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Provides background information on Basil Bernstein and his theory of symbolic control and cultural production. Presents an interview with Bernstein addressing such topics as the concept of "pedagogy" and its role in his theory, "boundaries" as a conceptual key in his theory, and transformation of his theory. (CMK)

Drawing on Bernstein’s notion of pedagogic culture or the ‘mode of being’ of the school, this paper develops and uses a theoretical framework for the analysis of school organization that draws attention to specialization of instructional practice. An understanding of the ordering principles of the school emerges from the analysis, fundamentally understood as relations of power and control in the school as an organization. The paper considers how the ordering principles of the school are related to differential performance. The framework is deployed in an analysis of six primary schools located in poor communities in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The market as educator has become firmly lodged at the centre of popular and scholarly debate commenting on the nexus between children, consumption and education/learning. In this paper, I appreciate this scholarly debate from the point of view of the sociology of consumption. The latter has been relatively silent on children’s consumption and education, focusing instead on adult learning. Nevertheless, I here draw on that sociology to forward an argument that favours consideration of a broader range of social relationships and cultural and contextual influences. I outline two models on the network of relationships that inform children’s consumption, and illustrate, through a discussion of Chin’s Purchasing Power, how children’s consumption-related learning may originate from outside the market. The paper finishes with a plea for more research that focuses on children and the domestic contexts of consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the social and cultural importance of photography in modem societies, photographic education is an area that has inspired very little in the way of academic research Photographic education is generally perceived in very narrow tows, as an area of technical training, lacking any broader intellectual significance It is the argument of this paper that in his/her many guises the photographer is an important figure in contemporary culture, and that the impoverished, or total lack of, understanding of photographic education is a significant omission The aim of the paper is to begin to address this gap through a qualitative look at the way in which professional photography students talk about their practice It is argued that photographic education has its own professionalised discourse, which students are encouraged to adopt, thereby excluding alternative perspectives I discuss examples of students' talk about practice as evidence oft/as discourse In the final section of the paper I consider some alternative approaches that have been developed outside the context of mainstream photographic education, and the possibilities they offer for rethinking what it means to teach photography [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews and critiques significant developments within contemporary ethnography. The first part of the paper traces the antecedents of ethnography in an anthropology which was itself closely identified and entwined with colonialism and imperialism. The paper then goes on to review contemporary developments within ethnography, particularly those associated with postmodernism. Attempts to establish a critical ethnography are reviewed and critiqued in the following section. The paper then goes on to suggest ways in which the concepts of 'really useful knowledge' and the processes of action research might be combined in order to assist in the construction of critical ethnography. The paper concludes by acknowledging the difficulties which exist for educational researchers and practitioners who wish to practice critical ethnography in the current educational climate in both Britain and North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to demonstrate that Bourdieu's critics who claim that his theory is structurally 'frozen', with no room for human agency misperceive the basis of the theory The relationships between his theory and education are summarised and the concept of habitus explicated Then drawing on Outline of a Theory of Practice, the determinants of practice are shown to incorporate change and human agency This is then related to an examination of education as cultural practice, and some comments made in that light on a recent paper by Willis, and `Origins and Destinations'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the spatial experiences of Emirati higher education women students. It presents some of the unique ways they engaged with and appropriated their campus space. To understand and explore women's spatial experiences as manifested through their spatial practices, appropriation and emerging spaces, I conducted an ethnographic qualitative inquiry with multiple levels of data gathering and analysis. I utilized social theories of space specifically the social construction of space and Lefebvre's triad as a theoretical framework for this study. The emerging spatial practices of 'togetherness' and 'sitting on the floor' were highly informed by aspects of women students' identity