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Heinz Duthel: Theses on Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault

“Be an ideologue comrade, make us believe in ourselves, when we still believe in God. Teach us about tomorrow, when our feet are still stuck in yesterday.”

The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; violence which had always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that we can fight fear.

Heinz Duthel

‘Nothing exist that can proof that we exist’

Heinz Duthel: Theses on Marx, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

For my children

Karl’s Voice

Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kommt drauf an sie zu verändern.

(The Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.)

(Karl Marx, 1845, Theses on Feuerbach)

The Poets’ Voice

But to go to School on a summer mourn

O, it drives all joys away.

Under a cruel eye outworn

The little ones spend the day

In sighing and dismay.

William Blake

Good sense which once ruled far and wide,

Now in our schools to rest is laid.

Science, its once beloved child,

Killed it to see how it was made.

Guiseppe Giuste (1808 – 1850) Epigrammi – 1849

(Gramsci’s translation)

We don’t need no education

We don’t need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Hey, Teacher, leave those kids alone

All in all we’re just another brick in the wall

The Wall, Pink Floyd, 1979

Abstract

. What I have tried to map out here is the basis of the theory of knowledge and social action on which I shall be basing my research; that fundamentally, human activity is social in character, that social structures are dynamic and relational, but exhibit a level of stability which results in dispositions gelling into objective structures. I develop a theoretical base and iteratively explore this in a setting, evolving a description of how we might understand (or model) the orientation of mathematics teachers. In other words, I am offering a detailed study of a context from which I present a description of an approach to conceptualising two teachers’ orientation. Although the particularities of the ‘cases’ are specific, the methodology is sufficiently transparent, and the theoretical development sufficiently well established to offer others an insight into diverse contexts.

The fundamental problem in which I am interested in this Study is how capitalist society is reproduced. Drawing significantly from critical social theory, the work of Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, I approach this problem by looking specifically at the contribution made by mathematics teaching to the maintenance of structured relations of domination. I construct theoretical, conceptual and methodological frameworks to enable me to study some of the underlying relationships between mathematics teacher predispositions and social structure. I discuss the weaknesses in Michel Foucault’s description of how discourses are sustained, and attempt to resolve these theoretical difficulties by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s dialectical approach to the habitus. I begin by socially and politically locating myself before moving on to looking at how we can understand the way modern capitalist society operates. I move onto examining theories for understanding the interplay between human agency and social structure. Thereafter, I look at the social roots of mathematics education identifying those areas where our current ideas about teaching and learning are inadequately conceptualised. Methodologically, I draw heavily on in-depth sequential interviewing, and classroom observation. I construct a model for what I term the discursive positioning of two contrasting teachers of mathematics, and explore how these differences might relate to wider social structures. This discursive positioning relates the externalising discourses (through which mathematics teaching and learning encounter the wider social context), and the deep-rooted evaluative dispositions of teachers, which operate through mediating relations which balance the interplay between human agency and social structure. In addition, I illustrate how teachers’ beliefs and conceptions about their role, rest upon ideological foundations located in their inclination toward particular social relations.

Acknowledgements

For my son Teddy

Preface

[Foucault, 1969: Tr 1972 #16, p 171]

Ser ideólogo camarada,

Fazer-nos acredita en nós

Quando ainda cremos em deus.

Ensinar-nos o amanhã

Quando os pés ainda se arrastam em ontem.

Sergio Viera, 1970

(Poesia de Combate, Vol 2, Frelimo, Maputo)

In the everyday scheme of things, schools and the teaching of mathematics can seem to be both ‘neutral’ and ‘independent’ to quote Michel Foucault. Yet, there are too many stories of school and social failure for this to be particularly convincing. Seen in a different light schools are sites of contestation, resistance and violence - albeit mainly symbolic rather than physical. For many pupils, school days are happy days, a launch pad into successful careers and relative prosperity. For others, it is a daily experience of continued failure. It is this disparity which captures my imagination in this Study. If according to the poet Sergio Viera, it incumbent on us to liberate children from the limitations of today, to help them believe in themselves and to show them tomorrow, then we fail many children; children at the margins, children from ethnic minorities, children whose cultural backgrounds and outlook might be different from the norms of the majority of teachers.

This Study is one part of a project to try to change the way some people are constrained, oppressed and restricted in their development and aspirations. It is about clarifying the mechanisms by which systems of power are maintained and sustained at the level of human agency in the mathematics classroom. Surely, this is a worthy aim, and one that we might expect all reasonable people to subscribe to and work toward?

If Marx’s project be regarded as the furthering, through the conjunction of social analysis and political analysis, of forms of human society in which the mass of human beings can attain freedoms and modes of self-realization in excess of any they may have enjoyed before, who can dissent from it.

[Giddens, 1981 #233, p 24]

Well no doubt there are many - especially those who stand to lose by such change. In addition, it seems to be at least interesting if not socially incumbent on us to ask, if no one could dissent from freedom and self-realisation, how did it all come to be this way? In this Study, I attempt a clarification of this issue. How comes it to be this way? I hope in this Study what I say will be taken as conjectural, and propositional, an invitation to engage rather than ‘dogmatic assertions’. I am not a neutral observer, trying to construct some external or objective reality. As is inevitable in such a work as this, there is much of me in here. Whilst I am writing as an academic researcher, I am also writing (among other things) as a partner, as a socialist and as a father. As a partner, I am aware that one needs to understand others, and to give in order to feel fulfilled oneself. As a socialist, I have certain values, duties and responsibilities to others. As a father to two tiny females, I face the future with aspirations for their welfare as well as some trepidation. The work in this Study brings together these three fundamental drives.

Referencing and citations

I have used Endnote Plus 2.3® to manage references and form the bibliography in this Study. I have chosen to give original publication dates in citations, whilst publication dates for actual sources used are given in references. For example:

Durkheim, Émile (1938: 1977) L'evolution pedagogique en France, (also published in 1977 as The Evolution of Educational Thought. Lectures on the Formation and Development of Secondary Education in France, translated by Peter Collins, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

In most cases involving major translations – most notably the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault – I used the official English translations. In citations, I have used the original publication date, followed by the date of the English translation actually used. In this case, page numbers refer to the English translation. For example, [Bourdieu, 1979: 1984 #45, p 387] refers to page 387 of the English translation of:

Bourdieu, Pierre (1979: 1984) La Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, (also published in 1984 as Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Translated by Richard Nice, published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, London)

In the case of the works of Karl Marx and Valdimir Lenin, I have where possible used the Collected Works published by Lawrence and Wishart, giving again in citations the dates of publication of the original manuscript rather than the (somewhat historically arbitrary) date of publication of the volume. For example:

Marx, Karl (1844) ‘Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844’, Collected Works Volume 3, pps 229 – 346, published in 1977, London, Lawrence and Wishart.

I do this not to suggest that I have actually read the original in whatever language the author wrote, but rather to be truer to a sense of history. It may seem a little perverse to some, but surely not as perverse as citing (Foucault 1990), (Durkheim 1977) or (Marx 1975). If only I could! There will of course be deviations from this specifically in the works of Lev Vygotsky, where original dates seem hard to come by.

The issue of citations is not a trivial matter in a work such as this. I cite other authors to show some affinity or disagreement with their work, and in addition to locate myself into the community of scholars by identifying whose work I have sought to develop. In carrying out work of this type, one inevitably comes across work cited by other authors. Where the work seemed important in substance, I have gone back to the original source and cited the original author. For example in Graham Hitchcock and David Hughes’ book Research and the Teacher. A Qualitative Introduction to School-based Research, [Hitchcock, 1989 #598] I came across reference to Claus Moser and Graham Kalton’s book, Survey Methods in Social Investigation [Moser, 1983 #590] in which they referred to three aspects necessary for successful interviewing. However, on referring to Moser and Kalton, I found that they in turn had drawn on Charles Cannell and Robert Kahn’s chapter, ‘Interviewing’, in Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson’s edited book Handbook of Social Psychology. Volume 2 – Research Methods, [Cannell, 1954, 1968 #603]. In this case, I went back to Cannell and Kahn’s book, which seemed to be the substantive work, and which had only been drawn on rather than developed in the subsequent texts.

On the other hand, a chapter by Stephen Lerman, ‘Culturally Situated Knowledge and the Problem of Transfer in the Learning of Mathematics’, in Leone Burton’s Learning Mathematics: From Hierarchies to Networks, referred to a book by Leslie Smith, Necessary Knowledge. Piagetian Perspectives on Constructivism in which a claim was made that Piaget had recognised the importance of the social dimension in learning. In referring to Smith, I found he referred in turn to citations from Jean Piaget. In this case I did not read the original Piaget – and made this clear in the text. My main reason was that in this particular case it did not seem important whether or not Piaget has actually said something or not, what was significant was how I interpreted the claim being made – that the social dimension was restricted to social interaction.

Throughout this Study, I refer to other authors by the use of both first name and surname. I do this deliberately out of respect, and a desire to feel that I am working within a community. I recognise that it runs counter to academic tradition, and apologise to those readers who may find it tedious.

The context of this Study

I am submitting this Study under the regulations appertaining to FLAEPA Academy Barcelona and hence, this Study is part of the central core of my work as an a scholar. There are no word limits – as indeed there would not be had I decided to apply for Master in Philosophy by published works, a route open to all Students. I outline my rationale for the length of this Study in more detail in the text – particularly in Chapter 1 by referring to my inclusion of a justificatory framework embedded within this Study. I have striven for clarity in expression and identification in key themes and concepts. In addition I have ‘shown my workings out’ in several places in this Study by giving some account of my journey to make sense of the theory and the data.

Chapter 1 - Setting the Scene

Synopsis of Chapter 1

In this chapter, I set the scene for the rest of the Study. Opening with a quote from Antonio Gramsci, I give you an opportunity to read some indication of how I see myself. You will of course make your own mind up, but the least I can do is to try, as honestly as I can, to give you some biographical background. I hope you will let me hold your hand as I take you on the journey I am making and let me be your guide. First, I want to encourage you to trust me by trying to indicate what drives me to undertake the journey. Second, I give you some sense of why I feel the journey needs making at all. Lastly, I give you a map of the journey we are about to make. I had just written an early draft of this chapter when I watched a BBC TV programme called “Grammar School boys” where several ‘celebrities’ recounted their experiences on passing the 11+ and going to the Grammar School. I was quite astonished at the similarities between my own experiences and some of the stories that were told in that programme. Surprise, joy, disappointment, segregation were all emotions that figured highly.

I have chosen to focus here on my formative early years for two main reasons. First because a central feature of the (social) theoretical approach I take underlines the importance of the influence one’s parents and early socialisation has on subsequent development and trajectory. Second, it helps to give an alternative view to the official view of educators and teachers. It was in my easily years that the basis for my research questions began their process of sedimentation.

Because narrative and personal stories are easy to read, this might be the chapter you enjoy reading most - if only out of prurient inclinations. Do bear in mind, it holds the seed of the start of a journey, and for that reason is intellectually demanding.

1.1. Introduction to Me

The first important task in studying the intellectual contribution of a writer is the reconstruction of the author’s biography, not only as regards his practical activity, but also and above all as regards his intellectual activity

[Gramsci, 1971 #282, p 382 – 383]

1.2. Background to the Study

Any description of classroom activity that cannot be related to the social structure and culture of the society is a conservative description.

[Walker, 1970 #476, p 143]

To explain any educational process we must have a conceptual apparatus that relates the economic and social structure of society to the teaching process.

[Lundgren, 1979 #477, p 42]

Neither the life of an individual, nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

[Mills, 1970 #562, p 3]

1.2.1 The mathematics education context

“Mathematics is often about nothing at all” was how one correspondent to the Cockcroft Report, Mathematics Counts, published in 1982, summarised what must be many children’s experience of the subject. Mathematics is about collecting like terms, removing brackets and all manner of things that seem quite divorced from our everyday lives, interests or needs. Yet, it is a naïve description because it merely takes some of the surface features and ignores the complexity and underlying structure. Paradoxically, it is exactly because someone can say this that makes the situation more worrying - showing how alternative descriptions can be lost and how complete the hegemonic control can be over the nature of educational experiences.

One response to the criticism that mathematics is ‘about nothing at all’, is to tinker with the curriculum, to trying to make mathematics ‘more relevant’ using ‘real life’ or ‘real world’ examples. Yet, as I will go on to argue, and as Paul Dowling has demonstrated [Dowling, 1998 #391], this does little to change the situation since many of the contexts are unreal and mythological.

The three epigraphs that open this section are intended to give a feel for my position in this Study. It is my desire to liberate and empower; to liberate by exploring the ordinary, the everyday common normal practices. By problematising these everyday practices, such interactions and relations as may appear normal, insignificant or even essential in mathematics classrooms are raised as problematic.

Recently there have been attempts to describe, understand and theorise the contribution (or constraints) made to learning through the social and cultural context in which teaching and learning takes place and there is a fast growing literature base. While this development does signify a move away from an embeddedness in psychology, it does not necessarily represent a significant change in orientation. Rather what appears to be underway is the development of a cultural psychology, concerned with changes within psychology to incorporate social influences and contexts [Lerman, 1998 #726, pps 333 – 334]. As Stephen Lerman points out “fully sociological approaches to mathematics education have not been prevalent” [Lerman, 1998 #726, p 333]. It is just such a sociological approach that I am attempting to develop and so my theoretical and conceptual underpinnings come from social theory rather than psychology. Consequently, I draw on such scholars as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Marx and other social theorists, rather than Piaget, von Glasersfeld, Vygotsky etc. (although their contribution to our understanding of social processes is important, acknowledged and in places incorporated). My main task is a sociological one. Put simply, this Study is an attempt to better understand the ways in which the teaching and learning of mathematics contributes to uneven social and educational outcomes and opportunity.

My approach to this is to look into the ways in which teachers conceive of their work as teachers of mathematics, and more specifically how this is organised by and related to their social imagery. By ‘social imagery’, I refer here to conceptions about social relationships, the patterns of relationships between different groups they envisage, the relational values that teachers hold and which allow them to operate as agents in the social field of mathematics teaching. This might seem an ambitious task, so in this section I will try to justify my decision to undertake it.

