Government attention (in England and elsewhere) has been drawn to the role of technology in supporting learning in families. However, sociologists of education highlight that parent's ability to engage with their children's education and learning is not a straightforward issue. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this paper attempts to open up a space for examination of the differential experiences of parents from different social class backgrounds, of technology in the home, and how this informs the potential they see for family learning using technology. We use Bourdieu's concepts of 'cultural and economic capital' and 'habitus' to explore several themes. Firstly, the paper explores the impact of material inequalities of access on families and how this structures parental engagement with technology in relation to their children's schooling; secondly, how the harms and risks of technology are differentially experienced, negotiated and managed by parents from different social class backgrounds -with varying amounts of social and cultural resources available to them; thirdly, through discussion of the 'generation gap', we examine the significance of the parents' working lives (in terms of the privileged forms of engagement with technology, which professional employment increasingly requires and facilitates) in shaping parents' own relationships to education and learning.
This is an exploratory study concerned with understanding the role and experiences of teaching assistants (TAs) within primary schools. The analysis suggests that TAs are constructed within a policy discourse that tends to posit their role as peripheral to teaching and learning. I offer an alternative account, deploying a concept of liminality which acknowledges the creative, open, ambiguous and ambivalent nature of the TA's role. My argument is supported by an interpretation of data drawn from a small qualitative study of TAs within two selected multi-ethnic innercity schools. It draws attention to the boundary work of TAs, both within schools and between the inside and outsides, the schools and their wider social and cultural contexts, which is important in understanding processes of in/exclusion within schools and the TAs' contributions, both overt and hidden.
Social mix and social mixing are topics of increasing significance to both the policy and academic communities in the UK, and have particular salience in urban multi-ethnic and socially diverse contexts. Enshrined in the comprehensive school ideal, and implicated in the now legal duty to promote ‘community cohesion,’ (urban) schools play a pivotal role in agendas for social mixing but little is empirically known about how this is lived and experienced by the young people in those schools. This paper begins to develop a theoretical understanding of social mixing drawing on qualitative data on the patterns, discourses, and experiences of associations and friendships collected in a London comprehensive school. We find that while the social mix of the school is celebrated, in official discourse as congenial and ‘convivial’, by staff and students alike, the extent of actual mixing - of associations and friendships forming between those of different social and ethnic backgrounds - is both constrained and complex. We point to the social and cultural factors which produce this sense of conviviality, and the opportunities for cultural learning it supports. At the same time, we argue that there are limitations. Schools are sites of differentiation, and friendships as exemplars of social mixing, both (re)produce and are (re)produced by existing social hierarchies and inequalities.
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