and socio-cultural formation, with an evident link to their traditional past that intersects with their specific nation's modern demands and challenges. Although Emirati women learners' spatiality might resonate with that of other women learners, their spatial practices are context and culture specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of habitus lies at the heart of Bourdieu's theoretical framework. It is a complex concept that takes many shapes and forms in Bourdieu's own writing, even more so in the wider sociological work of other academics. In the first part of this paper I develop an understanding of habitus, based on Bourdieu's many writings on the concept, that recognizes both its permeability and its ability to capture continuity and change. I also map its relationship to Bourdieu's other concepts, in particular field and cultural capital. In the second part of the paper I examine attempts to operationalize habitus in empirical research in education. I critique the contemporary fashion of overlaying research analyses with Bourdieu's concepts, including habitus, rather than making the concepts work in the context of the data and the research settings. In the final part of the paper I draw on a range of research examples that utilize habitus as a research tool to illustrate how habitus can be made to work in educational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to outline and evaluate Pierre Bourdieu's work as it has appeared most recently in feminist studies and the field of gender and education. In particular, it suggests ways in which Bourdieu's theoretical insights could be seen to more effectively contribute to cutting edge debates in both social theory and feminist thought regarding concepts such as agency, identity and domination. It also argues that a more creative and empirical engagement with the recent work of Bourdieu, alongside an interdisciplinary reading of more recent cultural and social theories of power, would be a fruitful way forward in advancing a feminist sociology of education. In the present historical moment and against the tide of postmodern and post-structuralist feminist accounts, Bourdieu is often read as a determinist who has little to offer contemporary feminist debates or who argues that masculine domination is too tightly woven to social practices of a given field. In short, this paper argues that such a view is not only a misreading of Bourdieu's work on fundamental theoretical grounds, but fails to acknowledge the ways in which his more recent work on masculinity addresses both the cultural and social conditions underlying contemporary forms of symbolic domination. In short, the paper argues that Bourdieu's theory offers an analytical breadth and range beyond the scope of anything that a normative, liberal account of masculine domination could provide. Yet, in drawing from such diversity, Bourdieu's oeuvre is able to resist incomprehensibility. It stands as a highly focused, realistic and generative attempt ( McNay, 1999 ; McLeod, 2004 ) to chart the problems of subordination, differentiation and hierarchy, and to expose the possibilities, as well as the limits, of gendered self-hood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to develop a more sophisticated notion of multiculturalism in Britain. It starts by examining the philosophical basis of the Crick Report on citizenship education to resolve the theoretical tension between liberal and multicultural approaches to the subject. To achieve this resolution, it compares the Crick Report to the Parekh Report on the Future of Multi Ethnic Britain, published on 11 th October 2000. The Parekh report is then used to critique the Crick report and re-theorise the practical imperatives of multicultural citizenship education. I claim that the Crick report, typical of liberal analyses, is suspicious of departure from the presumption of a unified social structure, and represents citizenship education as the imposition of a uniform standard applied to all groups and peoples. On this basis it is claimed that, although the Crick Report's conception of citizenship fails to adequately take account of cultural difference, it need not do so, as there is room within liberal approaches to citizenship education for a recognition of difference. The paper explains how such a resolution can be effected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the Queensland Department of Education's Equal Opportunity Policy for Girls and Boys and the Implementing Guidelines for that policy within the context of the pedagogical practices of one secondary school. Most recent movement in sociology of education has been the recovery of human agency as a dynamic force within schools which had been previously seen as determining structures. This paper attempts to address this recovery of agency within a structural theory of education. The assumption of the individual as a passive recipient of society's message through institutions such as the school failed to account for the lived experience of the practitioners and students and precluded the possibility of transformative work. The theoretical purpose of this article is directly linked to attempt to understand gender relations as integral to the structure of schooling and the subjective positions made possible within such structure. There are a variety of difficulties associated with this work which are raised at appropriate places in the article.

