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.
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.
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.
