Garth Stahl

Habitus Disjunctures, Reflexivity and White Working-Class Boys' Conceptions of Status in Learner and Social Identities

The article primarily explores the social class identification of 15 white working-class boys at a high performing school in a socially marginalized area of South London where academic performance was routinely depicted as crucial to economic and social well-being. The research aims to consider the influence of a high performing school on the boys’ identity and the relationship between their identity and their engagement with education. First, a brief background on white working-class boys ‘underachievement’ will provide the context. Second, Bourdieus conceptual tools of habitus, institutional habitus and capitals are examined. Bourdieus class analysis provides a useful conceptual framework to address (divided) working-class masculinities in a high attaining academic institution. Third, semi-structured interviews focused on academic self-concept, social class-identification and subsequent rationales, as well as participants’ identification of who they considered to be a student they admire, provide valuable insight into understanding habitus disjunctures and learner identities.

White Working-Class Male Narratives of "Loyalty to Self" in Discourses of Aspiration.

This paper intends to show the processes and identity negotiations of white working-class boys surrounding their own learner-identity within a ‘raising aspirations’ rhetoric. The current dominant neoliberal discourse, which prioritizes a view of aspiration that is competitive, economic, and status-based, shapes the subjectivities of these young males. Focusing on the deeply engrained values of a group of 23 working-class boys from South London, ages 14–16, this research critically considers the conception of aspiration and persistent ‘educational underachievement’. White working-class boys in the United Kingdom are frequently labelled as having ‘low aspirations’ or, indeed, no aspirations at all. Through the use of habitus as a conceptual tool, the research intends to serve as an exploration of how the aspiration rhetoric influenced the boys’ conception of ‘loyalty to self’ and their sense of average-ness/ordinariness/’middling’. The boys’ habitus undergoes complex ‘identity work’ in order to reconcile competing and contrasting conceptions of aspiration.

Relationship-Building in Research: Gendered Identity Construction in Researcher-Participant Interaction

Abstract Purpose To understand how research-participant relationships are formed in research settings through experiences and analyses of content-specific gendered identity practices. Methodology/approach I draw upon a school-based ethnographically informed study exploring the construction of masculinities among white working-class boys in three schools in South London, United Kingdom between 2009 and 2011. To access participants’ perceptions, I used a methodology of observation, focus groups, semi-structured interviews and visual methods. Findings Themes of gendered embodiment, physicality and performance play a part in the formation of relationships in this study. Furthermore, such themes play a role – to varying degrees – in researcher-participant relationship-building. In understanding relationship-building practices, I make connections to my own reflexivity accounting for the multifaceted nature of identities, lifestyles and perspectives present in researcher-participant interaction. Originality/value Throughout the fieldwork, constructs of gender, nationality and class all contributed to how relationships were built. In navigating the power relations innate to all relationship-building, I discuss how I capitalised on my outsider status in terms of nationality to neutralise certain elements of class and gender that were normative to my participants, but, simultaneously, draw upon my insider status in terms of knowledge of the locale, humour and clothing which contributed greatly to how the relationships were constructed and maintained.

How "Space" and "Place" Contribute to Occupational Aspirations as a Value-Constituting Practice for Working-Class Males.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider how working-class boys constitute themselves as subjects of “value” through a close examination of their occupational aspirations. The authors consider two significant influences on the aspirations of these young men: “space” and “place”; and neoliberal discourses which privilege a particular concept of individualized personhood. Contending with neoliberal conceptions of personhood and aspiration (that are primarily competitive, economic, and status based), working-class and working-poor young men either align themselves with the “entrepreneurial” or “aspirational” self or face the label of “low aspirations”. Design/methodology/approach – Employing space and place as conceptual lenses allows for a nuanced understanding of how aspirations are formed (and reformed) according to immediate locale. To explore the identity negotiations surrounding the occupational aspirations of working-class males, the authors draw on two qualitative research studies in depriv...

Race, Class, and Gender in Boys' Education: Repositioning Intersectionality Theory

Boys’ identities are distinctly gendered, racialized, and classed across disparate social and cultural contexts. Related intersectional identity processes are associated with boys’ academic success. While intersectionality has been utilized throughout boys’ education scholarship, a limited, “light touch” approach is often enacted. A critical logic of interpretation, intersectionality theory accounts for race, class, and gender within equity-based empirical studies. The authors contend insufficient engagement with intersectionality may lead educational research on boys’ social and learner identities to become static. Examining boys’ identities through intersectional approaches reveals more complex insights particularly as related to their school engagement. Critical of recent “boy crisis” literature, this article strives to compel theorists of boys’ education to more fully leverage the history, constructs, and epistemologies of intersectionality.

