Session Information
19 SES 02 B, Ethnographic Approaches to Researching ‘Troubling’ Categories of Families and their Positioning within Discourses of Schooling
Symposium
Contribution
This paper explores interrelationships between families and education systems in Australia, Denmark and England through an examination of the cultural meanings and impact of homework on learning and family life in diverse sociocultural contexts. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘habitus’, capital and field and Laureau’s notion of ‘concerted cultivation’ the paper explores the ‘family habitus’ and the learning dispositions formed through the interrelationships between the private domain of the family and the institutional habitus of the school in order to understand the ways in which homework produces educational advantage and disadvantage for particular groups of children. Using a range of data including homework video diaries, interviews and textual analysis, the paper presents contrastive case studies of the micro-practices of homework within diverse school communities in the three countries. The central argument presented is that as field of practice shaped by social class, homework requires complex forms of social and cultural capital from families, which may weigh more heavily on working-class, poor or linguistically diverse communities. This analysis of the institutional and familial power relationships constituted through homework generates insights into the ways in which cultural, social and emotional capital can be mobilised to secure class privilege and educational advantage.
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