1.2.2 The social context

It can hardly be contested that we live in an uneven and unjust society where access to education and to justice depend on the capital one can appropriate and accumulate. There is ample evidence in the literature to support this contention such that it is hardly now contentious [See as a selection for example \Aggleton, 1988 #612; Anyon, 1983 #613; Anyon, 1981 #221; Anyon, 1981 #168; Anyon, 1980 #514; Bernstein, 1975 #201; Bernstein, 1975 #262; Craft, 1970 #631; Dubberley, 1988 #601; Jackson, 1962 #404; Robinson, 1976 #629; Tyler, 1977 #630; Willis, 1977 #22]. But unfairness, injustice and prejudice are not abstract concepts of macro-social analysis of an internecine class struggle. They are felt through the disappointment, hopelessness and frustrations of ordinary people as they get though their everyday lives. They exist in the knots in the pit of the stomach and the tears in the eyes. Injustice is a process that goes on all around us, even when - and arguably especially when - we do not look for it or recognise it. It has now been found that pupils from working class backgrounds do less well at school than those with middle class backgrounds [Croll, 1981 #575, 110]. Whilst this may partly be attributable to a paucity of material conditions in the home, it cannot totally be attributed to this because the trend is that even children from more affluent semi-skilled working class homes do less well than middle class children [Croll, 1981 #575, p 111]. At least in part then, the cause must lie elsewhere and may include attitudinal factors, differential resources available for educating children from different social backgrounds, and in addition teachers’ behaviours and the very nature of education favouring the thinking and disposition of some children rather than others. I will look further into this issue in later chapters, but it is a concern in this Study to look at the contribution to this inequity that might be played out in mathematics pedagogy. It is my contention that Mathematics plays a significant role in organising the segregation of our society.

Mathematics is not used as a selection device simple because it is useful, but rather the reverse.

[Willis, 1989 #768, p 35]

Mathematics education plays its part in keeping the powerless in their place and the strong in positions of power. It doesn’t only do this through the cultural capital a qualification in mathematics endows on an individual. It does this through the authoritarian and divisive character of mathematics teaching. Either one can do maths or one can’t, but an accusation or admission that you can’t is more than just plain fact of capability; it is a positioning strategy – something that locates one in particular relations with others. It locates you as unsuccessful, and lacking in intellectual capability; it locates you on the edge of the employment and labour market, as virtually unemployable. Mathematics education thus serves as a “badge of eligibility for the privileges of society” [Atweh, 1998 #767, p 63].

For all of my working life – now 25 years – I have been in mathematics education and have worked in largely working class areas of East London, Beira in Mo*ambique and Milton Keynes. I have therefore seen and been part of the very battles between pupils and a curriculum in which they could see little relevance. I have experienced the tensions and contradictions in being cast in the role of the enforcer and having to find my way through that and round that.

1.2.3 The research context

It was a natural progression for me to use the opportunity of doing a Master in Philosophy. to try to explore some of the roots of social discrimination. There is considerable research evidence, publications and doctoral theses demonstrating that mathematics education is unfair, unjust and that certain sectors of society are inequitably treated. Here I want to develop this work, but to do something further. I want to stand on the shoulders of those that have gone before me and to study the mechanisms and present a framework for explaining how and why some of the precursors to this injustice occur. Hence, in this Study there is a considerable section where I undertake a development of a theoretical framework. I found I could not separate easily the theoretical framework from the literature review. What I have tried to accomplish is to present three cognate areas – theories of social structure and organisation (Chapter 2) theories of the conceptualisation of human agency (Chapter 3) and theories of the social foundations of mathematics education (Chapter 4).

The importance of this triad lies in the role mathematics plays in society. It is in short the foundation of the technological age. “Mathematics and mathematics education are carrying the scientific and technological superstructures of our time” [Skovsmose, in preparation #700, p 1]. Less triumphalist, Pierre Bourdieu compares the teaching of mathematics to the teaching of the classics and dead languages claiming it to be “no less derealising and gratuitous” [Bourdieu, 1989 #687, p 110 – 111]. Mathematics education thus stratifies, demarcates, legitimises and enculturates. Yet, we know relatively little about the mechanics of these social processes, including the way in which social reproduction is achieved through acceptance or subservience. Consequently, I want to argue less that mathematics education can benefit from drawing on sociology, by arguing instead that sociology can benefit from studying mathematics education as an example of a mechanism for distributing power.

My own experience within mathematics education has led me to want to look for foundations, predilections and structuring frameworks that would support a social model for understanding teachers’ work. I thus wanted to explore and analyse individual teachers working in their natural setting, within a set of objective relationships. Pierre Bourdieu, the French social theorist, offered me an approach, which seemed fruitful through his notions of ‘field’ and ‘habitus’.

For Pierre Bourdieu, social action is localised and contextualised in both space and time. The driving force of human action and interaction are the conscious and unconscious dispositions that make us act and interact in the ways we do. This is what Pierre Bourdieu call the habitus – which I will explore in more detail in Chapter 3. However, human society does not consist of a loose coupling of individuals, but rather human social practice takes place in social fields, which Pierre Bourdieu defines as:

a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions objectively defined.

[Bourdieu, 1992 #342, pps 72 – 73]

Fields are therefore relational structures representing a collection of differing social positions often competing for power and are embedded with fields at different levels representing different levels of activity as “hierarchically intersecting sets” [Bourdieu, 1989 #41, p 44]. A classroom may be seen and analysed as a field, as also might be a subject department, school or the entire educational system. The particular field that a researcher might want to focus on will therefore be related to the level or focus of analysis.

The notion of a social field is an attempt by Pierre Bourdieu to free up social analysis from a rigid and over-deterministic class analysis in which social classes are seen to exist by and for themselves. Pierre Bourdieu's approach is to see social class indeed as social division, but as a dynamic set of relationships representing the state of play, in both time and space, of competing positions of power [Bourdieu, 1979: 1984 #45]. I find this a particularly useful conceptualisation for understanding the mathematics classroom because it offers a flexible approach to how we can conceptualise the way in which classroom practice emanates from teachers with differing social perspectives and intentions.

A further notion used by Pierre Bourdieu to explain the process whereby social classes are differentially favored by the education system is symbolic violence. The idea is that the education system takes norms, ideas, beliefs etc of the dominant groups, which are otherwise arbitrary, and enforces these through systems of power relations so that the cultural arbitrary is misrecognised not as arbitrary, but as legitimate thereby reproducing and legitimising relations of domination [Thompson, 1984 #331, p 57]. A central question here is how it is that symbolic violence becomes legitimised and operationalised through the characteristics and practices of individual teachers. Exploring this question requires us to operate at the deepest level of human agency.

In applying his epistemological framework to research, Pierre Bourdieu suggests a three level approach:

1. Analyse the objective position of the field with respect to the field of power

2. Map out the objective structure of relations of the positions held within the field

3. Analyse the habitus of individual agents

[Bourdieu, 1992 #679, pps 104 - 107]

Applying a Bourdieuian framework to my research, I needed to explore the political foundation of the discipline. In other words, I needed to explore the nature of mathematics education as a social field connecting this to notions of social power, and this forms Chapter 4. This draws on a wider theoretical understanding of the nature of society (Chapter 2) and on nature of culturally situated individuals (Chapter 3). Certain questions then needed to be considered. How can we understand everyday practices as a social phenomenon? How might we understand the common sense, taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning classroom practice? What alternative interpretations might be possible if we adopt alternative conceptual frameworks? My intention then is to construct some descriptive model for teachers’ differential engagement in the process of education.

1.2.4 The political context

It was important that I located this work within a political and theoretical framework. I justify my decision to include a considerable section on the theoretical background through its importance for me in detailing the direction of my analysis. Sections on the work of Bourdieu, Foucault, Marx etc. are necessary because they are central to the story I wish to tell and in addition are underutilised in philosophy education. Hence, readers from that domain may be unfamiliar with the frameworks and concepts I wish to use. The areas I draw on are controversial, where we regularly see multiple interpretations and positionings. It is therefore important that I try to show as clearly as possible the positions I take and the assumptions and interpretations I am making. The knowledge I wish to construct and develop here is theory laden and theory led. Usually the role of a literature review is to explore the area and identify gaps in the literature that can be explored. What I am trying to do, is to explore the main themes and directions in mathematics education research and then to look to apply some fresh perspectives from social theory in my attempt to map out certain features of the domain. What I have tried to map out here is the basis of the theory of knowledge and social action on which I shall be basing my research; that fundamentally, human activity is social in character, that social structures are dynamic and relational, but exhibit a level of stability which results in dispositions gelling into objective structures.

I am adopting a materialist approach to social theory and social action. This has a number of implications, one of which is to assert “the primacy of the real over thought about the real” [Althusser, 1970 #784, p 87]. This in turn influences how we see the effect and the influences of objective structured social relations upon the various components of those social relations. The approach one takes to research design needs to be informed by the approach one takes to the nature of social organisation. There are certain assumptions I make at the outset, which influence, shape and structure what I do:

1) I hold a view of society as a conflict between differing interests – usually interests based upon economic distinctions and rooted in the underlying relations of production

2) I hold a view which sees the economic structure, the mode of production, as a fundamental determinant of social life;

3) A view that we need to consider the interconnectedness of the whole social system rather than explore in isolation locations of social activity e.g. the maths classroom - what Louis Althusser calls “structural causality” [Althusser, 1970 #784, pps 187 – 198];

4) That life is essentially social. That cognition is essentially a social act and therefore that material conditions exert a significant effect on us all. This is an approach that looks for connections between objective structures and human action;

5) That I am committed to social change;

6) That educational research should be critical and emancipatory, through analysing power relations.

The central question for me is what governs the practices that are at work in mathematics teaching and learning which can be located empirically and theoretically into a social reproduction process. The word ‘Study’ possibly comes from Thesseus, the Greek hero who slayed the Minotaur and conquered the Amazons. Unlike Thesseus, I make no claim that this Study is heroic! But I can dream.

You can say I am a dreamer. But how can you be an educator without dreaming

(Ubiratan d’Ambrosio, Paolo Freire Memorial Lecture, MEAS1)

You may say I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join me, and the world will live as one.

(John Lennon, Imagine)

So this Study is part of my dream – I freely admit to being a dreamer. How can I be a socialist without being a dreamer? As a socialist, it behoves me to take sides. Yet as a researcher too, I have to take sides, since as Howard Becker tell us neutrality is imaginary.

For it to exist, one would have to assume, as some apparently do, that it is indeed possible to do research that is uncontaminated by personal and political sympathies. I propose to argue that it is not possible and, therefore that the question is not whether we should take sides, since we inevitably will, but rather whose side are we on?

[Becker, 1967 #622, p 239]

I hope to be on the side of the weak and dispossessed, a considerable responsibility that calls on a radical approach to understanding the classroom, and a commitment to be penetrating while unpatronising. David Silverman offers three possibilities to Howard Becker’s question by offering three ethical positions [Silverman, 1985 #623]

a) Scholar – where one assumes no set of ethical values can be applied to research

b) State Counselor – where research is intended for policy makers

c) Partisan – where one adopts a political position committed to political practice.

[Silverman, 1985 #623, pps 179- 197]

Clearly, I locate myself in the final position, which does not suffer from an illusion that the world may be held at arm’s length. It is one in which I am not an agent of the state and where I want “to provide the theoretical and factual resources for political struggle” [Silverman, 1985 #623, p 184]. Karl Marx himself had used traditional research techniques to ask questions, the answering of which generated further critical questions in the minds of workers he surveyed showing methods can become “a didactic and political instrument” [Marx cited by \Silverman, 1985 #623, p 195] for social change. Taking sides then does not imply bias or distortion, but a commitment to ‘tell it how I see it’, identify our intentions and stand up for what we believe.

We take sides as our personal and political commitments dictate, use our theoretical and technical resources to avoid the distortions they might introduce into our work, limit our conclusions carefully, recognise the hierarchy of credibility for what it is and field as best we can the accusations and doubts that will surely be our fate.

[Becker, 1967 #622, p 247]

One reason for studying social practices is that of seeking emancipation - to help participants see the meaning and form of their own oppression and domination - and illuminate potential ways of overcoming them. Pierre Bourdieu’s approach is one that seeks to establish ways in which the social world is constructed, and how social structure is formulated and maintained. However, there is no point outside the system where a researcher can stand to be objective, neutral or disinterested. My reasons for pursuing this research is not disinterest, but of passionate interest and a desire for change. My work therefore will not attempt to be neutral, descriptive, illuminative. Rather I wish to offer a critical perspective. I therefore subscribe to the same point of view as that stated by Henry Giroux:

Are schools to uncritically serve and reproduce the existing society or challenge the social order to develop and advance its democratic imperatives. Obviously I opt for the second.

[Giroux, 1992 #178, p 18]

I too opt for the second, and in so doing try to reject a position of ‘uncriticallity’ and too little ‘challenge’.

1.2.5 The paradigmatic context

So, where do I locate this research? Well the detail will emerge in the unfolding of the Study, but I need to locate my basic, fundamental position, the paradigm in which I am working. Here I am taking ‘paradigm’ to refer to the basic set of beliefs and assumptions which guide my decisions, my actions and my interpretations. A paradigm has three elements of foci: ontology, epistemology and methodology [Denzin, 1998 #697, p 185 - 186] which are each defined by basic beliefs [Guba, 1998 #713, pps 200 – 201].

• Ontology is about the nature of reality and what can we know about it. Here I take a historical realist position by which I see reality being shaped over time by social, political, cultural and other factors, which crystalise or become reified into social structures. I discuss this in more detail in Chapter 2.

• Epistemology is about how we come to know the world, the relationship between the knower and the known. My position here is that this is transactional and subjectivist. The knowledge we hold or build of the world is based upon our interactions and our relationships to other individuals and to the dominant forces in society. This means that I am closely and interactively linked to the people I research. To some extent this position challenges the distinction between ontology and epistemology, in that what can be known derives from the interaction between me and the particular teachers and school I research. I discuss his more fully in Chapter 3 and it is influential in Chapters 4 and 5.

• Methodology is about how we gain knowledge of the world. My position here is both dialogic and dialectical. Because I see knowledge as created transactionally, my methodology needs to be based upon a setting up a dialogue with the teachers. To explore and exchange meanings, assumptions and positions. It is dialectical because this dialogue needs to uncover and potentially transform culturally and socially situated norms. I discuss this in more detail in Chapters 5 and 6.