Transnational mobility through education: a Bourdieusian insight on life as middle transnationals in Australia and Canada

ABSTRACT This article argues for a more nuanced view of mobility through education within an era of increased globalisation. We explore questions of transnational mobility through the lens of underexplored Bourdieusian concepts, specifically transnational habitus and habitus clivé. Our analysis shows how ones perception of a ‘better life’ and ones ideology of ‘entrepreneur self’ are produced despite ones encounter with disparity between their fields of their host countries and countries of origin. We therefore assert the need for a more complex conceptual work to unpack the lived experience of mobility especially for those who are unable to operationalise their capital in the transnational field.

The practice of ‘Othering’ in reaffirming white working-class boys’ conceptions of normative identities

ABSTRACT This paper considers how the practice of ‘Othering’ is used by white working-class boys in Boremund, South London to mark identity boundaries and reaffirm their habitus. Through unearthing themes of difference within the young men’s accounts, the work identifies various ways of ‘doing masculinity’ in two social groups, ‘Boremund Boys’ and ‘emos’, who contrasted greatly in style but who were of the same race, class, and ethnicity. Focusing on the identity negotiations of a small cohort, aged 14–16, the data indicate how a normative white male identity specific to this locale is policed and how ‘Othering’ is employed as a strategy. Using Bourdieu’s tools alongside the hermeneutic of heteronormativity, the research explores how emos, through inverting a traditional working-class masculinity, brought the habitus of Boremund Boys into disjuncture. Within the field of masculinity, the habitus of Boremund Boys, through a process of reorientation, reconciles competing and contrasting conceptions of what it is to be a white working-class male in South London.

Developing pre-service teachers’ confidence: real-time coaching in teacher education

Abstract Teacher quality continues to be of major concern in the Western world, and identifying the most effective approach to teacher training remains a contested area. It has been argued that teachers resist change because they lack motivation, have inadequate knowledge and expertise to modify their practices, and are reluctant to take risks for fear of having their confidence damaged. While remaining skeptical of such a deficit view, our interest is in pedagogic approaches which seek to better prepare teachers for teaching in contemporary society and, thus, to enhance their ‘effectiveness.’ This article discusses the use of a Real-Time Coaching (RTC) model designed to enhance pre-service teachers’ practical skills for contemporary classroom teaching. The model focuses upon pre-service teachers micro-teaching while simultaneously gaining feedback via a headset in real time; this is then combined with multiple collaborative feedback cycles within a learning community in order to foster reflective practice. To collect information about participants’ experiences with the RTC process, two rounds of semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants. Our findings indicate the RTC model has the capacity to foster a sense of confidence and ownership of learning by developing practical skills alongside affective attributes such as resilience, efficacy, and a disposition toward continual improvement.

Egalitarian Habitus: Narratives of Reconstruction in Discourses of Aspiration and Change

This chapter will examine how I ope rationalise habitus — in conjunction with capitals and field — to examine the constitution of learner identities in neoliberal times with a focus on the nexus of working-class aspirations, symbolic violence and constituting value. As a social theorist, Bourdieu’s theory of practice intends to show how relations of privilege and domination are produced through the interaction of habitus — a matrix of dispositions that shape how the individual operates in the social world — capital that is economic, cultural, social, and symbolic, and field (i.e., social contexts). In his scholarship, Bourdieu refused to ‘establish sharp demarcations between the external and internal, the conscious and the unconscious, the bodily and the discursive’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 19). Instead, his tools are designed to theorise human action as a dialectical relationship between objective structures and subjective agency. The conceptual tool of habitus represents an attempt to extend understandings around internalised behaviours, perceptions, and beliefs that individuals carry with them and which, in part, are translated into the practices as they transfer to and from the fields in which they interact. From the standpoint of a social researcher, habitus is at once the ‘anchor, the compass, and the course of ethnographic journey’ (Wacquant 2011, p. 81) while functioning as a ‘conceptual linchpin’ that can translate concepts with highly economic connotations into non-economic paradigms (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 120).

Creating Positive Spaces of Learning: DJers and MCers Identity Work with New Literacies.

Abstract The disengagement of working-class boys from education continues to be a major issue in the United Kingdom; however, there has been little educational research in working-class boys’ identity work surrounding learning practices where boys actively engage. This article attempts to address how identities are influenced by new literacies, specifically DJ-ing and MC-ing. Through these new literacies, our participants invert the “bad boy,” anti-school, masculine identity in favor of teaching one another and enjoying a challenge