "qualifies."   They offer this... "our questions are not about what human phenomena merit study but about the theoretical sophistiation of the approach to their study.  Some may ask if baseball cards are as valuable for study as The Scarlet Letter....which students are to be judged more culturally literature - those who can identify Hester Prynne but not Babe Ruth or those who can identify Jackie Robinson but not Arthur Dimmesdale....What matters...is that a student pf popular culture, as opposed to an enthusiastic fan of it or a hands-over-the-ears critic of it, should have good questions to ask.  To date, the most sophisticated and fruitful questions have come from scholars using theoretical positions developed in anthropology, sociology, history, and literary studies" (6).  

This little example made me chuckle.  When I returned to the h.s. classroom after over a dozen years of post-secondary teaching, I began pulling terms from Hirsch's cultural literary list and teaching them to students (as they applied to whatever unit of study we happened to be covering.)  I knew that the list was criticized for being non-inclusive, but I found I could be selective and make adaptations.  In 2005, when Hirsch came to the T.C. to speak at a college graduation which I attended, imagine my surprise!  While I can honor the complaints about the  Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, I can also speak from firsthand classroom experience about the inability of high school students in American classrooms to recognize many of the allusions which they encounter in the writings of "popular culture."   Am I off subject?  I hope not.

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This text includes an essay by Bourdieu entitled "Sport and Social Class," and an essay by Foucault entitled "What Is an Author?"  In addition, it includes essays about cockfighting,

jokes, the "movie of the week," and "William Shakespeare and the American people,"  - all of which I'd like to return to later - if time permits.

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Rethinking Popular Culture:  Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies. Mukerji, Chandra and Michael Schudson, editors.  Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.

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Bourdieu notes: September/October

In search of an understanding of Pierre Bourdieu, I went in search of a variety of his writings (and writings about him.)  I did not read them in a particular order, not did I attempt to make my notes chronological in terms of his life and writing...

One really intriguing volume which was spearheaded by Bourdieu (and collaborated upon by many others) is a 650-page volume of interview notes and essays which Bourdieu calls "stories" - private stories that he and the others "feel anxious" about making public, even though all agreed (and signed) allowing that to happen - especially the "difficult" spots...namely the "housing projects" or "today's schools" (3).   I have included my notes from a couple of the essays because I found this volume so very different in how Bourdieu presented his ideas and his writing style.  I include the title and a few excerpts and observations in the following paragraphs.

I found an essay entitled "Those Were the Days," in a volume entitled The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, (Pierre Bourdieu et. al.,) Stanford Press, 1993.  Bourdieu's interview notes and essay (done in conjunction with Rosine Christin) were included with the essay, an essay in which he writes about a French high school student whose existence - because of his parents' divorce - "... has been placed under the sign of instability and ceaseless change, at work, at home, at school, with his friends" (428).  What intrigued me about this interview/essay was how Bourdieu used it to reveal the ambiguity of this young nineteen year-olds' life.  Bourdieu talks about what he calls, "Two separate, even opposed, worlds and two sets of memories that make sense only if placed in relationship to each other" (427). Bourdieu describes how the jobs of the boy's Algerian father and Yugoslav mother had caused him to have to move and change schools frequently.   But what Bourdieu seems to focus on is what he referred to as the boy's "wisdom" which Bourdieu points out allowed the young man, (Malik,)  to show that he knows "perfectly well where he stands, that his school is 'a dumping ground.'  He adds, "at school they don't ask me to make top marks...might just as well do as little as possible, just enough to get by" (429)  // 