This profile locates my work in a Critical Theory paradigm [Guba, 1998 #713, pps 205 – 205].

The work in this Study has been nurtured for years, but it took off with a concerted period of theoretical searching. I needed to go deeper into social theory and sociology. This was followed by decisions about the data that I would need to collect, how and where I would collect it and how it was to be analysed. This pushed me into clarifying my stance on ontology, epistemology and methodology. My choice of setting is fully detailed in Chapter 6, but I decided I wanted to choose a school that was not on the margins. It is difficult to describe such a school – ‘typical’, ‘ordinary’, ‘average’ all seen oversimplified; in my case, typicality comes through a lack of extremes.

My interest had developed into the link between human agency and social structure and in order to explore this I wanted to get to know the teachers well, to become familiar with their work, professional desires as well as their diversity. My work as a teacher educator takes me into many schools, working alongside teachers in training. It made sense therefore to identify a school where I was familiar with the people and the set up. It was at this point something fortuitous happened. A colleague, who had been a Head of Mathematics, resigned to take up a promoted post. In addition the Headteacher, who had been in post for some 25 years, also resigned. Furthermore, the school was about to be subjected to a full inspection by the Government’s Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED). I decided to approach the school to undertake my data collection and field study there. Both the (old) Head of Mathematics and the (new) Head of Mathematics agreed.

One of the advantages of educational change is the possibility of consequent tensions that would bring to the surface some of the more unconscious elements of our practice. The new Head of Department was appointed early in the first stage of my literature study and I was informed by various people that he was considerably different in outlook from the incumbent. It seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

Given that I wanted to get to know much about how teachers organised their intellectual engagement with their work, it seemed important that the data I collected focused largely on teachers, their views and their practices. This firmly suggested that interviews and classroom observation would be the main research tools. Analysing the data took me back to the theoretical perspectives to try to characterise the ways in which local contributions are connected to social life. Hence the data collection and analysis, and the empirical and theoretical modeling, were carried out iteratively and inferentially. While Chapters 2, 3 and 4 lay the groundwork for the theoretical ideas I used in designing the study, the particular structural model was informed by the study being an inductive empirical struggle to construct a descriptive model underpinning two teachers’ professional discourse. The empirical construction of this model is described in Chapters 7, 8 and 9 and evaluated in Chapter 10.

I have already described the theoretical assumptions on which this Study is based. I wanted furthermore to develop a language to describe and analyse the complexity of the social world of the classroom and teachers’ predilections toward classroom practice, classroom organisation and the structure of tasks and curriculum choice. Pierre Bourdieu offered me a way through the subjectivity/objectivity issue in educational research as well as a tool for analysis in the habitus. Michel Foucault offered me a challenging perspective on the formation of discourse and a fresh perspective on power – but one with which I felt a little uncomfortable. By exploring this unease, I was able to identify certain distinctive features of the approach to discourse and power I needed. Antonio Gramsci helped me to understand the way in which I could apply Bourdieu and Foucault to a study of capitalism through hegemony and ‘common sense’. I attended a Symposium on Bourdieu and Educational Research at the BERA Conference in 1996, and joined both the Bourdieu and Foucault email discussion lists all of which helped me to grapple with theoretical and methodological issues.

I see this Study as located within the shift away from the purely psychological paradigm in which much mathematics education research is located, towards a social or cultural paradigm. This is not merely a change in focus, or a shift of academic fashion, but reflects both a change in the way we understand the working of the self, and in changes in the social fabric itself. As society incorporates faster and more all encompassing forms of communication – or ‘social saturation’ we do become more ‘social’ in our thinking. Thus the current resurgence in interests and activity in Vygotskian perspectives is no accident [Gulerce, 1995 #576, p 152].

1.2.6 The personal context

I have to admit that some of the driving force behind this work comes from my own anger and frustrations, and my own passions. I am not apologising for feeling about my research; I will go further and claim that passion is centrally important to my research. An ethnographer “must not suppress a sense of outrage whilst in the field” (Erikson, quoted in [Adelman, 1985 #507, p 45]. Rather this sense of outrage should be used to advantage as an illustration of how some aspects of a social practice or culture are unacceptable or undesirable and thereby illustrate social and cultural difference. In rejecting ‘objectivity’, Clem Adelman calls this approach “disciplined subjectivity” [Adelman, 1985 #507, p 45] and this is something with which I feel considerable empathy.

There is a question of for whom – and what - this Study is written. It well argued that teachers find much educational research irrelevant and consequently they play little part in it [Woods, 1986 #607, p 1]. The reasons include: the research questions not being defined by teachers; the language not being the language of teachers; the link between research and practice being weak. There is undoubtedly some truth here, but none of these would seem to me to be insurmountable by a research community committed to educational change.

There is an alternative rationale for why research and practice seem to be disconnected. Schools are conservative institutions. They are both slow to change, and unwilling to change. They are however part of a wider set of social institutions and have limited autonomy. The considerable research on pupil subcultures and labeling would seem to offer very real challenges to schools, yet ability grouping and pupil segregation not only still go on – but are being more positively encouraged. I was recently asked by a student teacher why it was that all the maths educators and educational research he had come across seemed to be from within at a liberal tradition – and this I think is a serous question. I like to think that research is fundamentally an enquiry about how to understand the world in order to improve matters. Hence, it is fundamentally emancipatory. This is not the message that schools want to hear since it challenges the dominant hegemony of the educational system – which is constructed not by educational researchers, but by politicians, media tycoons, and so on. Hence, research findings would seem to challenge sacred cows and the hegemonic control of education. I am not suggesting the process simple, for it is not, I merely want to suggest that one reason why research and practice are often in conflict is political. Yet, just wherein lies the political?

The ubiquitous quote from Karl Marx about the importance of change over interpretation identifies a need for a socialist to look for ways to bring about change rather than merely interpret the world. I unashamedly claim that in this Study I am trying to understand better the micro-mechanisms of relations of domination and their legitimisation. This Study itself is not a manifesto for change – although I close with some implications for the future. In order to bring about change, we need to understand better the mechanisms that keep us moving in the ways we go. This Study is therefore not a description of a journey, it is rather an attempt to describe and understand the way “mathematics education plays its part in keeping the powerless in their place and the strong in positions of power” [Gates, 1997 #509, p 3].

One of the difficulties of trying to pin down complex sociological concepts is the interconnectedness that arises out of this complexity. It is not easy to organise a Study such that it expresses a neat progression from one idea to the next as might be implied in a piece of writing where one chapter follows another. So this isn’t a linear Study, neither is it one that can chart my own progression through a research biography. However, in writing a Ph.D. Study – as with any such writing – there has to be a linear structure for the reader to follow. Unfortunately, this linearity may give a false impression of the process behind the research. Far from linear, this Study, and the work reported in it was more of an iterative process, where new reading and reflection on empirical data introduced new ideas and organisation. This is particularly true of my process of struggle to construct and refine an empirical model.

Are there different voices in this Study? Naturally, I want my voice to come through, but what of the voice of the participants in the research? Whilst I have a strong desire to work for the greater emancipation of the powerless, I also see the need to engage with different discourses. Often the discourse of emancipation and voice foregrounds the involvement of the participants. Patti Lather gives a good example of this approach [Lather, 1991 #78, see especially pages 41 – 49]. Yet it is her adherence to certain postmodernist approaches that seems to limit her view of what role a researcher might play in working toward greater emancipation. For her, the post-modern “raises questions about vanguard politics and the limits of consciousness raising … and the efforts of intellectuals to inspire the aspects of liberatory politics most problematised by postmodernism” [Lather, 1991 #78, p 4]. While I agree with her use of ‘empowerment’ as “analysing ideas about the causes of powerlessness, recognising systematic oppressive forces, and acting both individually and collectively to change the conditions of our lives” [Lather, 1991 #78, p 4], and made use of her suggestions for organising reciprocity in research [Lather, 1991 #78, p 60 – 61], I do not accept her conclusion that this implies that “empowerment is a process one undertakes for oneself” (p 4). I am in no way antagonistic to this claim – and see it as an essential element in fighting an oppressive system. I would not want however to discount ‘vanguardism’ as an essential part of that process. The existence of a ‘vanguard’ or “transformative intellectual” [Aronowitz, 1985 #636] is at times a necessary element in transforming society. It is over-simplistic, and if I may be so bold as to say somewhat liberal, to suggest that “who speaks is more important than what is said” [Lather, 1991 #78, p 47]. It is also dangerous and potentially sterile to separate the two. What radicals need to do is to bring the two together within a theoretical orientation that can deconstruct the underlying intentions and power relations – something that Vladimir Lenin recognised some 90 years ago. It is not enough to give voice to the oppressed, nor is it enough to be a critical transformative intellectual. We must do both by being “cultural workers taking away barriers that prevent people from speaking for themselves” [Apple, 1991 #658, p ix]. One of the dangers of undertaking research to liberate the powerless, is that it might be theoretically blind, impotent, lacking in both an understanding of root causes for oppression and strategies for change. In so doing, we must move on from such liberal notions that see the individual as made potentially powerful by being engaged by researchers in their work. Patti Lather gives an example here where “researchers with emancipatory aspirations, doing empirical work offers a powerful opportunity for praxis to the extent that it enables people to change by encouraging self-reflection and a deeper understanding of their particular situation” [Lather, 1991 #78, p 56]. Though I deeply wish it were otherwise, I do not see self-reflection or a deeper understanding of the situation as anywhere near sufficient to bring about real social change. This position explains the place that the teachers have in my Study.

1.3 Study Structure

To establish a clear and wide-ranging theoretical foundation for the work I wish to produce, it seems important to deal with issues in some depth and rather than risking a superficial presentation in a few paragraphs. I have chosen to open up the conceptual and theoretical space to consider such ideas as ideology and habitus in much more detail. A cursory reference to some concepts would mask the very analysis I wanted to describe. Indeed, it is this very simplistic treatment in other places that holds us back from understanding more fully such processes as the educational task of social reproduction. Hence the first part of this Study might be seen as “building bridges” between disciplines [Murphy, 1996 #646]. I try to achieve this bridge building by incorporating the concept of a Justificatory Framework, which is overlaid on top of the Theoretical, Conceptual and Methodological Frameworks – as in the diagram on the next page. Chapters 2 – 6 develop explicit, inter-related and consistent frameworks for:

• Theorising the context of the study

• Developing the concepts and constructs used in analysis

• Developing a methodological approach to the study

However in order to more firmly establish the foundations of the study, I feel I need to occasionally reach outside of the immediate area of the study for ideas, connections, implications and justifications. This can be seen for example in those sections in which I discuss Models of social reproduction (Section 2.2) and The political nature of educational research (Section 5.2.3). It might be helpful to see these as the hidden piles that support the bridge and allow it to gain its strength

My concern is to locate mathematics education into a social field and it is therefore essential that I spend some time looking into the development not only of mathematics education, but also of the education system in general. My Study is a sociological analysis of an aspect of mathematics education and I need to introduce the sociological tools I will use to examine the classroom. Chapter 2 - Understanding Society is be an examination of approaches to the understanding of society that will be important in my study and in particular the issue of social reproduction. One of my overriding concerns in this Study is the manner in which mathematics education plays its part in the reproduction of dominant social relations through the way teachers conceptualise and organise their work, so clearly I will need to consider the critical issues and themes here.

Chapter 3 – Conceptualising Human Agency is about the nature of human agency and consists of examinations of Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, approaches to ideology, and conceptualisations of discourse. These form a significant contribution to my analysis of data and some space is needed to expand upon the nature and form of the concepts I use and on how they inter-relate.

Chapter 4 – Exploring the Social Roots of Mathematics Education is an exploration of the issues, themes and approaches that seem to be at the heart of a sociology of mathematics education and which therefore have a bearing on the significance and orientation of my work.

Chapters 5 – Theoretical Orientation and Chapter 6 – Design of the Study are the methodological and empirical chapters in which I examine my own methodological background, discuss the methods I use, and the analyses I undertake. One of the difficulties in presenting such a structured piece is the integration of epistemology and methodology. For me the two are quite interconnected and merge into one another. Hence, I did not want clearly definable ‘methodology’ and ‘methods’ chapters. Consequently, I see Chapter 5 as an articulation of my theoretical orientation, and Chapter 6 the design of the research study at Highview School. In Chapter 5, I develop the approach that characterises my work as critical ethnography, and explore the issues arising from that. In Chapter 6, I apply these frameworks to the empirical work undertaken. I give in this chapter my reasons focusing on two teachers as ‘paradigmatic’ examples.

Chapter 7 – Introducing Alan Brown, Chapter 8 – Positioning Fran Gregory and Chapter 9 – Positioning Alan Brown, between them form the detailed empirical analysis, and contain the analysis of the two mathematics teachers I focus on, culminating in an empirical model for describing their discursive positioning and ideological foundations. Chapter 10 – Theorising the Model is the discussion of the model I have developed, and finally Chapter 11 – A Manifesto for Change is a consideration of the implications for the future.

The Appendices contain examples of my analysis through an annotated interview transcript (Appendix 1), two examples of lesson observation field notes (Appendix 2) and some analytical materials created by the computer-aided analysis I carried out using NUD*IST (Appendix 3). Finally, Appendix 4 contains extracts from the OFSTED report of the school. For reasons of maintaining anonymity and confidentiality, this is omitted from the public version of the Study.

Chapter 2 - Understanding Society

Synopsis of Chapter 2

The over-riding aim of this chapter is to draw together elements of a theory of description for an understanding of society, which could help us make sense of the practices we see in mathematics classrooms. I lay out the theoretical framework I am adopting in this study and make the case for an acceptance of a structuralist analysis, incorporating a conflict theory approach to social activity. I also lay out my argument for why we need to look closely into the nature of education in the UK and how this argument implies certain theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches, all of which are developed in subsequent chapters. In addition to justifying my theoretical perspective, I make a case for rejecting arguments that we are in an era of postmodernity. In writing this chapter, I have chosen to draw together and synStudye a set of ideas from various theorists which best describe the essence and coherence of the approach I am adopting. Hence this is both a theoretical framework and a justificatory framework.

