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Career development theory is critical in understanding how individuals make transitions through education and the workplace. However, despite evidence of the importance of geographical place in shaping individual trajectories, limited theoretical work has focused on the topic. In this paper, the potential for the development of a theoretical framework of career development that explicitly addresses the role of place is explored. This paper starts by outlining the limited ways that place has been conceptualised in existing career development literature, and then explores potential developments utilising the theoretical tools from careership theory and the work of Pierre Bourdieu and integrating insights from contemporary spatial theorists. The paper finishes by drawing together a spatio-relational framework for career development which both encompasses insights from the existing literature and extends this work arguing that place is a salient dimension in career development to a much more significant extent than has been previously recognised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019 Ofsted introduced cultural capital (CC) into the Early Years Inspection Handbook and defined it as 'essential knowledge' related to 'educated citizenship'. This paper investigates Ofsted's use of CC to critically examine the potential implications for early years work. Due to the feminised nature of early years work, a critical feminist approach is engaged to explore the potential impact of introducing CC into the regulation of the sector. This paper examines the differences between Ofsted's use of CC, CC's theoretical origins, and analyses sector responses. Our contention is that how Ofsted have employed CC may represent 'symbolic violence' against the working-class women working in the early years, by further devaluing their habitus and sustaining the stratification of society through forms of capital. This paper is the first to interrogate CC in Ofsted's early years documentation, and will have an international impact for any countries following UK education practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

VET colleges in China are positioned at the bottom of the educational hierarchy, absorbing the 'left-over' students with 'less desirable' academic records. VET students are stereotyped as 'stupid and lazy' youths suffering considerable prejudice in Chinese society. Drawing on Bourdieu's theoretical insights, this paper investigates the experiences of students in VET colleges and their teachers' perspectives on them. I explore how teachers' stereotyping habitus is practised in VET colleges and how it affects their students' learning experiences. The findings demonstrate that the teachers' pedagogic practices in class impose a designated cultural arbitrary via a hidden curriculum. The students adopted 'passing time' attitudes in class as a response to their teachers' 'misrecognition'. The paper examines how a system of unequal power relations in Chinese VET college is maintained and legitimised, which contributes to the 'transmission' and reproduction of the very culture that has shaped the standing of VET in Chinese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractGlobal education policy discourse is based on an unshakable belief that more and improved skills will promote economic prosperity, global competitiveness and social inclusion. In England, the Further Education and Skills sector (FES) has emerged as the vehicle to deliver these skills. However, the portrayal of FES as focusing primarily on vocational education for people often adjudged to be ‘not academic’ positions the sector at the bottom of the educational hierarchy, with negative ramifications for those who teach and study in it. This paper applies a case study approach to explore the lived experiences of five trainee FES teachers completing their initial teacher education (ITE). Drawing on contemporary interpretations of Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, I develop Morrin’s notion of hauntings to explain the psycho-social, historical and spatial influences on the trainees’ responses as they re-enter the field of education as teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ofsted, the inspection authority in England, has told schools to ensure that all students have access to cultural capital, taken as a canon of music, literature and art. In this paper, we trouble this guidance by analysing conversations with 1447 senior secondary students. The students reported that the arts offered considerable personal benefits, as well as creative self-expression (visual art) and vocational and networking skills (performing arts). By bringing Bourdieu to the dataset we offer a field analysis that shows how arts cultural capitals might follow the logics of the education field. We speculate that, despite the likelihood that these elite cultural capitals were not of equal value to all students, arts capitals and dispositions might support wider resistances to logics of practice in other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scant sociological attention has been given to the role of luck within social mobility/reproduction. This paper helps address this conceptual gap, drawing on insights from over 200 longitudinal interviews conducted with 20 working-class young people and 22 of their parents over an 11-year period, from age 10–21. We explore the potential significance of luck within the trajectories of 13 educationally mobile young people who were the first in family to go to university, six young people who achieved similar educational levels to their parents and one young person whose status was less clear cut. Our analysis suggests that particular forms of luck may be instrumental in creating opportunities for social mobility, although the consequentiality of these are mediated through interplays of agency, structure, habitus and capital. We conclude that paying further attention to luck may help augment sociological understandings of structure/agency and Bourdieusian understandings of social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The internationalisation of educational trajectories has emerged as a new form of cultural capital in education systems. Research suggests that the 'international capital' offered by language enrichment programs has become appropriated primarily by middle- and upper-class families investing in new forms of educational distinction. However, little is known about the appeal of international capital to different class fractions. In this paper, I draw on Bourdieu's theory of class and administrative data on French students and schools to examine the role of international certification in class practices of school choice. The analysis reveals that specific fractions of the upper-middle and upper classes are over-represented in schools offering international certificates. I use the findings to discuss the role of family resources and education system structures in the making of educational strategies. I conclude by highlighting the importance of empirically grounded analyses of the sociological significance and limits of international capital in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing in-service teacher professional development is a significant issue for educational stakeholders as reform movements mobilize to replace teacher-led instruction with student-centred pedagogies. Teachers need access to high-quality professional development to mitigate implementation problems associated with reform practices. Drawing on critical ethnography, I followed the year-long professional journey of six in-service science teachers in Quebec, Canada. Video-recorded professional development meetings and semi-structured interviews captured how teachers worked to enact sophisticated inquiry-based teaching practices. I have used a Bourdieusian lens to examine teachers' shifting habitus as they professionally develop in collaborative professional development. Findings suggested that the field of educational reform is transformative when teachers engage with a professional learning model emphasizing critical reflection and collaborative discourse. Using Bourdieu's concept of habitus and field, findings illustrate the benefits of pedagogic work on teachers' repertoires of practice to understand the generative potential of professional development to transform teachers' instructional practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we draw from a recent empirical study to consider how a person's classed trajectory impacts students from different class backgrounds in higher education (HE). Students face rapidly evolving social and academic circumstances and must build reasonable strategies to navigate their trajectory from education to work. In these situational processes, social class becomes emotionally exposed as a durable relational social ordering principle. Affinities with educational and labour market norms provide emotional advantages. To explore the classed nature of accumulated being in Australian HE in the context of widening participation, we examine experiences of access to and participation in HE, and strategies towards entry into the labour market. The movement into, through and out of HE orders and organises classed experience, demonstrating the durability of class in the face of doxic meritocratic choice discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I explore a disposition towards a critique of 'reductionism' and 'determinism' that seems to me to be very much prevalent within British sociology. I take a qualitative educational sociology that uses Bourdieusian concepts as one body of research where this disposition is expressed with particular fervour. A close examination of this work reveals its tacit acceptance of the limits of specific, and mostly statistical, classifications. It also reveals a distorted approach to reflexivity and the view of rival approaches and critiques. This points towards a specific and systematic disposition that, through the abundant warnings of 'reductionism' and 'determinism', itself reduces the development of a particular theory to a specific epistemology, thereby endangering the potential of rupture and epistemological break advocated by Bourdieu. This prompts us to pose fresh Bourdieusian questions about the state and practice of Bourdieusian reflexivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]