Reading this essay left me somewhat doubtful of Bourdieu's focus (or, perhaps I should say study) so I went on to some of the other essays in the collection.  In another essay (written with Patrick Champagne) entitled "Outcasts on the Inside,"  Bourdieu goes on to reference the "high school malaise" and devotes his comments to the concept that the there is a great discrepancy between the way students in the elite Parisian lycees experience education and the way that the students in the vocational junior high schools in the poverty-stricken housing projects in the big cities experience.  The essay, written in the esarly 90's, refers to "...the periodic student demonstrations of the past 20 years over various issues and the varying kinds of violence that are permanent occurrences in the most disadvantaged schools (as being) ...the visible manifestations of the permanent effets of the contradictions of the school system and the altogether new kind of violence it inflicts on those who are not suited to it" (425).  The accusations continue as the essays goes on,  "The educational system excludes as it always has, but now it does so continuously and at every level of the curriculum (between slow-track classes and the vocational schools...) and it keeps hold of those whom it excludes, just relegating them to educational tracks that have lost more or less of whatever value they once had.  It follows that these outcasts on the inside are forced...to do a balancing act....that the establishment into which they have been directed by educational tracking is a place for assembling the most disadvantaged....in short they drag themselves listlessly through a school career they know has no future"(425).  //  The point of the interviews and the companion essays which grew out of them became obvious to me as I continued to explore this volume - these essays are the stories of struggling French citizens, people who suffer because they become trapped in layers of society that are below their desires, or perhaps more aptly put, below what they believed society promised them.  As Bourdieu writes in the closing of the book,  "...it is clearly necessary to get to the real economic and social determinants of the unnumerable attacks on the freedom of individuals and their ligitimate aspirations to happiness and self-fulfillment:  determinants manipulated today not only by the merciless constraints of the labor and housing markets, but also by the decisions of the education market and the overt penalties and covert aggressions of working life....this observation is not cause for despair:  what the social world has done, it can, armed with this knowledge, undo" (629).

As Michael Grenfell says of Bourdieu in Pierre Bourdieu, Agent Provocateur, (London: Continuum Press, 2004) "Clearly the world disappointed Bourdieu and his analyses sometimes seem to offer hope that things could be otherwise.  However, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, a much more agressive philosophy and world order came into being....In many ways the picture painted by Bourdieu is horrific.  Old systems and structures are swept away in the path of of the market logic.  Individuals are marginalized or discarded.  Those on the inside are crushed by the demands of management systems and work practices.  The spirit of resistance that led Bourdieu to oppose the policies which produced such a society was fed by a refusal to accept that it was inevitable" (195).

Katha Pollitt wrote of Bourdieu in an article which appeared in the February 18, 2002, edition of The Nation after his death:  "Bourdieu called himself ' to the left of the left.' Reading him could be a disturbing experience because the explanartoey sweep of his key concept of habitus --the formation and expression of self aroud an internalized and usually accurate sense of social destiny--tends to make ameliorative projects seem rather silly.  'Sociology,' he wrote, 'discovers necessity, social constraints, where we would like to see choice and free will. The habitus is that unchosen principle of so many choices that drives our humanists to such despair.'   He believed, Pollitt contends that "schools could help give working-class kids the cultural capital that middle-class kids get from their families."   He spent much of his life, Pollitt points out, "studying the part played by the French education system in reifying class and gender divisions and in selecting and shaping the academic, technocracit and political elite--the "state nobility" -- that runs France, ...but he believed in education."  

In Culture and Power, Swartz writes:  "Frequently Bourdieu writes as if there were an almost exact correlation between hopes and chances, though at other times he recognizes that these are never completely synchronized" (111)   Later in Chapter Eight, "Education, Culture, and Social Inequality,"  Swartz says of Bourdieu's theory:  "Pursuing his central theme of the important of culture in social stratification, Bourdieu sees the eduational system as the principal institution controlling the allocation of status and privilege in contemporary societies.  Schools offer the primary institutional setting for the production, transmission, and accumulation of the various forms of cultural capital"(189).  Swatrz points out that, "Bourdieu was one of the first sociologists to take a critical look at the popular post-WWII public policies of expandind educational opportunity in order to reduce social inequality" (190).   And although Swartz contends that "all Western democracies have seen tremendous improvement during the last forty years," (190) his intent is to put forth (what I see as) one of Bourdieu's key goals:  Bourdieu maintains that, "the educational system--more than the family, church, or business firm--has become the institution most responsible for the transmission of social inequality in modern societies.  The task of the sociologist, therefore, is to 'determine the contribution made by the educational system to the reproduction of the structure of power relationship and symbolic relationships netween social classes" (190).

