Annotated Bibliography Second Draft

Jessica McCrory Calarco (2011). "'I Need Help!' Social Class and Children's Help-Seeking in Elementary School," American Sociological Review 76, no. 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.

Lareau, A. (2000). Home advantage: Social class and parental intervention in elementary education. Rowman & Littlefield Pub Incorporated. Book.

 

Annette Lareau’s, in her book, mainly argues that “social class affects schooling and challenges the position that social class is of only modest and indirect significance in shaping children’s lives in schools”. Lareau states that “teachers ask for parent involvement” and she believes that social class has a powerful influence on parent involvement patterns.  She also argues that social class differences in family involvement in schooling appear to reflect the amount of separation between work and home in working-class and middle-class families. Moreover, Lareau argues that social class has a powerful influence on life changes because in influences the values that parents hold and pass on to their children. She trusts that social class alters the cultural resources, including language and knowledge of art, music, and other cultural experiences. Most importantly, Annette Lareau pays attention to the devotion of parent involvement in schooling at the elementary level.

Lareau argues that social class plays a relevant role in parent involvement patterns. Though parent’s involvement is tied to school success, it can could also contribute to the lack of school success when parents’ lack involvement. Middle-class parents have a tendency to be more proactive in parent-teacher interactions than lower-class parents. Lareau implies that middle-class parents consistently take more active roles in school than do working-class parents when considering verbal development, attending school events and reading to children. Additionally, she focuses on the joining of researchers and teachers, and their efforts to create strategies that will improve parent involvement. According to Lareau, “the policy implications of parent involvement in schooling have now come to dominate the research agenda.” She argues that overtime valuable evidence that the curriculum, classroom goals and organization and structure of schooling have changed drastically. This implies that Lareau believes that home-school relationships are possible.

            By concluding that the impact of socio-economic status is on the values and educational aspirations which children bring to the educational process, I will argue these values of which children bring to education based on their socio-economic status. My knowledge of social class and how parent’s ownership of resources affects the teachers’ request for assistance, will allow me to discuss how social class affects a child’s request for a teachers’ assistance based on the resources they possess. By seeing consistency in parent influence and involvement, I am interested in arguing how family value can profit social class differently. Furthermore, I will discuss how the curriculum, classroom goals and organization and structure of schooling of different social class have evolved over time. Decisively, I will describe how cultural resources and experiences affect students in the classroom based on their social class.

Anyon, J. (1981). Elementary schooling and distinctions of social class. Interchange, 12(2), 118-132.

Jean Anyon, in her paper, argues that the role of education in industrial societies is to reproduce an unequal system of social classes. Through her ethnographical study, she investigates how distinctions of social class are produced and reproduced in five elementary schools. When Anyon address reproductive education and how elementary schools can reproduce distinctions of class, she creates assumptions of her own about fifth graders in a working-class school and in an affluent professional school of her own. She models her paper after notions of contradictory social consciousness, the dialectic of cultural activity and social change, and the importance of situated, class-specific, transformative professional teaching. Moreover, she briefly applies the model to reproductive characteristics of the working-class and affluent professional classrooms. Her assumptions informing her work on production and reproduction in classrooms is based on the argument that “while students and teachers certainly produce meaning in classrooms, these meaning are produced within boundaries and multiple constraints that ordinarily over determine their general form and substance. One major point that Anyon argues, is that educators can do a great deal to transform cultural expression of resistance into direct political action to change the economic and social system.

            Anyon argues that we have very little understanding first-hand of the mechanisms by which curricula and classrooms actually contribute to the production and reproduction of distinctions and relations of social class. According to Anyon, having over determined classroom productions produce “social actors who, in their behavior in society, produce and reproduce the “system”.” She suggests that power and domination determines what is produced in classrooms and that social actors reproduce the system largely by their everyday productions. For example, when a person produces a sentence in Standard English, they contribute to the reproduction of the language. Anyon explains that though the production and reproduction of social distinctions exemplifies over determination, social actor’s knowledge of society and its multiple constraints does not promise change. Instead they can be held accountable for their actions. Through everyday activities of social reproduction, she implies that people who challenge these ideas can contribute to struggles against cultural and economic reproduction. The five schools Anyon contrasted were in social-class settings, working-class, middle-class, affluent-professional, and elite communities. In interpreting the importance of their differences, she argues that they contribute by emphasizing work skills and capacities in different social classes appropriate to the reproduction of the division between manual and mental labor in American society. Additionally, Anyon argues that they contribute by transmitting class-based curriculum knowledge and dominant reproductive social ideologies. Anyon concludes by arguing the creation of institutional arenas in which children may develop indirect (cultural), rather than direct (political), responses to resisting oppression and resolving contradictions.

            Through Anyon’s studies, I will discuss how the production and reproduction of distinctions in social class creates constraints in society. Also, in my inquiry paper, I will argue how power and domination determines what is produced in classrooms and how that creates a reproduction of everyday productions. By contrasting social-class settings in working-class and middle-class communities, determine and discuss the emphasis on the different social skills, the transmission of class-based curriculum knowledge and dominant reproductive social ideologies, and propose how children may develop indirect responses to resisting oppression.

  If These Halls Could Talk. Dir. Lee Mun Wah. 2011. DVD

Lee Mun Wah believes that we have created a system to hurt people and it is our part to take responsibility for it. He mentioned the great myth of our country, in which “if we don’t talk about the conflicts that we are currently apart of, it will just go away. In his film, If These Halls Could Talk, Mun Wah brings together eleven college students from around the country to share their story about personal experiences with social class differences.  Mun Wah, in his film, exhibits how to create a sense of community in the classroom and how students can get to know each other more personally. He also exhibits how classroom discussions and solve conflict between students in a matter of a few minutes.  He stresses that with the use of classroom check-ins, one can promote a deeper understanding and friendship with one another.  Lee Mun Wah believes that the future of diversity is getting to know and understand someone who is different than you. The people he spoke of are people who are taught to be afraid of each other.

According to Lee Mun Wah, working class individual just want their opinion to be heard. As a working-class individual, they have to be over-qualified in order to feel qualified. In If These Halls Could Talk, a working-class male states that he feels that the discussion that he was having with the other ten college students felt like “the only setting he would be heard in without having a PHD”. Mun Wah argued that working-class individuals believe that the idea of succeeding within the system, whenever the opportunity presents itself, has been planted in them from the beginning and that some, depending on the type of working-class, have turned degrading expression or words into words of endearment. They often feel incapable of finishing school and if they do it to prove a point. Working-class individuals are afraid because they do not know what will happen next. One the contrary, Lee Mun Wah argues that some middle-class individuals understand the troubles of a working-class individual. These working-class individuals just do not know how to proceed to make matters better. Some of them do not want to be a part of a system that hurts people, but according to Mun Wah, they believe it is easier not to discuss the issues at hand.

Based on the research I recently gathered, I will be able to argue the opinions of working class individuals (students) and middle-class individuals (students) and how they differ. With their opinions and views stated, I will then answer the questions of the reader of why these social class opinions exist based on the information I have gathered from researchers. The experience that I have endured while being indulged in Lee Mun Wah’s film will lead to an analysis on how the strategies and parental involvement of working-class and middle-class students affects their performance within the classroom. Moreover, my analysis, which I plan on including in my inquiry paper, will be based on ethnographical studies done by researchers and educators.