There are four key ideas I draw on in the first section of this chapter: a dialectical approach to the understanding of history, a recognition of the importance of social class in the functioning of the education system, Marx’s theory of alienation as an explanation for the popular perception of mathematics and the role of hegemony in the mathematics curriculum. In the second section of this chapter, I discuss various models of social reproduction theory.

This chapter is important because I need to lay the foundations for a study of human agency at the individual level of the teacher of mathematics from a social perspective rather than an individualising psychological perspective. Furthermore, the framework of ideas I present here is needed to justify my claim that this social perspective needs to be – and can be – derived from a position that goes beyond social interactionism and becomes embedded in mechanisms and structures of social organisation.

2.1 The Place of Human Agency in Social Theory

Marx has thus proved, not for the first time, to be a difficult customer to silence.

[Callinicos, 1999 #722, p 318]

The problem with Marxist ideology was that, in the end, it suppressed the individual by starting with society.

[Blair, 1996 #781, p 59]

There is no such thing as society, only individuals.

Margaret Thatcher

In this section, I discuss the stance I take in this Study. Fundamentally I am arguing that a social theory purporting to have some relevance to improving our understanding of critical sites, has to incorporate the position that social organisation is not a static structure, but is a dynamic operational system. We have to be able to conceptualise the interrelationship between the social structures and the operation of members and groups in that system. Hence my discussion of alienation - a central tenet in social theory. Alienation is not some abstract concept, but is a process of differential relationships effected in a variety of locations, in my case, the mathematics classroom. Similarly, hegemony is a central plank of an understanding of the mechanism of social organisation – yet it too needs people to operationalise it. This section then develops the underpinnings of social theory that focusses attention on human agency in the symbiotic interrelationship between agency and structure. This is important because I go on to look at the nature, structure and organisation of some teachers’ understandings of their work and in doing so focus closely on the individual level, but with the intention of locating this within a sociological approach.

2.1.1 Why study the sociology of mathematics education?

In this section, I want to explore the political framework to this study. I hope that I have already given some indications of my own background and values. Now I will look at examining the basis for a theoretical understanding of the Study. I will endeavour to do three things in this section. First, to present a brief synopsis of the essence of the theoretical framework I will be adopting for understanding the society in which mathematics teachers work (Section 2.1.1). Second, I will briefly discuss two important issues related to this – alienation (Section 2.1.2) and hegemony (Section 2.1.3). Lastly, I will offer a refutation to the claims that since we now live in an age of post-modernity, Marxism no longer offers a valid form of analysis (Section 2.1.4). My reason for introducing this into this Study at this stage is to demonstrate my rationale for drawing on Marxist philosophy and analysis at a time when it is coming under sustained attack, not only from the usual political opponents, but also from proponents of postmodernism. I will argues why I believe it is still relevant.

Authors - Marx, Durkheim, Weber and so on - represent landmarks which structure our theoretical space and our perception of that space.

[Bourdieu, 1990 #38, p 30]

I am, however, not intending to label this Study as a ‘Marxist analysis of mathematics education’. I take my perspective again from Bourdieu:

You get what you can where you can.

[Bourdieu, 1990 #38, p 29]

It is this position that justifies my incorporation of habitus, hegemony and ideology - ideas that are traditionally ‘structuralist’ from Marx, Gramsci and Bourdieu, with discourse - which is traditionally viewed as ‘post-structuralist’ from Foucault. In the relevant sections, I discuss how I adapt discourse into a more structuralist framework and how I develop ideology into a system of classifications rather than socially structured and determined positions. I described earlier what aspects were central to my conceptual and analytical framework, but they bear repeating here:

• A view of society as being in conflict between differing interests – usually class interests based upon economic distinctions.

• A view therefore which sees the economic structure as fundamental.

• An approach that considers the interconnectedness of the whole social system.

• That life is essentially social. That cognition is essentially a social act. Therefore that material conditions exert a significant effect on us. This approach looks for connections between objective structures and human action.

• That I am committed to social change.

• That educational research should be emancipatory, through analysing power relations.

Adopting such a conflict perspective is not unnecessarily negative or pessimistic, but is based upon the recognition by George Hegel, subsequently developed by Karl Marx, of the importance and power of contradiction, considered not as some temporary abnormality or paroxysm to be avoided, but as the driving force of history.

Contradiction is at the root of all movement and life, and it is only in so far as it contains a contradiction than anything moves and has impulse and activity.

[Hegel, 1812 - 1816 #747, Vol II, p 67]

This ‘dialectical process’ is seen by George Hegel as teleological – moving inexorably towards some goal. Karl Marx took this idea forward, removed George Hegel’s idealism, rooting it instead in a materialist conception of history and used the method of dialectics as a way of understanding issues, as stages in a process, looking at inner stresses and opposing forces to explain the intrinsic possibilities for change [Reiss, 1997 #748, p 84].

In the introduction to this Study, I outlined my belief that both the society we live in and the education system that serves it are unjust and I considered the ways in which mathematics education as a social practice plays a part in sustaining relations of domination. It is my contention that in order to understand a social practice we must understand both the ‘social’ context of the activity as well as the ‘practice’ of the participants. In this chapter, I will put forward the theoretical framework for looking at the ‘social’. In Chapter 3, I will be looking at the ‘practice’. I split these into individual chapters not to suggest they are independent, but as a convenient device for constructing my argument. The idea of the inter-relatedness of social organisation and social relations is not new, but is a central component of Marx’s analysis of capitalist society.

In production men not only act on nature, but on one another. They produce only by co-operating in a certain way and mutually exchanging their activities. In order to produce they enter into definite connections and relations with one another.

[Marx, 1849 #753, p 211]

Hence, the productive forces are only one aspect of what Karl Marx calls “production”; the other is in the relations existing between individuals. Social activity is not carried out by individuals, but by communities, societies and groups with vested interests, and hence there may be relations of co-operation or of domination. this has quite direct implications for my attempt to better understand the nature of teachers’ professional discourse.

In developing a theoretical framework, I need to be able to conceptualise this dialectical relationship between the individual and the social. For me, Pierre Bourdieu offers a way through this in his appreciation of the interplay between objective social structure and subjective personal dispositions and which forms the central methodological and conceptual organisation of his work and informs his empirical studies [Bourdieu, 1977 #36; Bourdieu, 1990 #37]. It is his assertion that objective structures are actualised and reproduced through subjective dispositions [Bourdieu, 1977 #36, p 3]. This does not mean to me that subjective dispositions have a primacy over more objective social structures. Pierre Bourdieu’s position is that the development of individual dispositions is influenced and constrained by objective structures, the nature of hierarchy, the form of hegemonic positions and so on, which in their turn reinforce the objective structures. What distinguishes Pierre Bourdieu’s approach from that of, say, Ervin Goffman or Anthony Giddens is the way in which social structural properties and social and economic conditions are always embedded in everyday lives and events of individuals [Harker, 1990 #668, p 8]. Of course implicit in here is a readiness to accept the objective existence of social structure(s). I find myself in accordance with Pierre Bourdieu here when he claims that

There exist in the social world itself, and not merely in symbolic systems, language, myth etc. objective structures which are independent of the consciousness and desires of agents and are capable of guiding or constraining their practices or their representations.

[Bourdieu, 1990 #38, p 14]

This approach to social ontology has implications for the whole of my study. It has implications for the conceptual framework that I adopt in looking at how the social world becomes operationalised though individuals. I take this forward in Chapter 3.

2.1.2 Alienation and school mathematics

A significant root of Karl Marx’s analysis was not, as is often portrayed, the domination of the proletariat by a cruel capitalist class, but his theory of alienation. Put simplistically, a theory of alienation is a theory of unhappiness – an attempt to understand why we live in a world where there is so much unhappiness and conflict. Whereas we might see unhappiness, despair, depression and so on as psychological conditions, alienation for Karl Marx is a socioeconomic condition relating individuals to their economic and social conditions. Georg Hegel was interested in the alienation of the body and soul. Karl Marx on the other hand rejected the notion of a soul and saw people as alienated in the contradiction between their true selves and their actual behaviour. This conflict is created in the material world in the conditions under which people live. In particular Karl Marx saw this alienation occurring because of separation of the worker from the object of labour. In this way, Karl Marx moved George Hegel from philosophy into economics. Karl Marx’s vision was optimistic however. He did not represent the capitalists as evil individuals committed to conspiracy. Rather he saw all classes “locked together in a symbiotic relationship playing out their respective roles in creating ever increasing wealth at the cost of ever increasing misery for the working class” [Freedman, 1990 #175, p xi]. This theory of alienation, which Marx directed at global socio-economic conditions of existence, does have an application to the teaching of mathematics.

I will draw on Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 [Marx, 1844 #322] to outline his theory of alienation and explain how it is relevant to my study. For Marx, alienation is a result of an inherent contradiction between capitalism’s need to increase profitability, and the intrinsic needs of the individual for pleasure and self-development.

What then constitutes alienation of labour?

First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his intrinsic nature*; that in his work, therefor, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy, but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside of his work, and in his work he feels outside of himself. He feels at home when he is not working and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour.

[Marx, 1844 #322, p 274]

(*) This is translated both as “nature” or “being” in different versions of this article. I used the Volume 3 – Collected Works.

So it is the separation between the individual’s nature and the object of labour that causes discontent and retards personal development. The elements of such alienation do relate to the context of schooling and mathematics teaching. In particular, home and work are separated – which may be translated into the diverse contexts and locations of the child’s activity. Furthermore, pupils attend school through coercion rather than voluntarily. This is of course a controversial thing to claim. Many may see children enjoying school and attending more through choice than external force or coercion. However school attendance is enforceable through the legal system – there are even now constraints on parents taking short holidays during school time. More importantly school attendance is also enforced through strong cultural expectations on individuals; a form of intrinsic coercion. Again, this model of alienation needs to be implemented and maintained in the daily life of the pupil. So, while the theory of alienation is useful, it needs elaboration on the scale of human agency. Karl Marx develops the argument thus,

The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the whole life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

[Marx, 1844 #322, p 272]

The language Karl Marx uses here is both analytical and rhetorical. Yet, there are distinct parallels with the learning process. That Mathematics is unpopular, and the cause of much unhappiness hardly needs stating again – yet it is clearly the case that many pupils in school (as well as individuals in society) see mathematics as difficult to understand, lacking in purpose or application and something in which they would rather not engage. The school system, tears pupils away from their environment and culture and imposes on them tasks, activities and routines which bear little relation or application to their own interests or needs. Of course I am not suggesting that schools and mathematics education have to be structured purely around children’s immediate interests and needs. This would be a deficient experience. The paradox of learning is to take people to heights where they are not now at, to see that which they can not now see. However, where the material content (the curriculum) and the presentation (the pedagogy) of mathematics in schools is explicitly divorced from pupils, and of course from teachers, who after all are the ‘workers’ in this relationship, Karl Marx’s theory of alienation helps us to see a rationale for lack of interest, motivation and engagement in school mathematics lessons.

Not everyone feels this way of course. Many pupils enjoy school mathematics and many are successful at it. While happiness, enjoyment and success do not always go hand in hand, we might expect a high correlation. Karl Marx’s theory is not an individualistic theory, but a social theory, representing the structural features of social tendencies. The significant issue is the impact such alienation has upon individuals and upon society.

An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labour, from his life activity, from his species-being is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man.

[Marx, 1844 #322, p 277]

Hence, the alienation causes social divisions between those implicated in different activities in the production process. We can shift our attention from Karl Marx’s interest in commodity production, to looking at cultural production here to uncover the processes of alienation. Paul Dowling has presented one approach that I find helpful in this regard [Dowling, 1998 #391]. School mathematics he claims is a socially regulatory activity, regulating who can say and do what. In this regard, it is always hierarchical, consisting of various positions. Mathematical texts distribute individuals according to these positions. This distribution is carried out, in part by authorial voices (Dowling 1998, p 143) – those who assume dominance and authority through being the author of the discipline. An authorial voice may come through the texts used, but mathematics itself is not an activity – and class texts do nothing on their own, they require the practices of the teacher through the social organisation of the classroom, the organisation of tasks and the selection of pedagogic strategies to be effective. One way in which mathematics is constructed to alienate pupils is by its mythologisation. A mythical world, set apart from the world of the pupils is constructed within which much school mathematics takes place. Paul Dowling offers us the myth of reference, that mathematics refers to something other than mathematics (Dowling 1998, p 6), and the myth of participation, that mathematics is useful in optimizing the mundane everyday activities of pupils (Dowling 1998, p 9).

Alienation, as a social not a psychological separating strategy, has effects upon the role that mathematics education plays in social stratification. In terms of economic commodity production, Karl Marx identifies the way in which alienation affects different social classes in different ways and thus brings about not only social stratification, but also social distinctions.

The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of inhuman existence.

[Marx, 1845 #689, p 36]

This is a similar phenomena to that which Pierre Bourdieu discusses in Distinction [Bourdieu, 1979: 1984 #45]. Here he argues that estrangement or a tendency to “bracket off the nature and function of the object” (p 54) is a function of social class. In applying this to social and cultural reproduction, Pierre Bourdieu sees the significant factor to be the relative importance of economic necessity (p 54). With mathematics as part of our cultural makeup, the alienation, estrangement or mythologisation of mathematics is going to evoke different responses from pupils with differing cultural backgrounds. Here then is a theoretical justification, deriving in part from Karl Marx’s theory of alienation, for the way in which mathematics education plays a part in reproduction.

Karl Marx never claimed that capitalism developed by the imposition of an organised dominant and exploiting class. What he did argue was that the capitalist class has been constructed out of human actions; action embedded in a social context. The ruling ideology then is not imposed, but is generated and developed to create a reality which in turn creates a ruling ideology. While Karl Marx has exposed the structure of domination in capitalist society, he perhaps spent less time working on the process of domination, and the role of individuals within that. In particular questions about the interaction between social base and economic superstructure were left largely unexamined and thus the way in which ideologies and consciousness are produced by the cultural and political milieu, aside from defining it as dialectical are deficient. Karl Marx’s project however was part of a developmental critical social research, and since critical research is evolving what might have been critical at the end of the 19th century might not seem so today [Harvey, 1990 #584, p 6]. One of the tasks I have set myself here is to work on the role of individuals in a system of domination, in particular through the structure of some mathematics teachers’ professional discourse.

