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.