Source One: “I Need Help!” Social Class and Children’s Help-Seeking in Elementary School

Brian Okoye

03/23/13

English 1103

Calarco, J. M. (2011). “I Need Help!” Social Class and Children’s Help-Seeking in Elementary School. American Sociological Review, 76(6), 862-882.

Jessica Calarco’s journal displays how children’s social-class backgrounds affect when and how they seek help in the classroom. Calarco selects Maplewood Elementary, where the majority of the students are middle-class and about 25 percent of the students are working-class, as her researching site. By examining this suburban, public elementary school, she compares how middle-class and working-class (white) students’ behave in the classroom and how teachers’ respond to them differently. Through research, she is able to conduct a study that explores children’s role in educational stratification. It examines how students’ class backgrounds equip them with different micro-interactional resources (e.g., propensities and strategies) for meeting teachers’ expectations, and considers the profits children derive from using these resources in the classroom (Lareau 2000; Lareau and Weininger 2003). Also, she states how “theorists suggest that middle-class children bring to the classroom the resources needed to meet teachers’ expectations, while the working-class students must obtain these resources in school”. Calarco believes that compared to working-class students, the middle-class children request more help from teachers while using various strategies Additionally, Calarco states that “some scholars suggest that middle- and working-class children interact differently with adults”. By selecting Maplewood Elementary as a researching site, it enables her to “compare how middle- and working-class students respond to and influence the same teachers, peers, and activities in a setting where middle-class norms guide expectations”.

            Calarco theorizes middle-class helping-seeking strategies as “forms of cultural capital”. According to Pierre Bourdieu,” in these settings (what Bourdieu calls fields), middle-class knowledge, skills, and competences become forms of cultural capital that can be used to produce meaningful situational advantages” (Bourdieu 1977, 1985). With the use of different strategies, middle-class children request more help from teachers’ than do working-class students. By exemplifying these strategies, Calarco implies that middle-class children create their own advantages and contribute to inequalities in the classroom. Instead of waiting for assistance, middle-class children directly approach teachers’, even though it may interruptive. With this done, Calarco suggested that middle-class children spend less time waiting, which results in them receiving more help and getting their assignments completed.  Besides, if working-class students acquire middle-class knowledge and strategies, theories suggest that “they can never achieve the natural familiarity of those born to these classes and are academically penalized on this basis” (Lamont and Lareau 1988:155). Calarco suggest that “these theories imply that children are differentially equipped to interact with institutions and these interactions will contribute to inequalities.”

            By comparing middle-class and working-class students’ classroom behaviors, I will establish the main argument of my inquiry topic. Once I form the main argument of my inquiry topic, I will get a better understanding of how I would like to specify and correlate my supporting arguments with my main argument. Through my knowledge of children’s role in educational stratification, I will discuss the division of social class in education and I will also describe the advantages of one social class over another. Furthermore, now that I am aware that middle-class children bring to the classroom the resources needed to meet teachers’ expectations, while the working-class students must obtain these resources in school, I will seek a motive to argue how one social class is more or less equipped with resources than the other. Moreover, by understanding how teachers’ respond to proactive request, I will able to explain why one social class receives more attention than the other and why that social class is able to further succeed in school.