AUSTRALIAN PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS FOR TEACHERS
Standard 1: Know students and how they learn
This discussion describes how students from different social class backgrounds might have different strengths and needs in the education context. These differences must be considered in order to appropriately support student participation.
Standard 7: Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community
This chapter points to how social class might mediate parents’ and carers’ involvements in their children's education and calls for sensitive and strategic responses from teachers.
We were upper middle class. Because of Dad's income we were reasonably comfortable and probably a bit higher than the average. We got to go to private Catholic schools as kids and then I was sent to a private girls’ school in the city, because we lived in the country, and then university. So we were probably upper middle class.
(Peta, a middle-class mother)Introduction
The preceding interview excerpt shows how closely schooling is tied to social class. Here, the interviewee links her middle-class status to the privilege of private schooling and tertiary education, along with her father's income. Interestingly, while Peta was asked to discuss her class history, she was not specifically questioned about her schooling history at this point – this is an inference that the interviewee, as well as many others who participated in a study of mothering practices, made independently. This chapter reiterates and unpacks this connection in a description and appropriation of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of education. While many of us may recognise, as Peta did, a connection between social class and schooling, Bourdieu's abstractions allow both researchers and teachers to better understand, articulate and respond to the complexities of this association. Beginning with an outline of some of the ways in which Bourdieu has been taken up within contemporary education research, this chapter highlights the strengths of Bourdieu's theory of social practice. Making use of his concepts, as well as the approaches of Annette Lareau, Diane Reay, Gill Crozier and David James, this chapter explores the classed dimensions of school choice in an analysis of mothers’ orientations to ‘private’ and ‘public’ schooling. In doing so, it argues against ‘the end of class’ thesis, the now popular notion that class is irrelevant for understanding contemporary experience.