In this paper, the argument is made that forms of consciousness, knowledge, sentiments and values that teachers use as part of their cultural repertoires in schools are the result of social constitution The `social' is composed of a number of overlapping discourses that are characteristic of schools everywhere `Teacher culture' is a signifier for the production and consumption of these discourses Recent trends to emphasise the plurality of teacher culture(s) are countered by a review of work that suggests more uniformity in teacher culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is twofold to further elaborate processes of teacher socialization and to explore their implications for a critical theory of schooling. Employing a radical humanist paradigm (Burrell & Morgan, 1981), and in delimited fashion, it attempts to elucidate multi-dimensional processes of chalkfacial negotiation-in a school where the pupils' 'parent culture' is jewish, bourgeoise and patriarchal, and the teacher is a non-Jewish, home economist. As such, the paper is a study of a non- 'unidirectional' intercultural classroom where the 'parent society' is no officially 'fenced out of the school' unlike, for example, the Cherokee (Dumont & Wax, 1969) or the working class. As a critical case, despite and because of its anthropological strangeness, it hopefully metaphorically illumines processes that all teachers, especially 'cleanworkers', experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper highlights the relative neglect by educational planners of a sociocultural analysis of the context surrounding the implementation of educational reforms designed to promote rural development in Third World countries. An examination of the sociological and anthropological literature pertaining to both village culture and rural development in Papua New Gunea suggests that there are powerful cultural constraints on schools leavers applying practical skills learned in schools on their return to the village. These are exemplified by a discussion of the role of sorcery, the subordinate position of youth, and the divergence between planners' and villagers' priorities, and are illustrated with reference to the Secondary Schools Community Extension Project (SSCEP) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates certain aspects of the debate about the causes of unequal educational performance By analyzing two illustrative explanations of performance. It shows that the debate appears to be shaped by a fundamental theme in modern Western culture, the nature-culture opposition. This suggests that the knowledge that we have concerning educational performance is influenced not only by the social and political interests and positions of educators and researchers, but also by more basic cultural concerns, and if we want to understand both educational performance and the debate surrounding it, we need to be aware of this broad influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Claude Grignon's empirical study of lower levels of vocational education in France. The concepts of technical culture and the morality of technical processes are explored Grignon argues that the hidden curriculum of the Lycée for vocational education (Lycée d'Enseignement Professionel) socialises students into a world view in which social relations are conflated with technical relations, and take on the appearance of the certainty of technical processes. Social control is exerted by excluding the possibility of ambiguity and change from this deterministic frame of reference. In the second part of the paper we seek to show that some of Grignon's analytic concepts may offer useful perspectives for analysing British Further Education curricula, by applying the concepts of technical and `technicised' culture to some recent developments in British Further Education curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the spread of English as a medium of higher education in the Arab world, addressing questions about the relationship between higher education, language shift and cultural (re)production through such post‐colonial educational bilingualism. Drawing on exploratory ethnographic research, it documents how both Arabic and English have been implicated in the re‐configuring of collective identities through mass higher education in one Arab Gulf country against a context of rapid modernisation with a regional undercurrent of recurrent pan‐Arab and Islamist‐tinged nationalism. It examines how far the resulting linguistic‐cultural dualism amounts to a loss of linguistic–cultural diversity, and how far there is a linguistically‐framed discourse of resistance to such a process. Theoretically, the paper engages with discourses relating to socio‐cultural reproduction, collective identity, educational standardisation, change and cultural chauvinism, and markets. It offers insights into the potential for both language and higher education to act as tools or fields for cultural transformation and for resistance identity construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning is high on the political agenda for post-compulsory education and training in England. Official discourses about learning assume a predominantly individualist stance, despite the development of theoretical models that stress the contextual and situated nature of learning. In a study following 50 young people through further education over 4 years, it became apparent that the institutional culture of the colleges had a significant impact upon students’ dispositions towards their learning. In this paper, we explore the nature and significance of this impact in a case-study sixth form college: an under-researched sector of educational provision. This is followed by a brief discussion of the implications of our analysis for issues of access, widening participation and inequality in relation to current proposals to reform age 16–19 educational provision in England. We conclude by identifying some of the questions about the fine-grained nature of that college culture that our data does not permit us to address directly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares Bourdieu's notion of habitus with Bernstein's concept of code in an attempt to show how the apparent similarities mask more deeply seated differences in the way the concepts are conceived used. We argue that Bernstein is following an essentially structuralist agenda of the kind