Swartz goes on to quote Bourdieu and Passeron from Reproduction, (1977) saying that, "...the education system performs three central functions....1) the 'function of conserving inculcating and consecrating' a cultural heritage....schooling provides not just the transmission of technical knowledge and skills, but also socialization into a particular cultural tradition;  2) the 'external function of reproducing social-class relations....reinforcing rather than redistributing the unequal distribution of cultural capital;  3) the function of 'legitimation,' consecrating the cultural heritage it transmits and deflecting attention from (and misrecognition of) the fact that it is reproducing a social function"  (191).  In other words, Swartz tells the reader, as an "early and key architect of the widely influential theory of social reproduction..."(191).  He saw that educational institutions can "enhance rather than attenuate" social inequalities.

I plan to address some additional thoughts about Bourdieu's ideas on power in the Bourdieu paper.

Retyped notes on readings and observations: September

Anxious to examine cultural studies, I am finding it very refreshing to look at education in ways I never have before.   I have gone back to look at some readings about "culture," trying to tie it to new ideas and old.

Reading Philip Smith, Cultural Theory:  An Introduction, (Blackwell Publishers 2001), I found some ideas which helped me make links.  The following notes (which might seem quite simple to some) have helped me understand at least one view of how the word "culture" has evolved.

In English, Smith point out, from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the term culture applied widely to, "the improvement of the individual human mind and personal manners through learning" as it moved away from being a term largely used to refer to the "cultivation of crops and animals" (1).  But, even as it began to refer to the idea of a person as "cultured" (having manners,) it moved on to refer to the "improvement of society as a whole,"  and culture became something of a "value-laden synonym for civilization" (1).    So, as the term in English continued to evolve, it began to be used as a comparative term (unfortunately) being used to label (for example) a European nature as "cultured," compared to a society in another part of the globe as "barbaric."  That comparison, Smith goes on to say, would have included differences between nations ranging from "technological"  to "morals and manners" (1).

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As I read these ideas, I am drawn back into the studies I have conducted in a high school classroom asking students to identify their own cultures, their diversity, their identities.  As I introduce pieces of literature into the high school classroom- literature which will take students into multiple cultures - I am trying to broaden my own understanding of how, for example, some of the Western authors who are part of the literary canon commonly studied in high schools across the United States, were able to label (and dismiss) "other" cultures as "inferior to." Since I teach in an ethnically undiverse setting in southern Minnesota, I have decided that I need to embrace the concept of difference by trying to get the students to unlock the many ways in which their identities are very different from each other "culturally."But, I do not want to digress too far into that at this time...I only want to mention it and make the link.

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Back to Smith's tracing of the evolution of the term culture... he goes on to cite the rise of Romanticism in the Industrial Revolution, and proffers the idea that "culture began to be used to designate spiritual development alone and to contrast this with material and infrastructural change....(and) along with Romantic nationalism in the late nineteenth century, there came inflections which accented tradition and everydane life as dimensions of culture (folk culture, national culture)" (2).  Then, Smith gets to Raymond Wilson's (1976) suggestion that this history (summarized above from Smith's tracings) of how the word "culture" came to be identified are "dimly reflected in the three current uses of the term 'culture'" (2).

"...to refer to the intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development of an individual, group, or society."

"...to capture a range of intellectual and artistic activities and their products (film, art, theatre)...in this usage culture is more or less synonymous with "the Arts," (allowing us to refer to a "Minister of Culture,")..."

:...to designate the entire way of life, activities, beliefs, and customs of a people, group, or society" (2).

Smith goes on to offer, in Chapter One, "Introduction:  What is Culture?  What is Cultural Theory,"  some analysis of the work of anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) who documented multiple definitions of culture.  Smith takes a sampling of their many categories of "culture" definitions and boils it down to his ideas about how our understanding of "culture" has shifted in the past fifty years "within the field of cultural study" (3).  Smith offers these ideas:

"Culture tends to be opposed to the material, technological, and social structural...there may be complex empirical relations between them...(but) we need to understand culture as something  distinctive from...an entire 'way of life'" (3-4).

"Culture is seen as the realm of the ideal, the spiritual, and the non-material....It is understood as the patterned sphere of beliefs, values, symbols, signs, and discourses" (4).