Overall I adopt a position that Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalist society and his critical methodology remain largely correct, but require some revision due to changed economic and social circumstances [Althusser, 1969 #26; Gramsci, 1928 - 1935 #283; Lenin, 1902 #162; Lenin, 1905 #541; Lenin, 1916 #628; Lenin, 1917 #163]. It has been argued [Harvey, 1990 #584, p 36] that the historical location of Karl Marx’s undertaking resulted in his analysis overstating three issues: the political mission of the working class, the coercive nature of the bourgeoisie and the role of property ownership. This however reflects the context he was working in rather than some flaw in his analysis.

A detailed understanding of agency has not been developed until recently as sociology and social theory has illuminated the complex nature of human society. Both Valdimir Lenin [Lenin, 1902 #162; Lenin, 1905 #541; Lenin, 1917 #163] and Antonio Gramsci [Gramsci, 1928 - 1935 #283] have strongly criticised an economistic approach to a Marxist analysis of capitalism. Antonio Gramsci developed the notion of ‘hegemony’ as a major contribution to our understanding of the mode of operation of capitalism and this is a concept that has considerable potential for understanding the classroom. I shall look into the notion of hegemony since it is important to understand the role played by the dominant conceptions of the world on the structure of teachers’ discourse.

2.1.3 Gramsci’s notion of hegemony

Antonio Gramsci spent most of his political life imprisoned by the Italian Fascist Government. Most of his writings were produced in and from his prison cell which has some bearing on how we need to read him. His writing needed to be censored and was thus written though a filter, and in more than one case it has been argued that some of the contradictions in his theoretical framework arose just due to this effect [Barrett, 1991 #32, p 54 - 56].

Antonio Gramsci neither introduced nor invented the word ‘hegemony’; there is evidence that it was previously used by Plekhanov in 1888 [Bocock, 1986 #111, p 25; Laclau, 1985 #193, pps 24 - 25]. He did spend a considerable amount of time grappling with the issue of how capitalist societies were organised to maintain a considerable - if not total - domination of all sectors of life. In particular at how:

Bourgeois ideology, in other words, takes a number of superficial ideas and then constructs around these an overall interpretation which it passes off as being the whole story.

[Ransome, 1992 #200, p 123]

When re-reading some of the work of Antonio Gramsci for this Study I was struck by how useful it could be applied to the teaching of mathematics; how there are many superficial arguments which take on a life of their own, working to cloud deeper questions. There are various hegemonic discourses in mathematics education, which appertain to be ‘the whole story’, yet which mask a deeper set of influences and implications: setting by ability is a good example of such a hegemonic discourse.

Antonio Gramsci describes two ways in which this hegemony may be manifest. First it can be through coercive control - through the direct force or threat of force of the state, police army etc. as well as the courts. We can see this emerging through the statutory nature of the National Curriculum legislation and its associated testing regimes. Second, hegemony may be manifest through consensual control when individuals readily assimilate the Weltanschauung or worldview of the dominant group [Gramsci, 1971 #282, p 80]. Hence, hegemony is achieved not only through legal compulsion, but also by winning the active consent of diverse social groups. Antonio Gramsci furthermore contributed to shifting the classical debates on ideology. For Antonio Gramsci, ideology was neither a set of ideas nor false consciousness, rather it was

an organic and relational whole, embodied in institutions and apparatuses, which welds together a historical bloc around a number of basic articulatory principles.

[Laclau, 1985 #193, p 67]

Antonio Gramsci espoused the notion of there being classes, in favour of ‘collective wills’ and what was significant was not class belonging, but

the attainment of a cultural-social unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills with heterogeneous aims are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world.

[Gramsci, 1928 - 1935 #283, Vol: 2, p 349]

There is a ring of truth here for how we see the debates over educational policy and practice over the last 20 years where we have seen a struggle to gain or maintain hegemonic dominance in a range of positions. We now have in the UK regular tests, school league tables, and a prescriptive numeracy and literacy strategy to cite just four examples. The National Curriculum has now seemingly gained active general consent, as has ‘setting by ability’ which was in the 60s and 70s a contested arena. We now see setting, as the official doctrine of the Labour Party, already spreading into Primary Education. Hegemony thus allows a broad strategic front to be constructed, which sweeps many along with it. The advantage of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is that it frees us from the vision of a ‘spectre’ dominating us. It conceptualises the way in which hegemonic strategies achieve dominance, not by overt oppression, but by mechanisms of popular consent [Hall, 1988 #77, pps 53 - 55].

It entails a critical passage of a system of domination into the authority of a leading bloc, which is capable not only of organising its own base through the construction of alliances between different sectors and social forces, but which has as a central feature of that process the construction and winning of popular consent to that authority among key sectors of the dominated classes themselves.

[Hall, 1988 #77, p 55]

Antonio Gramsci’s development of hegemony is recognition that capitalism does not exist merely by the imposition of power from above. There needs to be some coercion, but there also needs to be consent and acceptance of how things are. In this, Antonio Gramsci is in agreement with Michel Foucault. He diverges from Michel Foucault however in his recognition that not all power is ‘in the relation’ or all pervading. I discuss this more fully in Chapter 3. Power is differential and varied depending on the social context. Some people and some social groups posses more power than others and this may be economic, cultural, or the coercive power of the state. Antonio Gramsci then goes beyond Michel Foucault’s Study of how power exists to look at why it exists and circulates in the way it does. Hegemony is the process or power by which the dominant class maintains its dominant position through the organisation and legitimisation of certain ideologies, practices, structures, beliefs and expectations.

Hegemony is a lived system of meanings and values, not simply an ideology, a sense of reality beyond which it is, for most people, difficult to move, a lived dominance and subordination, internalised.

[Williams, 1977 #543, p 108-115]

This process of internalisation of hegemony and the way in which dominant positions evolve and gain ascendance remains a fundamental question of the interplay between agency and structure; between one’s individual dispositions and what become transmitted as the socially accepted norms and values. For Antonio Gramsci, as for Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, it is important to consider inner drives and needs - the ‘structure of feeling’ as he put it - for in this way a counter-hegemonic culture could be developed which might help us to begin to change the world. Where Antonio Gramsci deviates from Michel Foucault is over the derivation and genesis of these inner drives. For a Marxist, they reside in the underlying relations of production. For Foucault, they lie in a Nietzschian will to power. This is a significant distinction. My direction in this Study is toward the former orientation. Furthermore, in an effort to see how hegemony can operate through teachers, I focus through the overarching social structures and strategies, toward the underlying agentic social imagery of teachers.

2.1.4 Are we in an age of postmodernity?

The enlightenment is dead, Marxism is dead, the working class movement is dead . . . and the author does not feel very well either.

[Harvey, 1990 #540, p 325]

In the closing days of the second millenium, one of the more contentious debates surrounding academia is over the claim that we live in a postmodern age. What I argue in this section is my position on postmodernity. There are arguments that in this age of global markets, mass communications, changing employment practices and rising living standards, we live in an age where capitalism as described and conceptualised by Marxists has fundamentally obliterated itself. For Francis Fukuyama we have reached the “end of history” with the triumph of liberal democracy [Fukuyama, 1992 #774, p 338]. The literature here is too vast to explore in detail, and I do not feel I need to rehearse the analysis here. What I do need to do, since I have been arguing for a political meta-narrative that postmodernism would deny, is to give my rationale for rejecting arguments for postmodernity.

Alex Callinicos describes how, because the characteristic structures of capitalism have not undergone any fundamental transformation, postmodernity, seen as a perspective which eagerly embraces the present as the beginning of a new era of unprecedented fluidity, social mobility, and individual choice is “historically dubious” [Callinicos, 1999 #722, p 260].

Has the dialectic of modernity been transcended thanks to our entry into a postmodern condition constituted by the collapse of the ‘grand narratives’ which offer comprehensive interpretations of the totality of human history? The short answer is ‘No’.

[Callinicos, 1999 #722, p 296]

Michael Apple, whose work is located within critical education, holds a similar position.

Capitalism may be being transformed, but it still exists as a massive structuring force. Many people may not think and act in ways predicted by class essentializing theories, but this does not mean the racial, sexual and class divisions of paid and unpaid labor have disappeared nor does it mean that relations of production (both economic and cultural since how we think about these two may be different) can be ignored if we do it in non essentializing ways.

[Apple, 1997 #775, p 599]

Recent claims of postmodernism are purporting the obsolescence of essentialist or totalising theories of society and that instead we must content ourselves with localised theories. But localised theories smack somewhat of the individualism of liberalism, as Peter McLaren puts it.

As a Marxist, I have some problems with postmodern social theory - not all of its manifestations but in many of them. Often mistaking their radical posturing and flamboyant marginality for a transgressive politics, the fashionable apostasy of the postmodernists offers a sexy smoke screen for a sell-out liberal humanism.

[McLaren, 1995 #270, p 18]

You can almost smell the smoking gun! Postmodern social theory, and in particular postmodern educational theory, does little to challenge capitalist social relations. What postmodern approaches inform us of, and help us with, are the different discourses, different variables and interpretations, different readings of texts. What postmodern social theory does rather less well is to help us see what binds it all together. What remains the same? Jobs, money, poverty, unemployment, social disadvantage, educational failure. Postmodern social theory is blind to the political nature of many events. Relating this to educational, Michael Apple claims that “too little focus has been placed on the political economy of what knowledge is considered high status in this and similar societies” [Apple, 1997 #775, p- 598].

Antony Easthope opines that French philosophy shows us what it is like to live at the end of the 20th Century "more intimately and completely than anything else." Now that really is a load of old tosh. What has French philosophy to say about unemployment, poverty, child prostitution, drugs the state of our justice system or our disappearing democracy? Rien. Its rigid jargon and cumbersome neologisms preclude knowing anything either "intimately" or "completely.” The only way French theory connects with late 20th century life is in the philosophical support it gives to market economics.

(Letter to the Guardian, 5 June 1997)

So is postmodernism “just a load of old tosh”? Alex Callinicos seems to think so,

Moreover much of what is written is support of the idea that we live in a postmodern epoch seems to me of small calibre intellectually, usually superficial, often ignorant, sometimes incoherent. … I seek here not simply to demonstrate the intellectual inadequacy of postmodernism understood as the claim that we are entering a postmodern epoch, but to set it in a historical context. Postmodernism, then, is best seen as a symptom.

[Callinicos, 1989 #75, 5 - 6]

Furthermore, it is argued that postmodernism is less about the form of society, and more about political orientation and pre-millenium nostalgia.

The discourse of postmodernism is best seen as the product of a socially mobile intelligentsia in a climate dominated by the retreat of the Western labour movement and the ‘overconsumptionist’ dynamic of capitalism in the Reagan-Thatcher era. From this perspective the term ‘postmodern’ would seem to be a floating signifier by means of which this intelligentsia has sought to articulate its political disillusionment and its aspirations to a consumption-oriented lifestyle. The difficulties involved in identifying a referent for this term are therefore beside the point, since talk about postmodernism turns out to be less about the world than the expression of a particular generation’s sense of an ending.

[Callinicos, 1990 #408, p 115]

That it is a nihilistic perspective, Alex Callinicos leaves us in no doubt.

Unless we work towards the kind of revolutionary change which would allow the realisation of this potential in a transformed world, there is little left for us to do except, like Lyotard and Baudrillard, to fiddle while Rome burns.

[Callinicos, 1989 #75, p 174]

I do feel passionately that there is something else we can do and I reject arguments that we are in a post-modern era. This however does not imply that I reject all that goes under the label of ‘post-modernism’, particularly postmodern approaches to epistemology and research methodology. Morwenna Griffiths points out “that there is a wide range of often mutually incoherent views about post-modernism” [Griffiths, 1993 #273, p 223] and yet highlights “that some feminists and some educationalists (including feminists) have benefited from their engagement with postmodernism” [Griffiths, 1993 #273, p 224]. What I understand to be the basic tenets of a postmodern approach are identified by Patti Lather who describes it as a fragmentation of discourses; a break with totalizing, universalizing ‘meta-narratives’; that we live in a world with a cacophony of multiple readings and interpretations [Lather, 1991 #78, p 5]. Drawing on such post-modern approaches can support challenges to the status quo and traditional categories of thought and classification and should not be dismissed out of hand, as Susan Bordo writes

A good deal of the linguistic paraphernalia of academic postmodernism, for all its pretentiousness, has its origins in important insights and ideas that ought not to be dismissed out of annoyance with the elitism and insularity that are, after all, hardly new to academia.

[Bordo, 1992 #776, p 161]

Two areas that can benefit from these insights are the ‘politics of difference’ and the ‘politics of emancipation’. What I would argue for is the need to locate this struggle for difference and emancipation within the logic of social organisation. Morwenna Griffiths takes the approach of arguing, not for a post-modern feminism, but a feminist postmodernism [Griffiths, 1993 #273, p 231]. However, the argument that feminism, and consequently emancipation more generally, can benefit from post-modern approaches has its opponents.

Postmodernism impairs the construction of projects such as feminism. Whilst the problem with the homogeneity of the term ‘woman’ has been recognised; political engagement still renders it necessary. If subjectivities are multiple and changeable; if power is diffuse; if legitimation is only local then the ability to challenge is constrained to the particular. Feminists would argue for struggle at the particular: but also at the general, across a range of sites, and at a number of levels.

[Skeggs, 1991 #528, p261]

The imperative here is the need to distinguish as clearly and coherently as we can those aspects of the debate over postmodernism that are supportive of social justice, emancipation and democracy from those which are more individualising and fragmentary, marginalising or even rejecting the struggle for equality and freedom. My position in this Study is to base my theoretical framework on a model of social organisation that takes the underlying relations of production as a central force. This means not assuming that individuals are fragmented, constituted by discourses, but rather are embedded in a stratified society and consequently reflect this social structure in their cognitive structures and interpersonal relations. In doing this though, I can adopt the position that the construction of one’s individual social frameworks are likely to be somewhat fragmented due to the complex nature of the society we are bought up in. Exactly how I intend to do this is the subject of Chapter 3 where I discuss approaches to the conceptualisation of human agency. What is necessary to synchronise structure and agency is first the recognition that individuals can and do assume some differential positioning, where their engagements with the professional discourses of the field may shift. Second, rather than accept this shifting as demonstrating the primary role of discourse in the construction of self, we need to see it as requiring an exploration of some deeper consistency whose flexibility may be explained by one being located within differential power structures and the concomitant social relations and inter-personal relations.