that Bourdieu has set himself against. To this end, Bourdieu seeks to overcome the rigidities of 'rules' (which lie at the heart of the idea of Bernstein's code), with the more flexible notion of 'strategy' which incorporates the idea that structure and agency are implicit in each other rather than being dichotomous entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses ethnographic data to investigate the impact of recent government legislation on primary school teachers. The reactions of one inner city primary school are reported in detail It is argued that primary schools have distinctive cultures and these shape tile response to the legislation. The relationship is dynamic, as the legislation also influences the culture. The headteacher's role is undergoing particularly marked changes. Heads are finding it necessary to give considerable reassurance to teachers, stressing continuity rather than repudiation of past practices. Innovation can be seen as a technological, political or cultural process and the implications of these perspectives for teachers' work are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the overall occupational culture of teachers, there are a number of different staff subcultures which compete for limited resources within a contracting educational system This paper concentrates upon the subculture of physical education by focusing on one department engaged in a teacher initiated curriculum innovation where competing perspectives of change are made evident It is suggested that coping strategies developed within the educational context of the school in order to enhance subject status may deflect teachers from considering the possibilities of change in their classroom practice [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses the problem of Bedouin girls dropping out from the public school system in the Negev region of Israel. Data show that this phenomenon results from a conflict between the modern Israeli institutes’ perception of modernity (which promote coeducation) and the Bedouin traditions that remain the cultural ethos of the girls’ fathers. Israeli institutions’ perception of modernity (enlightenment theory) aims to modernize the Bedouins according to Israel’s modern principles, thus revoking traditional Bedouin values (sex separation). This paper promotes a postmodern theory that calls for embedding feminine traditional values of local communities as a necessary process in the development of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As early as 1970, M. S. Archer argued that Bourdieu's sociology of education was the product of the particular conditions of the French educational system within which it was formulated. The same argument was subsequently advanced more generally by Richard Jenkins, who insisted that Bourdieu's sociology of culture, particularly the analysis contained in La Distinction/Distinction ( Bourdieu, 1979 , 1986 ), was an expression of the peculiarly French emphasis on taste as a basis for social differentiation. Bourdieu was himself interested in the relations between particular and universal explanation in social science, and in many of his later articles he focused specifically on the question of the transferability of his concepts, such as 'cultural capital'. The English Preface to Homo Academicus ( Bourdieu , 1988 ) is an explicit discussion of how the analysis presented in the text of French higher education should be read and adopted by English readers, while Practical Reason ( Bourdieu, 1994 , 1998 ) contained published lectures in which Bourdieu considered the applicability of La Distinction to Japanese society. The purpose of my proposed contribution is to trace the development of Bourdieu's sociology of education in the context of educational policy developments in France during his lifetime and, equally, to trace the ways in which his work has been used in the British context during the period between the first reception of his educational work in the United Kingdom in Knowledge and Control ( Young, 1971 ) to the reception of his more polemical political interventions of the 1990s, many of which implicitly invoked earlier educational thinking. The intention is that this discussion should revive interest in the relevance of Bourdieu's work to the British situation by reference to many of the later texts that appeared after the emphasis of the British field of reception had shifted from education to cultural studies. La noblesse d'état/State nobility ( Bourdieu, 1989 , 1996 ) and La misère du monde/The weight of the world (Bourdieu et al. , 1993, 1999 ) have direct implications for British thinking about education that are different from the implications of the texts of the 1960s, and it is important to disrupt the tendency still to see the importance of Bourdieu's educational work primarily in relation to Les héritiers/The Inheritors ( Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964b ; 1977 ) and La reproduction/Reproduction ( Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970 , 1977 ). Finally, the discussion will confront the question of transferability and ask whether the comparative conditions in Britain and France between 1960 and 2002 justify the transfer of his analyses and research methods across the cultures in the future beyond his death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologist Basil Bernstein's theory of symbolic control and cultural production, reproduction and change, developed since the late 1950's until present day, is famous for its complex, formal and generative character and has gained international acknowledgement. It has provided inspiration for theoretical work in a variety of disciplines and the conceptual framework for robust and sensitive sociological empirical research on cultural and particularly, pedagogic practices and their effects, in many parts of the world. This research in turn was used in the continuous development and refinement of the theory. For a variety of reasons, the theory was not always welcome, or well treated, in the Anglo-Saxon intellectual milieu. It has caused strong controversy and has sometimes become the object of crude oversimplification and miscomprehension, as well as of political and ideological misuse. The theory is explicitly grounded on selected and inventively remolded elements of modern social theory and critically incorporates features of more recent currents of thought.