"Emphasis is placed on the 'autonomy of culture'....it cannot be explained (only) as economic forces, distributions of power, or social structural needs" (4).

"Efforts are made to remain value-neutral....The study of culture is not restricted to the Arts, but rather is understood to pervade all aspects and levels of social life. Ideas of cultural superiority and inferiority play almost no place in contemporary academic study" (4).

Smith concludes his groundwork chapter by saying talking about "action, agency, self." He writes, "The connection between culture and the individual is what is at stake here.  The most critical issue concerns the ways in which culture shapes human action" (5).

I found reading Smith helped me get an idea about how this term (which he calls one of the most complex) has been understood historically, is understood by historians, anthropologists, cultural theorists, and others.

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I suspect that Bourdieu's ideas about power, language, and violence,  and Foucault's ideas about discipline, punishment, and power will build my understanding about how those two philosophers saw culture shaping human action. 

And now, before leaving Smith, I want to include some more notes from Smith's chapters (same book) which deal with postmodern and poststructural theory because I have found that reading helpful in my (current) classroom.  I don't know that the following notes will be particularly useful to others in the class, but I want to include them as helpful definitions / theories for myself in this course and in my literature classroom.

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In Chapter Thirteen ("The Cultrual Analysis of Postmodernism and Postmodernity,")  of the aforementioned text, Cultural Theory: An Introduction,  Smith sets out to help his reader understand that the theory of "postmodernism" as one of the most highly tied to "anxiety and controversy" in cultural theory (214).   Then, he offers what I found to be a helpful list of what Smith calls, "...some of the qualities of postmodern culture and postmodern society on which everyone seems to agree, regardless of their particular explanations and discussions" (215).

And, he references Zygmunt Bauman, John Frow, Dick Hebdige, and Scott Lask as he offers his list...(215).

1) "Culture and the mass media have become more powerful and important in social life than previously."

2) "Economic and social life revolve around the consumption of symbols and lifestyles, rather than the production of goods through industrial labor."

3) "Ideas about reality and its representation are made problematic.

4) "Image and space have replaced narrative and history as organizing principles of cultural production."

5) "Stylistic features like parody, pastiche, irony, and pop eclecticism become more prevalent."

6) "A consumption[based ctyscape dominates urgan form. Rather than being organized around economic production, this has as its central dynamic the provision of entertainment, leisure, and lifestyle services.  Shopping malls, pleasure parks, and themed residential complexes are examples of this."

7) "Hybridity comes to replace rigid boundaries and classifications." (More to follow from Chapter Fourteen on hybridity.)

In Chapter Fourteen, "Postmodern and Poststructural Critical Theory,"  Smith introduces a section entitled, "The Analysis of Identify and Difference."   Smith cites Cornel West (1994) who argues that we should engage in a "new, cultural politics of difference."  Although I am slimming these ideas down (perhaps too much) I believe that what Smith is getting at is embedded in these words:  "Over recent years the study of identity and difference has become a crucial hallmark of thinkers influenced by postmodern and poststructural theory.  'Identity' refers to who people think they are, either individually or collectively, and the ways that this is culturally constructed. Ideas about 'difference' try to capture the diversity of forms of human identity and experience" (241).  Smith goes on to discuss ideas from Homi Bhabha and Edward Said regarding their writing about colonialism and postcolonialism.  Smith says, "Like other postcolonial theorists, Bhabha sees difference, ambivalence, and hybridity as powerful tools for combating dominant discourses and structures of power.  It is the last of these that he hints is the most potent.  Rather than simply setting up an alternative discourse which affirms difference, hybridity works to transgress existing discourses and reveal the imcomplete and contingent nature of nationalist ideologies" (243).  He goes on to use (what I find to be)  powerful example of this in explaining why ( in a study of the Harlem Renaissance by Houston Baker) Baker explains why he thinks that movement was misunderstood (or rather) inaccurately articulated (244).

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Notes in this posting were drawn (and cited) largely from the following source:

Smith, Philip.  Cultural Theory:  An Introduction.  Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell 

  

     Publishers, 2001.