2.2 Models of Social Reproduction

Education is a matter of learning the ropes, not of untying them or discovering who is holding them.

[Harris, 1979 #124, p 81]

In our view it is pointless to ask if the net effect of education is to promote equality or inequality, repression or liberation. These issues pale into insignificance before the major fact. The education system is an integral element in the reproduction of the prevailing class structures of society.

[Bowles, 1976 #46, p 125]

Education is not simply shaped in a general way by the imperatives, arrangements and logic of the capitalist system. Education is specifically articulated with this system in certain very definite ways.

[Hall, 1981 #478, p 13]

I have included this section to demonstrate that although the main theoretical strands in social reproduction theory have a diversity of analytical orientation, nevertheless they do have a tendency to focus on an over-structural analysis that minimises the level of human agency through which many of the processes of social reproduction are operationalised. If teachers play a part in that process – as they must as key players – it is important for us to understand what parts they play and what characteristics they adopt. There is therefore a need to shift down from the level of the institution, from the social block or class, to look at how symbolic capital might be reproduced in teachers’ orientations and at how we can conceptualise and theorise the diversity of teachers involved in this process.

2.2.1 Introduction

One concern of educational sociology has been to understand how capitalism as a system of structured inequality manages not just to survive, but to maintain itself through the education system. Schools both produce the dominant culture - in the sense of inculcation - and mirror the structures required - in the sense that schools are part of the society at large and reflect its structures, dialogues, discourses and dispositions [Apple, 1979 #1; Bowles, 1976 #46; Gitlin, 1989 #674]. That schools still play a significant role has been shown by a research study in the London Borough of Ealing:

An in depth investigation into the homelife of almost 5,000 pupils from the age of four provides vital new evidence that social class is a factor in determining whether a child does well or badly at school. ... Its findings suggest that ministers cannot simply tell schools they must do better - but that poor social conditions must be tackled before there will be a rise in pupil performance. ... It confirms that children from the best backgrounds not only perform better but migrate to the most successful schools. This means that the most needy pupils - those on free school meals - tend to end up in the worst schools.

[Dean, 1998 #639]

It is likely that the means whereby schools operate to reproduce society are tightly interwoven in the actions of individuals within the school system - through interpersonal relations and through the delivery of the curriculum. Consequently, ideology and educational discourse will be ways in which we can begin to understand this process whereby particular social structures are reproduced and legitimised.

Students in most schools and in urban centres are presented with a view that serves to legitimate the existing social order since change, conflict, and men and women as creators as well as receivers of values and institutions are systematically neglected.

[Apple, 1979 #1, p 102]

Clearly, Michael Apple is seeing hegemony at work here. Embedded in this position is recognition of both micro-educational processes through which children are presented with a particular curriculum, and macro-sociological structures whereby the social order is reproduced. I will begin with the macro-sociological arguments before moving to micro (and meso) levels of operation.

Early attempts to conceptualise social reproduction used what is termed a ‘functionalist’ approach, which sees the education system as assuming the function of agent of socialisation. A classical Marxist approach may be summed up as follows:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of a society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations the dominant materials relations grasped as ideas; hence of the relations the which make the one class the ruling one, therefore the ideas of its dominance. … Hence among other things they rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age. Thus, their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.

[Marx, 1845 #85, p 59]

The relevance of this is that school organisation and pedagogical practices exercise a subtle form of social domination. If, as many claim, teachers serve as agents of social and cultural domination we need to have a clearer understanding of how this takes place. However, ruling cultures do not need to exercise overt repression and control to retain dominance, as Tony Bennett describes:

Dominant culture gains a purchase {…} not in being imposed, as an alien and external force, on to the cultures of subordinate groups, but by reaching into these cultures, reshaping them, hooking them, and, with them, the people whose consciousness and experience is defined in their terms, into an association with the values and ideologies of the ruling groups in society.

[Bennett, 1986 #109, p19]

Here exactly is how mathematics education gains its purchase. When I read this, the language took me right back into the classroom and to debates I have had with my contemporaries over the 58 years of my life. But an important issue here is the level of abstraction. The regeneration of capitalism, through social reproduction is but one - perhaps the highest - level of social abstraction. The classroom tasks, the expectations, the organisation of the classroom all seem to be implicated in this. In this section I will look rather briefly at a number of central analyses of the reproduction question which focus on diverse levels of this abstraction, namely:

• Samuel Bowles’ and Herbert Gintis’ classic Marxist analysis of schooling in America

• Louis Althusser’s ideas on ideology and ideological state apparatus

• Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about cultural capital

• Rachel Sharp’s Marxist analysis and critique

• Paul Willis’ ideas on cultural production

• Basil Bernstein’s model of pedagogic codes

Clearly, this represents a small selection from the whole work on social reproduction. My choice represents my belief that these figures significant theoretical standpoints and a study of their ideas does allow me to illuminate the main themes and controversies of capitalist social reproduction.

2.2.2 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis and “correspondence theory”

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis undertook one of the first major analyses of the role of the school in the economic and political system. In their book Schooling in Capitalist America [Bowles, 1976 #46] they presented a form of ‘correspondence theory’ in which the structures and the functioning of schools correspond to that in the society at large.

A major criticism of Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’ analysis is that it has the appearance of a highly deterministic - perhaps over-deterministic - analysis of capitalist society. Schools simply fulfilled the demands of the capitalist society and provided workers to fill the spaces. Little attention was given by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis to the dynamic of working class culture and opposition nor to the mechanics of classroom interaction. It is clear that not all pupils from a working class background are duped and oppressed such that they internalise the capitalist message. It is clear also that not all teachers are agents of capitalist oppression. Henry Giroux’s criticisms reflect this in his claim that the Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis model represented a monolithic approach and an unduly passive view of human beings [Giroux, 1981 #121, p 294 - 295], which reflects Henry Giroux’s consistent call for recognition of the existence and nature of resistance. This needs to be seen in a social context, however. Bowles and Gintis were not purely putting forward an argument about the structure of social reproduction, they also paid some attention to the process too.

Bowles and Gintis argue that the structure of social relations of school not only prepares and accustoms pupils for the discipline of work, but produces the psychological characteristics demanded by either shop-floor or managerial jobs. Schooling develops the types of personal demeanor, modes of self-presentation, self-image and social class identifications which are crucial ingredients of job adequacy.

[Gibson, 1986 #154, p 47]

This is an important claim - one that begins to chip away at the division between structure and agency and is hinting that we need to look to human relations and social imagery to see how capitalism continues to exist. They were arguing that the processes - actual classroom processes - prepare pupils for their roles, that schools and classrooms were engaged in socialisation. It does seem to me that whatever limitations there were on Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’ study, it marked a significant stage in the development of radical analyses.

2.2.3 Louis Althusser and the “Ideological State Apparatus”

One thing Louis Althusser did was to free up Marxist analyses from economic determinism. He presented a case for what he called the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ [Althusser, 1971. Orig. 1970 #29].

What do children learn at school? They learn to write and add. … But besides these techniques and knowledges, and in learning them, children at school also learn the ‘rules’ of good behaviour. I.e. the attitude that should be observed by every agent in the division of labour, according to the job he is ‘destined’ for: rules of morality, civic and professional conscience, which actually means rules of respect for the socio-technical division of labour and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination. … to put it more scientifically, I shall say that the reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology or the workers and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agent of exploitation and repression, so that they too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words’. In other words, the school teaches ‘know how’, but in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling ideology.

[Althusser, 1971. Orig. 1970 #29, p 7]

Here Louis Althusser claims that reproduction is achieved through subjection to the ruling class ideology, rather than the ruling class itself. This is an important issue, as it is purporting that the processes we put children through in our subject teaching, not only produce certain dispositions, but furthermore, produce dispositions which go on to ensure the continuance of the status quo. Louis Althusser also used the notion of relative autonomy, to suggest that schools have some space in which to operate with some partial independence from the economic base, and it is this that supports the considerable flexibility and diversity in the management of schools. Yet again, we see a social concept operating at a high level of social abstraction - here the institutional and super-structure level. Individual teachers themselves do have considerable autonomy; hence, ‘relative autonomy’ needs to be conceptualised at the level of the teacher.

2.2.4 Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic violence and cultural capital

Pierre Bourdieu’s interest in the role of the education system in social and cultural reproduction drew on his empirical studies of the French Education system [Bourdieu, 1977: 2nd Edition 1990 #39]. For Pierre Bourdieu, the culture portrayed in schools is merely the culture of the dominant group in society. This dominant culture is portrayed as the natural and only culture; either you share this culture or you are deviant in some way. If you share the dominant culture, then you have at least a chance of a share of success [Bourdieu, 1979: 1984 #45, p 387; Bourdieu, 1977 #36, p 164]. To explain the process whereby social classes are differentially favored by the education system, Pierre Bourdieu uses the notion of ‘symbolic violence’ whereby the arbitrary cultural norms of the dominant group is misrecognised not as arbitrary, but as legitimate, thereby reproducing and legitimising relations of domination [Thompson, 1984 #331, p 57]. Bourdieu then extended Marx’s previous attention to capital by developing various forms of capital other than economic. He described economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital, defined as:

firstly economic capital, in its various forms; secondly cultural capital or better, informational capital, again in its different kinds; and thirdly two forms of capital that are strongly correlated, social capital, which consists of resources based on connections and group membership, and symbolic capital, which is the form the different types of capital take once they are perceived and recognised as legitimate.

[Bourdieu, 1987 #43, pps 3 - 4]

These various forms of capital advantage those pupils who accept and submit themselves to forms of acting and thinking that ensures the continuance of the elite in positions of power.

The educational system helps to provide the dominant class with a ‘theodicity of its own privilege’ not so much through the ideologies it produces or inculcates, but rather through the practical justification of the established order that it supports by masking - under the overt connection that it guarantees between qualifications and jobs - the relationship, which it surreptitiously records under the cover of formal equality, between the qualification obtained and inherited cultural capital.

[Bourdieu, 1990 #37, p 133]

According to Pierre Bourdieu, there is a fallacious view that schools are liberating forces that have as their purpose enhanced social mobility through creating greater opportunity. His empirical studies show that children from different social backgrounds become successively differentiated as they progress through the education system - hence social mobility is a sham. To explain how this works, Pierre Bourdieu uses the notion of cultural capital. This is the form of culture which is accepted and supported by the dominant force, but which is not shared by others. Schools are places where the cultural capital of the dominant class is fostered and consequently those with less cultural capital will do less well. There is a tautology here for Pierre Bourdieu. The working class then do not ‘fail’ as such, but are sifted out – participating in their own sifting. Cultural and thereby educational success is therefore largely pre-determined.

It is claimed that one significant aspect of this part of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory is the relative autonomy of cultural capital from economic capital. This marks it out from what is occasionally termed ‘traditional Marxist analyses’. This process of domination is largely successful because it goes largely undetected, being projected as the normal way of going about things. It thus depends upon Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to sustain itself. Pierre Bourdieu goes further and suggests that subjective choices become governed by objective possibilities and it is in this process that he sees the role of the habitus. People recognise the limits of their potential and restrict their desires accordingly. This may be an oversimplification since the work of Paul Willis in the 70s has suggested that working class children (‘the lads’) played a much more active and deterministic role in their own future [Willis, 1977 #22]. Paul Willis’ study of working class cultural production is an example of a detailed analysis of the structural organisation of some children’s’ outlook and social imagery.

2.2.5 Paul Willis and “Cultural Production”

The work of Paul Willis [Willis, 1976 #21; Willis, 1977 #22; Willis, 1981 #53; Willis, 1983 #23] suggests previous views that working class boys get working class jobs because they are failed by the system were too simplistic and underplayed the active nature of class interests. His research reported, in Learning to Labour - How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs suggested that remaining in traditional working class jobs could be seen as a successful rejection of the dominant culture by the boys not wanting to engage in an alien culture. Working class boys reject the school culture and are determined or pre-disposed to stay working class.

In looking at Paul Willis’ work, an important distinction needs to be made between social reproduction - the fact that the dominant social structure is maintained - and what Willis calls cultural production - contributory factors to the way in which this takes place [Willis, 1981 #53; Willis, 1983 #23]. Put perhaps rather too simplistically, social reproduction is a tendency for employment histories to be inherited. Cultural production is the process whereby attitudes and social practices are formed, passed on and regenerated.

Paul Willis talks of ‘cultural production’ where ideas and ideologies are produced within the non-dominant culture, rather than being transferred down where they will be transformed or negated. Take for example performing manual labour. In Paul Willis’ book he shows how a working class culture takes this as inevitable, whilst dominant culture urges the acceptance of the dominant culture as a way out. The working class ‘lads’ can see the contradiction in here, as is illustrated by a discussion between a ‘lad’ and a businessman at a careers convention. One of the ‘lads’ is advised to not to be a painter who just splashes paint on a wall, but to try to set his sights higher and try to be an interior decorator. The boy explains, there has “got to be someone in society who slops on a wall” [Willis, 1983 #23, p 93].

Paul Willis sees cultural production as a dynamic process of ideological struggle. Dominant ideas are partially incorporated and partially subverted in the process. Schools serve to reproduce dominant culture, but they contain within them individuals and groups with differing cultural norms who contribute to the process of subversion. Counter hegemonic ideas and forces may be repressed or incorporated causing social change - or apparent social change. Paul Willis claims that cultural production has both a mediating and a contestation effect. This is important for looking at the roles schools play in social reproduction.

One central concept of Paul Willis is that of penetration wherein the counter culture is able to see through the dominant ideology and reject its foundations – e.g. the individualism of educational success.

The wisdom of movement up the gradient as an individual is replaced by the stupidity of movement as a member of a class. By penetrating the contradiction at the heart of the working-class school, the counter-school culture helps to liberate its members from the burden of conformism and conventional achievement.

