Bourdieu: explorations in field theory

Grenfell, M.J. (2006) Bourdieu: explorations in field theory. Conference of the British Educational Research Association, Warwick, UK. 06 - 09 Sep 2006. 15 pp .

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu became known to British educationalists during the 1970s when he formed part of the new wave of ‘sociologists of education’. Since this time, his publications expanded to cover a range of other topics and fields: economic, management, art and aesthetics, philosophy, politics, history, geography, etc. However, it can be argued that it is to education that he constantly returned; for example, in Homo Academicus (1984), La Noblesse d’Etat (1989), and his attack on scholastic reason in Pascalian Meditation (1997). Even in La misère du monde (1993), there are lengthy accounts from both teachers and students on what it is to inhabit education in France in the late nineteenth century.
A number of books and commentaries have been written about Bourdieu and his ideas and theories. It is also common to find reference to him in literature on a range of educational topics. However, the application of what he referred to as his ‘thinking tools – habitus, field, capital, reflexivity, etc. – to empirical studies in education is comparatively quite rare. One contemporary commentator even asks whether a concept such as ‘habitus’ is really ‘worth the candle’, if it takes thirty years to elucidate. In 1998, I published a book with David James entitled ‘Bourdieu and Education: Acts of Practical Theory’. In the Introduction to this book, we wrote: ‘whilst we do not wish to insist that a Bourdieuian approach is automatically the best way to research educational phenomena,…(our conviction) is that research in terms of Bourdieu’s theory of practice offers insights and understandings not readily visible in other approaches’ (p.2). We then included contributions from Philip Hodkinson and Diane Reay to complement our own in order to illustrate this point.
The present paper builds on this project. It presents Bourdieu work as providing a practice of theory in further educational contexts. Three specific topics are considered: teacher education, classroom discourse, and philosophy of education. In each case, a range of issues are addressed from the established literature before reviewing these in the light of Bourdieu’s approach. The aim is to ‘test out’ the working of this theory in practice; in specific educational research projects. Finally, the paper discusses recent work on ‘social capital’. I shall address how this concept has been dealt with by educational researchers in recent years and how this differs from the use Bourdieu makes of it. In conclusion, the paper assesses the strength of insights provided and the degree to which Bourdieu’s approach offers a genuine new paradigm for educational researchers as a whole, not simply sociologists of education.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Author: M.J. Grenfell

Download statistics