Sociology: class differences in achievement (internal factors)
Labelling
- Teachers may label a student as bright, troublemaker, hardworking etc
- Studies show that teachers tend to label students based on stereotypical assumptions of their background and middle class are often labelled as higher than working class
- Dunne and Gazely 2008 - found that teachers felt they couldn't do much about the underachievement of working class, whereas when it came to middle class underachievement, they believed they could overcome this.
AO3 - Labelling theory
- Determinstic - assumes that those who are labelled automatically lead to failure when this is not always the case.
e.g - Rosenthal and Jacobson conducted a field experiment whereby teachers falsely told 20% of students that they were spurters. These students did go on to do much better thus revealing the power of positive labelling and an example of self fulfiling prophecy.
Streaming
- Gilborn & Youdell - teachers use stereotypical notions of ability to steam pupils.
- found that teachers were less likely to see the working class as having ability = placed into lower streams and entred in lower tier GCSEs
Streaming: Colin Lacey
- Colin Lacey's polarisation explains the emergence of pupil subcultures as a reaction to streaming
- Pro school subcultures - pupils in high streams tend to remain committed to school values/work
- anti school subcultures - those in low streams suffer from a loss of self discipline and this label pushes them to alternative ways of gaining status among their peers e.g. turanting, not doing h/w
Abolishing streaming
- Ball found that when schools abolished streaming pupil polarisation also disappeared.
- although this disappeared, differentiation continued and teachers continued to categorise people deifferently and lable the middle class as co-operative and able
Pupils' class identity outside of school/symbolic capital
- school has a middle class habitus, those socialised at home into middle class tastes gain 'symbolic capital' and are deemed to have value.
- contrast, school devalues working class habitus. Bourdieu - calls this withholding of symbolic capital as 'symbolic violence'
- reproduces class structure and keeps them 'in their place'
Nike Identities
- many people were conscious that society and school looked down on them and symbolic capital led them to seek alternative ways of creating self worth.
- investing in styles through branded clothing such as nike
- wearing brands was a way of 'being middle class'. without them they would feel inauthentic.
- however this led to conflict with school dress code - pupils who adopted street styles risked being labelled as rebels