[Willis, 1977 #22, pps 129 – 130]

Hence class solidarity, and the ‘you don’t dob on yer mates’ approach. Furthermore, he asserts that an affinity towards manual labour is not generated by capitalism in general, but through the “patriarchal working class culture”. Paradoxically then Paul Willis argues that it is partly this counter school culture that helps the school system achieve one of its aims – to provide working class kids for working class jobs [Willis, 1977 #22, p 178].

A missing dimension here is how the working class culture actually comes about is sustained and legitimated. The notion of the habitus could add something to this analysis by seeking to examine the way in which indirectly economic forces and structure do indeed construct this culture. Paul Willis refers to Bourdieu, drawing on “Reproduction in Education” [Bourdieu, 1977: 2nd Edition 1990 #39] to support his claim that it is unwise for working class kids to put their trust in diplomas and qualifications since achieving these does not change the position of individuals but merely serves to establish and reinforce who remains at the top of the social hierarchy [Willis, 1977 #22, p 128], yet the benefits of achieving qualifications is one of the dominant discourses of education.

2.2.6 Rachel Sharp’s Marxist analysis

Rachel Sharp lays criticism at Pierre Bourdieu for not analysing the ‘context of schooling’ [Sharp, 1980 #67, p 70]. She further criticises him for not adopting a Marxist perspective where social class is directly associated with economic capital (Sharp 1980 pps 70 - 71) and for not understanding the class struggles taking place around the social division of labour. In some ways Rachel Sharp is criticising his theory of social and cultural reproduction because it fails to take into account “an analysis of the economic preconditions for the production of capitalist production” [Sharp, 1980 #67, p 72]. An understanding of bourgeois ideology for Rachel Sharp involves

examining the forms of self representation through the rituals and practices and myths which pervade every day of existence. . . Pervasive representations are not merely abstractly stored in the head but are materialised in social practices and rituals, which have explanatory power.

[Sharp, 1980 #67, pps 108 - 109]

In a study of an inner-city multi-racial Catholic school in Toronto, Peter McLaren demonstrates the strengths and the effects of the rituals, which permeate not only religious life, but our schools as well. [McLaren, 1986 #224]. Rituals are embedded in our psyche as organised patterned behaviour, which draw on shared structures. They are both imposed upon and created by us. However, rituals may be encouraged as a way of obscuring alternatives. In this way, dominant groups can maintain a hold over others. One advantage of rituals is the organisation of behaviour that makes us predictable. Peter McLaren gives a much fuller discussion of the nature and effect of rituals in society [McLaren, 1986 #224, pps 1 - 48], which demonstrates how we need to consider the role played by elaborate and ritualistic practices in the maintenance of the existing social order in order make any changes. Rituals make it more difficult for alternatives to be seriously considered as necessary or appropriate.

Above all, it is important to try to convey the possibility of alternatives, One of the strongest ideological supports for capitalism is the way it has generated a belief in its own necessity.

[Sharp, 1980 #67, p 167]

This is an issue that has come up over and over again so far, and is one which I felt would need to be seriously considered in my empirical work – how to uncover and illuminate the ideological supports for capitalism. To some extent, many of the macro-sociological studies have proved less than durable to analysis, and less helpful. By focussing on supra-social structures at the expense of the mechanisms by which these structures are bought about has lead to an over-dependence on arguments that largely write out human agency. One contribution to such an understanding of the nature and influence of human agency is that of Basil Bernstein.

2.2.7 Basil Bernstein: Micro-educational processes - class and pedagogy

One of the most significant contributions in the development of frameworks and structures for understanding human agency in social reproduction through the education system has come from Basil Bernstein. He has over many years looked at both the meso-level as well as the macro-level of human interaction, and he argues that pedagogical practice is one human device for reproduction and production of culture and social structure [Bernstein, 1990 #245, p 64]. You have to learn your place and your role, whether you are a teacher or a pupil. Pupils have to learn to be a learner, but more than this, they have to learn the limitation of what they have to learn. In achieving this, children learn the rules of social order – what Basil Bernstein calls ‘hierarchical rules’. These rules are both implicit and explicit. Connected to the hierarchical rules are sequencing rules which organise the order of the curriculum and more overtly dictate the nature of the child through stages and the definition of needs [See also \Walkerdine, 1984 #70]. The distinction between implicit and explicit pedagogical practices define what Basil Bernstein calls ‘invisible’ and ‘visible‘ pedagogy [Bernstein, 1990 #245, p 70 et. seq.].

Moving toward a micro-analysis of the mechanisms of social control, Basil Bernstein argues that the way in which pedagogical practices sequence the educational experiences for different children separates the local from the less-local. This is to say that local, context dependent operations and actions are sequenced before the context independent operations that focus on application and principles [Bernstein, 1990 #245, p 75]. The children who tend to fall through this net are often those children from lower working class families who become constrained into the local, context dependent skills. This process is further explained by the diverse influences of the two sites of pedagogic action – the school and the home. Where the home situation forces attention on the local context, pupils will be at a disadvantage in a school site demanding a focus with less context specificity. Children will thus be limited in the level of success they can achieve through schooling since they fail to fit the model of an ideal successful pupil.

In this way children’s consciousness is differentially and invidiously regulated according to their social class origin and their families’ official pedagogic practice.

[Bernstein, 1990 #245, p 77]

Consequent practices and forms of organisation in schools will reinforce this process, through stratification and separation – setting, streaming, banding and other divergences. This then separates the pupils whose knowledge is localised, being labeled and pathologised as educational failures. Pupils who have access to the linguistic structures will thus be privileged – cultural capital in all but name!

Currently the visible pedagogy of the school is cheap to transmit because it is subsidized by the middle class family and paid for by the alienation and failure of children of the disadvantaged classes and groups.

[Bernstein, 1990 #245, p 78]

This failure is even more stark since three major studies of language use and social class [Tizard, 1984 #641; Labov, 1969 #503; Bernstein, 1971 #504] show that working class children are as competent at conceptual and logical thinking as middle class children. Children from working class backgrounds can thus perform as well, but do not achieve as much success. I found the most worrying aspect here to be Barbara Tizard and Martin Hughes findings that all the teachers in their study rejected this finding as “incredulous” [Tizard, 1984 #641, p 159].

Basil Bernstein has a tendency to impose tight structuring and classifications upon his models, and this often makes it difficult to distill out the social activity. He does however suggest that there are ways schools can change the situation by relaxing the structuring of the curriculum and by “a weakening of the framing regulating the flow of communication between the school classroom and the community the school draws upon” [Bernstein, 1990 #245, p 79]. By this, we could move to open out the curriculum to involve and encompass the local community and parents.

The other form of pedagogical action is the “invisible pedagogy” [Bernstein, 1990 #245, pps 80 – 86]. In invisible pedagogies, rules are implicit, control is exercised through inter-personal relations and communication and relaxed familial settings. However “the surveillance of the child is total” [Bernstein, 1990 #245, p 83] and the control mechanisms are shifted to internalised predispositions.

The assumptions of invisible pedagogies … are less likely to be met in class or ethnically disadvantaged groups and as a consequence the child is likely to misread the cultural and cognitive significance of such a classroom practice, and the teacher is likely to misread the cultural and cognitive significance of the child.

[Bernstein, 1990 #245, p 84]

Notwithstanding the significance of Basil Bernstein’s analysis, it is not without some controversy. He rarely analyses class at all; offering us only working class and middle class – though admittedly with some finer gradation – lower, upper [Rosen, 1972 #138, p 6]. What Basil Bernstein’s analysis avoids is an attention to social structure and supra-individual social control. There has always been a degree of cultural relativism in his work – particularly in his early work on restricted and elaborated codes – as even the pejorative use of the terminology might suggest. “The linguistic capital of the dominant culture is persistently over-valued and that of the dominated culture is persistently undervalued” [Rosen, 1972 #138, p 7]. However in a move to reject such accusations, Basil Bernstein does accept the need “to avoid implicit value judgments about the relative worth of speech systems and the cultures which they symbolize” [Bernstein, 1971 #504, p 186]. Further weight is added to the cultural relativism argument by the work William Labov carried out on the use of non-standard English. One of his conclusions seems particularly challenging to some aspects of Basil Bernstein’s position:

Is the elaborated code of Bernstein really so “flexible, detailed and subtle” as some psychologists believe? Isn’t it also turgid, redundant and empty? Is it not simply an elaborated style rather than a superior code or system?

[Labov, 1969 #503, p 192 of Giglioli, p 34 of Keddie]

There may be something in that, but even expressing it has an air of unreality; it can almost not be said. This is a complex issue though, and there is a need to distinguish between diversity in linguistic style on the one hand and the effect of social and educational disadvantage on the other. What is important is examining the discontinuity between the knowledge forms which the pupils possess and those knowledge forms usually awaiting them at school [Mellin-Olsen, 1987 #86, p 21]. Pierre Bourdieu has also commented that an examination of the social conditions tends to be missing from Basil Bernstein’s work:

The realism of the structure inherent in such a sociology of language tends to exclude from the field of research the question of the social conditions of production of the attitude system governing, inter alia, the structuration of language. To make just one example, the distinctive features of the language of the lower middle classes, such as faulty hyper-correctness and proliferation of the signs of grammatical control, are indices among others of a relation to language characterised by anxious reference to the legitimate norm of academic correctness. The uneasiness about the right manner – whether table manners or language manner – which petty bourgeois speech betrays is expressed even more clearly in the avid search for the means of acquiring the sociability techniques of the class to which they aspire – etiquette handbooks and guides to usage. This relation to language can be seen to be an integral part of a system of attitudes to culture which rests on the pure will to respect a cultural code more recognised than known, and on a meticulous respect for rules, a cultural willingness which, in the last analysis, expresses the objective characteristics of the condition and position of the middle strata in the structure of class relations.

[Bourdieu, 1977: 2nd Edition 1990 #39, p 134 note 16 in 1990 Edition]

Pierre Bourdieu, in addition, draws out the active role that schools as social institutions play in the hegemonic trick of making a political imperative appear to be a social necessity:

In even more completely deleting the power of selection to the academic institution, the privileged classes are able to appear to be surrendering to a perfectly neutral authority the power of transmitting power from one generation to another, and thus to be renouncing the arbitrary privilege of the heredity transmission of privileges. But through its formally irreproachable verdicts, which always objectively serve the dominant classes since they never sacrifice the technical interests of the dominant classes except to the advantage of the social interests, the School is better able than ever, at all events in the only way conceivable in a society wedded to democratic ideologies, to contribute to the reproduction of the existing order, since it succeeds better than ever in concealing the function it performs.

[Bourdieu, 1977: 2nd Edition 1990 #39, p 167]

It is important that to look at what we can say about the processes of domination themselves, and Basil Bernstein has some contribution here:

Although an elaborated code does not entail any specific value system, the value system of the middle class penetrates the texture of the very learning context itself. Elaborated codes gives access to the alternative realities, yet they carry the potential of alienation, of feeling from thought, of self from other, of private belief from role obligation.

[Bernstein, 1971 #504, p 186]

The matter of ‘alienation’ was central to Karl Marx’s view of how capitalist production operated to separate labour power, invested in the individual, and the ownership of the commodities that were the product of this labour power. Basil Bernstein’s use of the concept here is becoming significant for the school curriculum. To continue to operate as a form of social reproduction, the school curriculum and the classrooms that embody it have to continue to operate this distancing of self from other, in order for the discrimination in cultural disposition to be operative. It is not however sufficient for this merely to operate in the schools, for it might be that this would exacerbate schools as seats of resistance [Giroux, 1983 #15]. The discrimination must be total and operate both within and beyond schools, as Basil Bernstein illustrates:

Mothers in middle class relative to the working class place greater emphasis upon the use of language in socializing the child into the moral order in disciplining the child, in the communication and recognition of feeling.

[Bernstein, 1971 #504, p 196]

This raises another issue – the effect social and economic conditions have upon the form and style of language used by different social groups, and whether or not schools and teachers might compensate or at least acknowledge the divergences. What all of this suggests it that not only is social class background important in structural terms, but that it is also important to consider the place social class differences hold in teachers imagery.

2.3 Summary of the Key Themes in Chapter 2

A major theme in this chapter is a representation of the structure of society and the dialectical relationship between objective structures and stratification, and the activity of groups and individuals that make up that society, as we know it. I offer a perspective drawn form Karl Marx of how the structure of society is influenced by the dominant relations of production. It is the conflicting demands inherent in this process of production that results in the society illustrating much injustice and social division. In turn, the conflicting demands and inherent contradictions in this process result in considerable alienation or separation of the individual from the activities they are forced to engage in, be it manual labour or learning mathematics. In order to sustain the relations of production, and control the effects of alienation, certain forms of social control are utilised. These are supported by the imposition of hegemony, wherein the ideas and arguments in support of the status quo obtain dominance and priority over all others. The means by which these hegemonic ideas are imposed and sustained are both subtle and extensive. At this level, the significance of the teaching of mathematics is to play a part in the generation and reproduction of hegemonic ideas. This is carried out through structural and organisational mechanisms by placing pupils in schools for example and through influencing techniques by favouring particular – dominant – ideas, practices and schemes of thought at the expense of alternatives. This process confers cultural capital on pupils in certain social groups, which eventually becomes transformed into economic capital. One limitation in much current analysis is the failure to conceptualise the structure of teachers’ social imagery. This chapter represents the foundations of my study by presenting the elements of the theoretical framework – which I have italicised above. In order to understand better the influencing techniques, I need to look next into a conceptualising human agency.

Chapter 3 – Conceptualising Human Agency

Synopsis of Chapter 3

Writing this chapter has been particularly challenging – and has been described by one colleague as my “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. This seems rather over-ambitious, but I am trying to bring together some ideas that might be considered as sitting uneasily together. In this chapter I introduce the conceptual framework I adopt in the study. This framework involves the elaboration of three key areas from social theory, Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, the notion of ideology and its relation to underlying social ideas, and Michel Foucault’s analyses of discursive formations. I spend some time articulating the significance of these three key themes because it seems to me to be very important that wherever possible I clarify what might be misunderstandings. I want to argue that classroom decisions made by teachers (either interactive or prior planning decisions) are not rational choices made by looking objectively at the situation. There are influences and structures of thought which impose themselves on teachers. It is these influences and structures of thought that are included in the notion of ideology. It is this level of thinking that is usually avoided in many studies of teacher thinking, largely I conjecture because of the political nature of the ideas it represents.