Recent studies question students' learning gains on college campuses. Even though academic challenges are further complicated for first-generation college students who arrive at college under prepared, little is known about how these setbacks contribute to students' cognitive and behavioral study approaches in college. Situated within a culture perspective and drawing on semi-structured interviews with first-generation college students and course instructors, this study assesses how students contend with competing academic logics in the transition from high school to college. Findings reveal that students draw on high school scripts to fulfill college coursework demands regardless of how ill suited those scripts may be. Students are not motivated to modify or retool existing scripts unless they result in unsatisfactory academic outcomes. We argue that retooling decisions are contrived within incentive-driven frameworks and suggest that these cost-benefit approaches impact first-generation college students' academic growth opportunities in detrimental ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research explores Hong Kong students' dispositions towards higher education and employment in relation to understandings of their schooling experiences in English Medium of Instruction (EMI) schools in Hong Kong. The research draws upon Bourdieu's theory of practice, Appadurai's notion of the 'capacity to aspire', and Taylor's concept of 'social imaginary', to help make sense of students' aspirations for the future. Data included observation notes and interview transcripts with members of six focus groups across three distinctive schools in Hong Kong. Analytically, the research shows how aspirational dispositions and logics formed through specific configurations of the broader cultural and social milieu of Hong Kong, middle-class familial practices, non-elite EMI schooling experiences, and the place of English in Hong Kong, were complicit in fostering a sense of ambivalence about the future for these students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transfer of human resource management (HRM) practices from the corporate business context into schools has taken a novel turn. No longer restricted to the management of school teachers, HRM techniques are now being applied to the management of students. HRM views the student as a human resource to serve the school, and seeks to systematically regulate students’ identities in order to align them with school values and goals. This article introduces the Uncommon Schools model as an exemplar of student-centred HRM. The case study demonstrates how student-centred HRM is being operationalised in schools and concludes by exploring the potential effects on students of existing within an HRM system. The article is informed by critical management theories and argues that student-centred HRM constitutes a radical shift in the relationship between school and student. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established literature suggests that language problems lead to lower attainment levels in those subjects that are more language dependent. Also, language has been suggested as a main driver of ethnic minority attainment. We use an original dataset of 2020 secondary school students to show that ethnic minority students in Cyprus underperform overall, but they do not perform less well in subjects considered more language dependent. We suggest that the main determinant for their low performance is not linguistic but cultural. This is the first study to investigate the performance of Georgians as an ethnic minority group in a European country. It is also one of the very few studies which were deliberately designed to compare the attainment of ethnic minority students on more and less language-dependent subjects. Methodologically, this is an instructive study using a repeated-measures design and combining teacher assessments with test results to alleviate floor and ceiling effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article, through looking at mothers’ modes of engagement with their children’s education, proposes an integrative analytical approach to the study of the making of mothers, mothering, and motherhood. The article presents and brings into dialogue four different bodies of anthropological and sociological literature: mothering as a form of care work, anthropological work on child-rearing in different cultural settings, sociological studies of the class negotiation of home–school boundaries, and the theoretical and empirical literature on consumption in post-industrial society. Bringing together ideas of care, culture, class, and consumption into one analytical framework is crucial for attending to, in holistic fashion, the complex ways in which mothering, in different social–cultural contexts, is perceived and practiced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Educational under-achievement by a section of the Maori population is a persistent problem for New Zealand. This article is a theoretical examination of the practice and consequences of a culture-based curriculum that is promoted as the solution. We develop the argument that not only is the ‘cultural solution’ at odds with the complex social reality in New Zealand, but it is itself a contributor to educational under-achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over recent years there has been growing appreciation of the body's corporeal significance in how children learn in educational settings. 