Drawing on case study data from an American urban school, this paper examines the elementary school classroom as a setting for children's learning of culturally appropriate modes of informal work group behavior. Rather than representing an intrusive, disfunctional element in schoolroom social organization, pupil peer activity is strongly conditioned, in form and function, by the classroom situational context and by school‐sponsored norms for peer conduct. School norms are communicated to children through both informal and formal channels, and are sanctioned in the classroom disciplinary process. Although several forms of peer activity occur at the expense of organizational goals, peer group activity takes a number of forms that evince cooperation with school goals and authority and that lend support to individual achievement. SCHOOLING, ORGANIZATIONAL SOCIALIZATION, PEER BEHAVIOR, HIDDEN CURRICULUM, ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION.
Recent ethnography of minority and working-class schooling has shown how wider structural factors like class stratification, poverty, and racism influence observable patterns of failure and under achievement in the classroom. In contrast, ethnography in middle-class schools and classrooms has not seriously probed similar structural bases of middle-class children's success, instead attributing this success to a presumed equivalence between the “middle-class culture” of the children's homes and the culture of the school and its staff. This study traces the history and effects of middle-class involvement in the public elementary school of a gentrifying inner-city neighborhood in New York City. Segregated into their special classrooms with distinctive curriculum and organization, the school's middle-class children were more successful than their poor and working-class peers. Their success was not the result, in Bourdieu's terms, of the “cultural capital” afforded by their middle-class upbringing. The school staff, in fact, disapproved of many elements of the children's class culture. Rather, the children's successful standing within the school had been the object, and achievement, of their parents' long-standing political struggles against the school's staff and other parents. This case illustrates that school success is as much an active social construction—both inside and outside the school—as school failure has been shown to be.
SURPRISINGLY SIMILAR DEVELOPMENTS in planning, land use, and cultural life are evident in "revitalized" waterfronts in many port cities throughout North America. This article presents a cultural theory of waterfront redevelopment, viewing the process as a characteristic response of similarly situated postindustrial port cities to international economic restructuring, technological obsolescence of port facilities, and corporatization. Major themes in revitalized waterfronts—environmentalism, history and heritage, and tourism and festival —serve to connect newcomer elite groups to a changing urban environment, by reconceptualizing the relationship of the city toward nature, the past, and work, [port cities, urban renewal, waterfronts, postindustrialism]
Community murals in US innercity neighborhoods offer popular, grassroots representations of local identities and their relation to urban space and community culture. They are powerful tools in building neighborhood solidarity across ethnic groups, generations, and defended gang territories. Designed primarily for local consumption, murals circulate dramatic, alternative representations of local identity, heritage and history, contesting attributions of stigma and danger promulgated in mainstream media. In Boston's Dudley Street corridor that crosscuts its Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods, both low-income communities of color, these themes are evident in the presence of a vibrant series of community murals lining the one-mile long street. Designed and painted by local youth under the sponsorship of grassroots communitybased organizations, the murals give voice to urban youth's hopes, struggles, and aspirations for their individual and collective futures, from their positions in disadvantaged, multi-ethnic neighborhoods in a city sharply divided by race and class. Murals, public art, urban ethnography, youth. The visual culture of cities . . .represents a central formative feature of the lives and identities of contemporary citizens and demands ethno-bs_bs_banner
MIDDLE-CLASS PROFESSIONALS WHO GENTRIFIED a New York City neighborhood during the 1960s and 1970s possessed a coherent vision of community improvement that guided their civic activity. Drawing on many long-standing Western antiurban notions, their vision centered on themes of renewal, cleansing, and purification of a fundamentally disordered and polluted city, and guided their actions in four main areas: (1) opposition to commercial and industrial development; (2) historic preservation and restoration; (3) beautification t greening, and celebration of the "natural"; and (4) political reform. Current urban economic trends in North America, particularly the shift from manufacturing to service-based economies, support the appearance of this ideology and the associated gentrification practices, [gentrification, housing, New York]
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