More thoughts on Bauman: September/October notes

 In Consuming Life, Bauman writes about the consumer society's emancipation and responsibility, noting that, "The arrival of freedom...tends to be viewed as an exhilarating act of emancipation....Soon after freedom has settled in and turned into another daily routine, a new kind of horror...makes memories of past sufferings and grudges pale:  the horror of responsibility" (87).   So, society's rules and prohibitions, "were prompted by recognition of the physical threats and spiritual burdens endemic to the condition of freedom" (88).  But, he goes on to propose two very opposite views of "societal coercion."   Are we (as Hobbes and Durkheim suggest) prone to societal coercion to protect human togetherness against "war of all against all,"  or are we (as Levinas suggests) using "normative regulation" to make our responsibility for "the Other" conditional and limited instead of unconditional and unlimited? (89). //  I am taking liberty in over-simplifying this, but Bauman goes on to talk about how "the advent of consumerism" has changed our ideas about responsibility and obligation.  "Ever larger chunks of human conduct have been released from explicitly social patterning, supervision and policing....In a deregulated and privatized setting which is focused on consumer concerns and pursuits, the responsibility for choices, the actions that follow the choices and the consequences of such actions rests fully on the shoulders of individual actors.  As Pierre Bourdieu signalled as long as two decades ago, coercion has by and large been replaced by stimulation..." (90-91)   Bauman goes on, "The concepts of responsibility and responsible choice, which resided before in the semantic field of ethical duty and moral concern for 'the Other,' have shifted or have been moved to the realm of self-fulfillment and the calcultion of risks.  In the process, 'the Other' as the trigger, the target and the yardstick of a responsibility recognized, assumed and fulfilled has all but disappeared from view, elbowed out or overshadowed by the actor's own self. 'Responsibility' now means, first and last, responsibility to oneself ('you owe this to yourself'. 'you deverse it', as the traders in 'relief from responsibility' put it), while 'responsible choices' are, first and last, those moves serving the interests and satisfying the desires of the self" (92).  

How does this touch upon the workings of educational institutions?  Who is the 'other' in the school?  To whom do administrators and teachers feel responsible?  How do districts find loopholes in the "mandated" programs, and how do we get caught in mandated programs which we know are leaving plenty of people behind?  Yearly, I watch children slip through cracks because they do not 'qualify for' (as an example) special services.  More and more people I know are opting for home-schooling and on-line high school education; yet,  when the time comes for post-secondary acceptance, I see no accountability or continuity when it comes to interpreting / accepting / evaluating the so-called "college credit" which students take with them to college campuses.  We hear that we are slipping behind in the global race to educate our population;  it is easy to believe if when I yearly see the tremendous language talents of our foreign-exchange students.   

In Consuming Life, Bauman goes on to say, that, "The life of consumer...is not about acquiring and possessing.  It is not even about getting rid of what was (sic)  been acquired the day before yesterday and proudly paraded a day later. It is instead...about being on the move" (98).  Furthermore, he declares that if Max Weber was right about the ethical principle of the production life being the delay of gratification, then the ethical guidelines of the consuming life has to be to avoid staying satisfied (98).  

I see a tie between these ideas in Consuming Life and what Bauman talks about in Globalization as well.  As people continue to pursue opportunities to consume, Bauman points out that these consumers are growing more and more mobile.   The money-holders -"people who invest" - are not tied to the locality. And,  "if they have no connection to the employees,  if they feel "freedom from the duty to contribute to daily life and the perpetuation of the community" (Globalization 9), then they are members of the mobile, consumers in a global society who can be nameless and faceless.  The "Other" doesn't need to be "engaged with."  As Bauman puts it in Chapter One (Time and Class,) " Capital can always move away to more peaceful sites if the engagement with 'otherness' requires a costly application of force or tiresome negotiations. No need to engage, if avoidance will do" (11).

Is this what occurs when people go school-shopping?  Is this an avoidance of community?

Later in Chapter Four (Tourists and Vagabonds) he goes on to talk about the modern world without any 'natural borders' (77).  We know that we could be somewhere else (no matter where we are.)  Tourists move because they want to, and vagabonds move because they have to.