'The body' has been conceptualised from a variety of perspectives that we characterise as: 'the body without flesh', 'the body with fleshy feelings' and 'the body made flesh'. We reflect on these perspectives with reference to the model of embodied action used in our ongoing research on relationships between education and disordered bodies, outlining what they might differently offer in terms of understanding body/mind/culture relationships. We suggest that Basil Bernstein's notion of the 'pedagogic device', when reworked around the concept of a 'corporeal device', may provide one way of better conceptualising such relationships avoiding some of the fault lines and dualistic thinking inherent in other perspectives. If, as sociologists or school practitioners, we are to address the agency of 'the body' in cultural reproduction and better understand how the corporeal realities of children influence their sense of position, value and self, then we will need to deal with both the 'physical' and the 'phenomenal' universes of discourse, and the 'somatic mediations' of lived experience. This will mean giving as much attention to the biological dimensions of embodiment as its discursive representation currently receives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on data generated by a 3-year study, informed by ethnographic principles, of the interface between Gypsy culture and the educational system in the South West of England, this article focuses specifically on the experiences of young Gypsy males [1]. The manner in which they perform specific forms of masculine identity though business skills and dealing, fighting, and sex talk are considered. Tensions are highlighted regarding the ways in which these performances are valued in different communities of practice, and how this operates to maintain an atmosphere of suspicion regarding the educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the unique situation of the Israeli-Jewish education system in Israel, which has developed different educational streams mainly according to religious differences. It highlights the changes in the status of the cultural stands of secular and religious Jewish groups in the course of the twentieth century. The secular majority has been willing to fund separate autonomous religious schools. Remarkably, the lower state intervention in the schools, the higher the level of funding. Thus, the ultra-orthodox schools have enjoyed full funding together with the greatest autonomy. Moreover, the nonautonomous secular state schools have also practiced religious rituals, without any clear guidance by the Ministry of Education and Culture. The implications of full autonomy and funding of the ultra-orthodox schools is discussed, by way of 'critical sociology of education', with emphasis on the 'cultural shift', the cultural advance of the religious groups, and 'cultural surrender' of the secular group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of habitus given by sociologist P. Bourdieu that appears to have little to offer educational research. This proposition is considered in a critical evaluation of the origin of habitus in Bourdieu's work and its ability to fulfill its theoretical functions. Sociologist J. Tooley and D. Darby are not the first to have reached the conclusion the Bourdieu's approach of sociology and particularly the concept of habitus has little to offer educational research. They are not so much concerned with Bourdieu as with the value of his concepts for educational research, and their critique is directed specifically to sociologist D. Reay's work on habitus in the classroom. Tooley and Darby's view that the substantive weakness they identified are due to an "uncritical adulation" of Bourdieu and, more generally, to demonstrate the worthlessness of their approach as a means to reach their substantive conclusion. On the basis of Reay's account of habitus, Tooley and Darby included their study as an instance of the poor-quality educational research they believe to be caused by the willingness of many academics to attach themselves to the coal-tails of some major theorist.

There is a strange dissonance between on the one hand the rather disordered and unstructured everyday reality of teaching as noted in literature on teachers' knowledge and on the other hand the tendency among leading social theorists, such as Bourdieu and Giddens to emphasise the ordered and structured nature of education and social life in general Among the possible reasons for the lack of awareness of and sensitivity to the reality of teaching in contemporary social theory, it is suggested that the predominant educational practice in institutions of higher education, the culture of the lecture hall, might have conditioned social theorists to expect a higher degree of order, rationality and predictability than is actually the case in 'real life' Studying the reality of teaching as an area close to real life can help social theory to reorient itself towards a more realistic picture of modem societies, taking into account a higher degree of disorder and unpredictability than recognised in contemporary social theory This hypothesis may be illustrated with reference to an experiment with 'project work' at a Danish university [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Locating oneself as a poststructuralist not only emphasies readings of texts, but generates data comparable with this location. This article considers some possibilities in researching everyday happening at primary school. Reading and producing discourages, rather than texts only , involves bringing into play our own subjective understanding. Writing differently then a methodology for the analysis of what we have recorded of what we have recorded as research data. For the study of sites and events one, one possibility is for deconstructions to follow a form of ethnography. However with psotstructural theories and their related academic practices, the research choices are different. An effect of this difference is that the timmings and resolution of gathering, presenting and analysing data are dislocated. These dislocations may be read as an enactment of a radical philosophy. They may also be read as a puzzle to be resisted but which is nevertheless constructed to match today's cultural shift and to challenge the nature of researching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ethnographies of youth culture and schooling produced by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural studies and its followers had a major impact on educational sociology during the late 1970s and 1980s. Despite this invaluable contribution, important theoretical and methodological problems emerged in their treatment of class and culture. In particular, the