5016 disable
From Studyplace
Contents |
[edit] why should social interaction require preliminary learning?
[edit] what is the use of reporting on people in terms of what they lack?
I absolutely agree that authors need to be careful about making broad generalizations about groups, and that they should think carefully about the words that they use when trying to convey the messages that they are trying to get across; however, I disagree with Professor Varenne’s interpretation of Lareau’s use of the term “competence” when describing the educational background of the parents in Colton. The word competence can refer to ability, but it can also refer to, according to dictionary.com, “adequacy; possession of required skill, knowledge, qualification, or capacity”. To say that the parents in Colton were not competent in the sense that they are not able or capable of academic achievement (or incompetent / stupid) would not only be offensive but incorrect, but I feel that Lareau was using the term competence to refer to the actual educational credentials and experience that Colton parents had in their possession. The context of her discussion of educational competence was that she was trying to highlight the causes for lower parental involvement among lower income families. She argues that, when parents have less credentials or schooling themselves, this makes them less sure about assisting their children with homework and interacting with teachers. She also refers to Colton parents as having “inferior educational skills” as compared to Prescott parents. Again the word “inferior” is a politically loaded term, and she probable could have picked a better one, but her message still holds true: parental education is a form of cultural, human and social capital that has an impact on the academic achievement of students, including parental involvement. –Kara Balemian
[edit] how would one choose, among everything that someone else may lack, which lack to report?
- I couldn't get past the "lack" of accuracy in the first sentence of Annete Lareau's "Home Advantage." Anyone at least remotely familiar with New York City outside of Columbia University, would know that Norman Podhoretz grew up in Brownsville Brooklyn, and not in the Bronx as Lareau states. Ask anybody born and raised in NYC and they will ascertain that Brownsville, Brooklyn is indeed, very far from Columbia University, both geographically and symbolically. But Brownsville Brooklyn is even further from the Bronx, as the two are similar, but mutually exclusive, geographic areas. Does this incorrect information or "lack" in reporting of factual data at all discredit Lareau's work? Or is it merely a cosmetic flaw that should be overlooked? How much trust do we place in the authorship of scholarly text, when the simple fact of a NYC neighborhood goes unchecked? What does reporting this seemingly minute detail correlate with my experience as an American educator, if anything? -s.wessler
[edit] what else do parents do that may be educational?
Well I'm not sure Lareau's book talks about the educational work that parents (or teachers) do. Much of the book seems to be about the management of parent-teacher/parent-school/child-schooling relationships. One of the first things articulated to me about TC Anthro & Ed professors is they distinguish between schooling and education (or the process called schooling and education). While this book seems to be about schooling (especially how schooling creeps into or invades the home, or doesn't), it's tough to know what it says about education. I went to skim for an example of the (misleading/incorrect?) conflation of the two terms education and schooling, and early on in Ch. 6 found: "Interviews with parents in their homes, however, did not suggest that parents participation in schooling reflected the value they placed on education. Most Colton parents said that education was very important: they were insistent that their children attain a high school diploma. Parents whose children were retained were deeply upset by their children's educational failures" (99). Briefly, I wonder about how "education was very important" is related to a high school diploma, and how a child can fail at education. So we ask "what else do parents do that may be educational," and I wonder if we're talking about anything educational that parents are doing, let alone what else they may be doing. - Beau
Given that education and schooling are not always aligned in the way we think they should be, I want to talk about cultural capital. Is schooling simply a mechanism/institution that reproduces cultural capital and therefore the dominant structures at hand? The main subject to be learned at the schools Lareau describes is not reading, writing or arithmetic, but success. The parents themselves are receiving education on success: What must I do in order for my child to succeed at this school? The teachers seem complicit in this process as well. "Parental involvement" is often equated to a child's success in school, but the parent is forced to learn acceptable forms of involvement. It's not enough for them to just show up. When parents lack the cultural capital to already be in the know of proper etiquette of parental involvement, they apparently fail at helping their children succeed. Obviously, this is unfair from the get-go. So does this mean that our job as educators is to teach cultural capital in schools? I would argue that if the goal is to level the playing field, then yes. Having been a high school teacher in a low-performing school, the group of teachers that I worked with made this an explicit goal. Of course we were concerned with our designated subjects, but we also laid bare the cultural constructs that were at play in reproducing their status. Oddly enough, now that I think about it, we rarely did this with their parents. That's a whole 'nother can o' worms. I can't say that our approach always equated with success, but some of the kids really seemed to get it. Other students seemed to reject either consciously or unconsciously the whole cultural capital game. Thoughts? How much can cultural capital pave the way for success without the help of the old-fashioned kind of capital? - Lauren B.
Previous Discussion Definitions and Consequences--Next Discussion Contrasting Ignorace: Enabling