"...the vagabond," says Bauman, " is a flawed consumer....not really able to afford the kind of sophisticated choices in which consumers are expeted to excel; their potential for consumption is as limited as their resources....They spoil the fun simply be being around, they do not lubricate the wheels of the consumer society, they add nothing to the prosperity of the economy turned into a tourist industry.  They are useless....and because they are useless, they are also unwanted....they are natural objects for stigmatizing and scapegoating....(96).

Who spoils the fun in our educational institutions?  Who are the unwanted and the useless?  Who leaves and why?  Who gives the governmental programs devised for educational institutions a "bad name"?

This concept becomes even more mesmerizing when Bauman goes on to say that "...tourists have a horror of the vagabonds for much the same reason that the vagabonds look up to the tourists as their gurus and idols: in the society of travellers, in the traveling society, tourism and vagrancy are two faces of the same coin.  The vagabond...is the alter ego of the tourist.  The line which divides them is tenuous and not always clearly drawn.  One can easily cross it without noticing....the sight of the vagabond makes the tourist tremble - not because of what the vagabond is but becaue (sic) of what the tourist may become.  While sweeping the vagabond under the carpet -- banning the beggar and the homeless from the street, confining him to a far-away, 'no-go' ghetto, demanding his exile or incarceration -- the tourist desperately, though in the last account vainly, seeks the deportation of his own fears" (96-97).

In our educational institutions, who are the vagabonds?  Who are the tourists?  

More on Bauman (Wasted Lives:  Modernity and its Outcasts) to follow.

  

Bourdieu, October 15, 2008

Bourdieu paper

Bauman and Bourdieu...

On pages 130-131, Bauman writes: "If the privilege of 'never being bored' is the measure of a successful life, of happiness and even of human decency, and if intense consumer activity is the prime, royal road to victory over boredom, then the lid has been taken off human desires; no amount of gratifying acquisitions and enticing sensations is likely ever to bring satisfaction in the way once promised by 'keeping up to standards'. There are now no standards to keep up to -- or rather no standards which, once reached, can authoritatively endorse the right to acceptance and respect, and guarantee their long duration. The finishing line moves on together with the runner, the goals stay forever a step or two ahead. Records keep being broken, and there seems to be no end to what a human being may desire. 'Acceptance' (the absence of which, let's recall, Pierre Bourdieu defined as the worst of all conceivable kinds of deprivation) is ever more difficult to attain and yet more difficult, nay impossible, to be felt as lasting and secure....From everywhere, through all communication channels, the message comes loud and clear: there are no precepts except that of grabbing more, and no rules, except the imperative of 'playing your cards right'. But if winning is the sole object of the game, those who get poor hands deal after deal are tempted to opt for a different game where they can reach for other resources, whatever they can muster."

In light of what is happening in this country at this time, I am at once mesmirized and choked with fear and disappointment. It's like watching a horror movie - I don't want to watch, but I can't look away.

Moving on... while waiting for my copy of Bourdieu to arrive, (and frantically seeking a library copy to tide me over, ) I came upon a book by Grant McCracken entitled Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, and Brand Management. (2005). I thought that one article on museums and culture, and another on what culture has to do with creating value were thought-provoking as I journey into a topic that's quite new to me. The museum and culture chapter talked about how museums see themselves / react when people leave "unmoved." Or, as McCracken says, "...the fact that visitors do not embrace Culture does not mean that they are without culture."

Chapter 4 - Swartz/Bourdieu... This chapter (more commentary to come, of course,) explores (66) three ways that Bourdieu separates himself from Marxism - [symbolic interests] extending economic interest to noneconomic goods (66); [power as capital] extending the idea of capital to all forms of power, whether they be material, cultural, social, or symbolic (73); [symbolic violence and capital] and emphasizing the role of symbolic forms and processes in the reproduction of social inequality (82).

"Bourdieu challenges both the Marxist theory of superstructrure and idealist views of cultural life by proposing a theory of intellectuals that emphasizes the specific symbolic interests that shape cultural production " (94.)