untheorised presence of the 'new middle class' and a confusing notion of 'dominant culture', weakened the coherence of their analyses. This article traces these problems from the early studies of youth culture through to more recent school ethnographies. It concludes by stressing the relevance of critical concepts like class and culture within contemporary debates emerging from the 'new' educational settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within recent years scholars in both sociology of education and curriculum studies have explored what it is about the school that reproduces class, race and gender relations that maintain an unequal social structure While it has long been recognized that school outcomes differ along these lines, the role that the school plays in creating differential outcomes and forms of consciousness that sustain fundamental inequalities and antagonisms has been largely ignored. This is as much true for scholars like Bowles and Gintis as it is for earlier functionalists. This article begins to fill this void by focusing on the relationship between the `hidden curriculum' and student culture Data presented here were gathered as part of a larger study on the `lived culture' of lower class black students in a community college (which I call Urban College) located in a large northeastern city in the United States I argue that, rather than `determine' student culture in any simple sense, the hidden curriculum and student culture emerge in relation to one another Each creates aspects of the other and neither can be discussed or analyzed separately The way in which elements of the hidden curriculum combine in a concrete culture to produce aspects of student consciousness is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that much of school humor is to be seen as coping behavior, means of adjusting the self to difficulties and problems that otherwise might result in failure of task, alienation of self or breakdown of social order. School humor eases teaching and learning, relieving physical and intellectual strain induced by task, parrying alienation threatened by institution. It can aid the formation of a cultural bond between teacher and pupils. It is actually used as a resource by both teacher and pupils in negotiation in instances where each seeks to establish their definition of the situation. In the freedom of the extra-curricular areas of the schoolday, pupils counter boredom and oppression with laughter. In the sanctity of the staffroom, teachers likewise, through humor, rescue their professional dignity and personal self-esteem. The young adolescent, experiencing new and powerful sexual drives and encountering strongly and clearly demarcated images and identities based in part on gender lines, manages the transition to a considerably extent through humor. Some pupils, already alienated from school by virtue of their background social class culture and similarly structurally located in school as their parents are in work, also cope, largely through humor and laughter.

This article summarizes the historical predecessors of a critical theory of education. The social theory of education is an integral part of social and cultural changes. The liberal or progressive view of faith in education as the basis of social reform developed during the period of social expansion and belief in democratic culture. The view of education as cultural reproduction began as a critique of the liberal social theory of education. Cultural reproduction theory belongs to a later time, when commitment to a common culture has become less tenable as a result of the salience of social fragmentation and class division. The most insightful intellectuals see prevailing social arrangements and patterns of culture as partial, deceptive and socially oppressive. Withdrawal of faith in education is an aspect of the removal of commitment from a system of symbolic interpretation that has lost its claim to universality and its capacity to compensate for socioeconomic deprivation with cultural consolation. Cultural meanings, and the institutions through which are transmitted, are identified with social denomination. The disenchantment is connected to an affirmation, among intellectuals, of the endogenous cultures of the oppressed as more authentic and socially accurate than the official culture.

This article is an analysis of teacher training institutions in Britain from the mid-1950s to the present day. Over this period, such institutions have gone through three distinct phases, indicated by their changing nomenclature teacher training college, college of education, institute of higher education. At each stage, the structure, culture, organisation of knowledge and typical modes of social interaction have been different. It is argued that these three stages correspond with Weber's three ideal types 'charismatic education', 'education of the cultivated man', 'specialised expert training'. By using this Weberian idea the analysis attempts to relate the micro-issues of interpersonal interaction and students' educational identities, through the middle range problem of institutional structure, to the wider macro-forces which have influenced teacher education The article is based substantially upon fieldwork conducted by the author between 1974 and 1977 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers two conferences on the sociology of education in 1981 and 1982. The theme of the Sociology of Education Conference is Class, Race and Gender. Among the event's speakers are Jean Anyon, Michael Apple, Philip Wexler, Sandra Acker, Olive Banks, Roger Dale and Sara Delamont. Meanwhile, the Dutch Steering Committee on the Sociology of Education is organising a conference on Youth Culture and Education. The conference is concerned with the relations between youth cultures and education. Attention will be paid to the style of living of pupils and teachers. The preparing committee on the conference has the intention to give further impulses towards a new approach to the inequality debate in education. Main language during the conference is Dutch, but it is possible to speak English.