Conference:
ECER 2009
Format:
Symposium Paper
Session Information
14 SES 03, Harnessing Social Capital to Meet the Needs of Children & Young People in Challenging Urban Contexts
Symposium
Time:
2009-09-28
14:00-15:30
Room:
JUR, HS 10
Chair:
Kathryn Riley
Discussant:
Lejf Moos
Contribution
This presentation will draw on field work on urban schools to explore the emerging and contentious issues of community cohesion and social capital from a UK perspective. The notion of schools having a role to promote community cohesion has come to the fore recently in the UK. This role has been defined as 'promoting greater knowledge, respect and contact between various sections of the community, and establishing a greater sense of citizenship' (Pearce, 2004, DCSF, 2007,). A legal duty has now been placed on all maintained (publically funded) schools in England to promote community cohesion.
The arguments for schools taking advantage of social capital include how schools can create a special 'sense of place' that engages both children and adults (Glasman & Crowson, 2001) by developing the role of the teacher as a 'bridge' between the school culture and the social networks of the community (Field, 2003). Definitions of social capital in the education field include the notion of 'social energy' that is social capital in action: harnessing the creativity, values and relationships within a community for a shared purpose (Hirschmann, 1984).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.