"Bourdieu's general science of the economy of practices attempts to reapproriate from the idealist/materialist bifurcation of human life the totality of practices as fundamentally interested but misrecognized forms of poweror capital....(his) sociological project is a study of the political economy of the various forms of symbolic capital....he focuses ...on symbolic producers who specialize in creating symbolic power...(and) he also thinks of his sociology as an instrument of

struggle against the various forms of symbolic violence" 94).

(more to follow...)

Anxious to study this...

I am truly anxious to examine the curriculum in this course.  Although my Bauman book hasn't arrived yet, I was able to get my hands on a borrowed copy and get a bit of a start.  My mind is racing through all sorts of ideas about how Bauman's ideas  "fit" education.  When Bauman talks about "community" on page 72, I began to think about how differently the term plays out for an eighteen year-old today from how it did 20 or 30 years ago.  How we use "community" to include and exclude, how much power various artificial communities have (or appear to have) to an eighteen year-old, and how publicly some personal "communities" play out their relationships have changed (redefined) connectedness, need, safety, power, and more. 

Book arrived.  I would like to add some commentary about Bauman while trying to avoid repeating things we have already talked about in a group.

I found the commentary in Chapter 2 which traced the "consumer vocabulary" helpful to assist me in wrapping my mind around some of what Bauman is trying to say.  "In stark distinction from the society of producers/soldiers, the society of consumers focuses its training and coercing pressures...exerted on members from their early childhood...on the management of the spirit....Such a change of focus becomes indispensable if members are to become fit to inhabit, and act in, their new natural habitat, wrapped as it is around the shopping malls where goods are sought, found and obtained, and the streets where the commodities obrained in the shops are put on public display to endow their beaters with commodity value" (54).  Bauman goes on, "Bombarded from all sides by suggestions that they need to equip themselves with one or other shop-supplied product if they want to be able to gain and retain the social obligations and protect their self-esteem...(55).  As he talked about the assault on the lives of children, I tried to reflect on how this concept impacts the educational setting - how consuming changes the performance power of students as they flow from role to role in their lives.  " 'To consume' therefore means to invest on one's own social membership...(56).    

To think about education - comparing how children compete in an educational setting and how they compete as consumers of products - raises many questions in my mind.  I think about this on several levels, and it raises questions on all of them...  a)  to a child, on what level (in what arena) is it most important for him/her to compete successfully,  b)  to a parent, same question...  c)  how do the educational options which have evolved over the past couple of decades reflect the ideas of consumerism/competition?  d) in mainstream (for lack of a better term) education,  what has caused us to abandon (not be able to sustain) some of the good /necessary  ideas, techniques, programs  we've come up with...why can't we sell / retain them?

Talk about consuming (spending) poorly.    

I found it appealing/intriguing to read about Anders' concept of Promethean challenge, pride, shame" (58-59) and how "societies are never ashamed nor can they be shamed,  shame is conceivable only as an individual condition" (59).

In light of what is happening to the economy, the comment on page 80, "That living on credit, in debt and with no savings is a right and proper method or running human affairs at all levels, at the level of individual life politics as much as at the level of state politics, has been, so to speak, 'made official' -- on the authority of the most successful and most mature among present-day sociaties of consumers.  The United States of America, ostensibly the world's most powerful economy, looked up to as a success model to follow by most of the inhabitants of the globe who seek the ultimate example of a gratifying and enjoyable life, is perhaps deeper in debt than any other country in history."   //  How prophetic, and Bauman is just one voice among many.  Now, in the fall of 2008, the economy is revealing itself for what it is - a wreck - and the politicians who have - as the media puts it - "lightly slapped wrists and looked the other way," now have to decide how much reaching out "across the aisle" they can do to actually put "country first."  It is a woeful situation.  When the next President takes office, what will he demand of the citizens?  What are we willing to sacrifice to "catch up" to the image we wish we still had in the global world?  //  In what ways are we willing to create programs which will successfully educate all young people in this country?  In what ways are we willing to successfully support the young people who want to enter the field of education?  I hold ambiguous feelings toward programs like Teach - for - America.  The eye-opening, service-giving aspects of the program are noble.  But, are we attracting people into these programs who will invest a career (or a year) to educating our citizenry?