Critiquing ideology though is not enough to give us a clear picture of the messy swamp of human interaction. I find my way through this swamp with Pierre Bourdieu and his notion of habitus as my guide. Michel Foucault brings to this guidebook his idea that there is some underlying structure and rationale to the process of discursive formation. I do not conceive of this chapter as a “Woollies pick-‘n-mix”; rather it is a cordon bleu arrangement of complementing and mutually enhancing components, the integration of which is considerably more satisfying and powerful than any of the parts. I hope you, the diner, will agree.

3.1 Introduction

Sie wissen da nicht, aber sie tun es

(They do not know it, but they do it)

(Karl Marx, Capital)

People know what they do, they frequently know why they do what they do, but they don’t know what what they do does.

(Michel Foucault quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow and Dowling 1991; FLM 1991 pps 2 – 8 Gender, Class and Subjectivity.)

It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know.

(Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a theory of Practice)

In this section I discuss the link between the form of social structure and the nature of human agency, which acts as a precursor to my intention to study the structure of teachers’ understanding of their work from within a social perspective. In particular, my approach assumes an interplay between structure and agency, and this interplay needs to be conceptualised and operationalised. I see this interplay as associated with Antony Giddens ‘duality of structure’, but identify some limitations and drawbacks in the form of his conceptualisation which require an approach that is capable of uncovering determinants and influences that act between the social and the individual leading to a dialectical and dynamic constitution of both self and society. These determinants and influences appear in subsequent sections of this chapter as habitus, ideology and discourse formations.

3.1.1 Introduction

Current perspectives on schooling appear to be caught in a dichotomy, where approaches either suppress the significance of human agency or ignore the structural determinants of the social world outside of the school [Giroux, 1983 #15, p 119; Giroux, 1997 #755, p 71]. The need to consider the interplay between social structure and human agency was identified by Karl Marx when he claimed that

The principle defect of all materialism up to now – including that of Feuerbach – is that the external object, reality, the sensible world, is grasped in the form of an object or an intuition; but not as concrete human activity, as practice, in a subjective way.

[Marx, 1844 #321]

Hence, the social world is to be seen as a practice, as human activity. I have described in Chapters 1 and 2, my desire to know more about the mechanisms by which society reproduces itself. I wish to do this, not by looking at some wider overarching social practices, but to look into a critical site and understand better how it is that covert domination may be sustained through the way teachers conceptualise their work and their professional social relationships.

The basic exigency is to understand certain aspects or components of human agency and their relationship to social structure. This is tied to notions of domination and oppression, and involves a conception of power and influences. Henry Giroux sees this as part of a critical interrogation of “how human beings come together within historically specific social sites such schools in order to both make and reproduce their conditions of their existence” [Giroux, 1997 #386, p 71]. Underpinning this interrogation is an assumption that must form the foundation of a critical social theory – the dynamic and dialectical relation between structure and agency. This forms a central plank of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approach:

There exists a correspondence between social structures, between the objective divisions of the social world – particularly into dominant and dominated in the various fields – and the principles of vision and division that agents applied to it.

[Bourdieu, 1989 #687, p 7 quoted in \Bourdieu, 1990 #38, p 12]

This process of construction and reproduction is not well examined or understood in specific sites and seems to lack clear conceptual and methodological tools for analysis. Critical sites are those in which the very day to day struggles for identity and power are all played out. One such site is the mathematics classroom within a state secondary school. I chose this site not only because I am by profession a mathematics educator, but also because it is a critical site in the constitution of self and identity. In order to carry out such an interrogation I need to identify and conceptualise the ideas with which to describe the appropriate micro- and macro- structures and mechanisms That is the purpose of this chapter. Second, I need to develop a methodological approach which will allow me to understand, and make sense of knowledge about the social site I shall be studying that is consistent with the conceptual and theoretical framework. I do this in Chapter 5 and 6.

3.1.2 The duality of structure

One of the most endearing problems of modern social theory is to account for, and theorise the nature of human agency and its role in the maintenance and construction of social structure. That is, to theorise why do we do what we do, and just what is it that we do and how we are influenced by others and by the wider social forces to which we are subject. Anthony Giddens gives an example of his approach to this structure/agency distinction through what he terms the “unintended consequences of intended action” [Giddens, 1976 2nd Edition 1993 #231, p 84]. He uses the terminology “duality of structure” to denote the inter-relation between agency and structure, and I shall illustrate this with three quotes:

By the duality of structure I mean that social structure is both constituted by human agency and yet at the same time the very medium of that constitution.

[Giddens, 1976 2nd Edition 1993 #231, p 128]

In social theory we cannot treat human activities as though they were determined by causes in the same way as the natural events are. We have to grasp what I call the double involvement of individuals and institutions: we create society at the same time as we are created by it . . . Social systems are like buildings that are at every moment constantly being reconstructed by the very bricks that compose them.

[Giddens, 1982 #305, pps 13 - 14]

Structure is the medium and outcome of the conduct it recursively organises; the structural properties of social systems do not exist outside of the action but are chronically implicated in its production and reproduction.

[Giddens, 1984 #134, p 374]

There is a clear a debt to Karl Marx in the development of Anthony Giddens’ ‘structuration theory’, which Anthony Giddens recognises as

an extended reflection upon a celebrated and oft-quoted phrase to be found in Marx . . ‘Men make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing’

[Giddens, 1984 #134, p xxi]

I do not want to present this approach as unproblematic or uncontentious. However, a central issue is the necessity to try to understand and describe the contribution that human subjects make to the endearing social forms, norms and subjectivities, and in turn how engagement in the social world, might influence a teacher. This requires teasing apart the duality, rather than clouding it or negating it. That is, how can the mathematics teacher be seen as deriving the logic of their practice from the social world? Central to this project is the notion that the engagement in the social world is a multi-layered complex phenomenon, in which we must eschew simplistic notions of overt domination or repression, and conversely simplistic notions of power.

Domination is not the same as “systematically distorted” structures of signification because domination - as I conceive of it - is the very condition of existence of codes of signification. “Domination” and “power” cannot be thought of only in terms of asymmetries of distribution but have to be recognised as inherent in social association. Thus - and here we must also reckon with the implications of the writings of Foucault - power is not an inherently noxious phenomenon, not just the capacity to “say no”; nor can domination be “transcended” in some kind of putative society of the future, as has been the characteristic aspiration of at least some strands of socialist thought.

[Giddens, 1984 #134, pps 31 - 32]

Anthony Giddens’ development of structuration theory is an attempt to overcome the dualism in the agency/structure dichotomy by “squashing together structure and agency into one tightly-constituted amalgam” [Willmott, 1999 #729, p 7]. The problem with such an approach is that it leaves the effects and interplay between structure and agency as indistinguishable, and “we are left with an unfortunate but ineluctable conflation of structure and agency” [Willmott, 1999 #729, p 7]. To overcome such a conflation we could opt for the alternative approach of “analytical dualism” [Willmott, 1999 #729, p 7], an approach which does not assume some primacy or determinism inherent in structure, but seeks to develop a social ontology capable of uncovering determinants and influences that act between the social and the individual leading to a dialectical and dynamic constitution of both self and society.

My interest in this chapter is to present a view of how people might be driven to operate and interact with each other and therefore structure their social relations; how individuals, personalities and subjectivities are formed and how they coalesce, conflict and interweave to sustain capitalist social relations, which in turn constitute the relations of production. In order to do that I begin by looking at how we ‘think’ in the sense of how we come to think about and structure what we do which then leads us to do what we do in relation to others. This is not going to be a psychological study however, but an exercise in looking for how we can conceptualise the social theoretical frameworks through which individuals operate. There is a significant area of research in the “Teacher Thinking” literature which looks at the structure of teachers’ knowledge, which is helpful in identifying teachers’ conceptual and cognitive structures. For my purpose, I find it limited in its application by not being located in a social or political context, nor is the social structure of society a contributory factor. What we need is to “penetrate beyond the discourses and consciousness of human actors to the conditions and foundation of their day-to-day experiences” [Giroux, 1983 #15, p144]. In this study, I wish to shift the locus classicus toward the motor driving force of society. Concepts that will be useful here are therefore habitus, ideology, and the nature of discursive. These I look into in some detail in this chapter.

3.2 Operationalising the Habitus

But a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

(Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, “The Boxer”)

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please, they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

[Marx, 1852 #81]

Nancy looked at them enviously. It must be great to have such an easy way of going on. It was a kind of shorthand in professional families, she noticed, they could all talk to each other at the drop of a hat. She felt a twinge of annoyance that her father, long dead, had been a postman and not a lawyer. The annoyance was followed by a stronger twinge of guilt. Her father had worked long and hard and had been pleased to see them all do well at their books and get secretarial or clerical jobs.

(Maeve Binchy, The Lilac Bus)

In this section I present my rationale for using Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus and the approach I adopt in working with it to elaborate the organisational structure of teachers’ thinking. The habitus forms a central plank of my theoretical and methodological framework in this Study and I offer a four-fold operationalisation of it that can help us come to an understanding of human agency and practice. Because one aspect of the habitus is embodied social structure, it forms a coherent bridge between a structuralist analysis of society on the one hand and human practice on the other. The other aspects of the habitus (dispositions, structuring and symbolic violence) similarly indicate ways in which I can develop a framework for analysing teachers’ professional discourse to uncover the practical logic therein.

3.2.1 Introduction

I will begin with a consideration of the significance and operationalisation of the habitus – a more generalised construct than Basil Bernstein’s ‘code’ which has really only been operationalised in educational settings [Harker, 1993 #526, p 173]. We do need to consider the generative grammar of educational practices and such a generative grammar is offered by Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, which avoids the determinacy of Basil Bernstein’s code through the paradoxically useful indeterminacy of the logic of human practice [Bourdieu, 1990 #38, p 77]. Crudely (and possibly unhelpful brief) the habitus is embodied social structure and thus it is a notion that transcends the dichotomy and distinction between structure and agency. Social structure becomes embodied by our socialisation and consequently social practices, our relations and interactions thus give effect to and sustain these underlying social structures.

In this section, I will address what I see as the significant elements of the applicability of the habitus in deconstructing teachers’ understandings. These are: the habitus as the embodiment of social structure, the habitus as habit and dispositions, the habitus as a structuring device and the habitus as symbolic violence. These form the elements in the agency-structure symbiosis characteristic of my operationalisation of a Bourdieuian approach and are fundamental elements in the framework I am constructing in this chapter. I will look at each of these in turn. It needs to be borne in mind that the habitus is not only a sociological construct for conceptualising and theorising the nature of human practices. It is also a method for analysing and describing those practices and understandings held by practitioners.

3.2.2 The habitus as the embodiment of social structure

Pierre Bourdieu uses the habitus to replace ‘rules’ with a strategic “feel for the game” [Bourdieu, 1990 #38, p 9]. Rogers Brubaker sees the habitus as important within sociology because it represents:

the system of dispositions that mediate between inert structures and the practices through which social life is sustained and structures are reproduced or transformed.

[Brubaker, 1985 #332, p 758]

So conceptually, the habitus is Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to theorising how people enact and embody dominant ruling ideas as well as in transforming and adapting them. Aaron Cicourel refers to this aspect of the habitus too:

Studies of socialisation have for the most part ignored Bourdieu’s distinctive way of calling attention to how power or forms of dominance are reproduced in settings like the family and the school such that they have lasting effects on future behaviour and the way in which dominant groups sustain themselves. Neither however have Bourdieu nor most students of socialisation, language development, and educational processes examined the local ways in which a habitus reproduces dominant beliefs, values and norms through the exercise of symbolic power and by bestowing cultural capital; in particular, the way children perceive, acquire, comprehend and implement power. Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, however provides a powerful tool for examining domination as everyday practice; but this notion must be cognitively and linguistically documented.

[Cicourel, 1993 #49, p 111]

Hence, the significance of the habitus is that it “constitutes the means whereby individuals are adapted to the needs of specific social structures” [Callinicos, 1999 #722, p 293].

3.2.3 The habitus as habit and disposition

Pierre Bourdieu himself often fails to offer a clear definition of the habitus - because he claims it is indefinable and inaccessible outside of human practice. In much the same way, it is difficult to define “education” without referring to specific practices in specific contexts. Generic definitions can prove constraining rather than helpful. In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu describes the habitus as

both the generative principle of objectively classifiable judgements and the system of classifications of these practices. It is in the relationship between the two capacities which define the habitus, the capacity to produce classifiable practices and works, and the capacity to differentiate and appreciate these practices and products (taste), that the represented social world, i.e., the space of life-styles, is constituted.

[Bourdieu, 1979: 1984 #45, p 170]

To some extent, this is a helpful development; our habitus is what we use to classify and judge and at the same time it is the collection and make up of those judgements and so is deeply implicated in our daily practices. One way forward is to consider the habitual nature of the actions that make up our practice. Where do these habits come from? Largely they derive from our up-bringing and social background and all that goes with it such as beliefs, perspectives, interpersonal relations etc.

The habitus acquired in the family is at the basis of the structuring of school experiences; the habitus transformed by the action of the school is in turn at the basis of all subsequent experiences.

[Bourdieu, 1992 #342, p 134]

Hence, the role of the school is critical in the development of wider social organisation. The habitus becomes transformed within the school, yet with its possibilities limited, it tends to therefore be reproductive rather than transformative. The habitus is not deterministic yet dependent on the social field - different practices may be produced by the same habitus in different fields. The habitus thus mediates rather than determines [Bourdieu, 1990 #38, p 116].

Between the child and the world, the whole group intervenes with a whole universe of ritual practices and also of discourses, sayings, proverbs, all structured in concordance with the principles of the corresponding habitus.

[Bourdieu, 1977 #36, p 167]

The habitus is thus a reflection of social structure, but also illustrates how we become constituted via generalised dispositions.

3.2.4 The habitus as a structuring device

This seems to offer some specificity to the notion of ideology, which I see as related to rather than contrasted with the habitus. Our habits are not mechanically produced, we have idiosyncrasies, our own inventions and creations picked up on the way, partly depending on what we ‘chose’ to focus on and what we ‘chose’ to ignore. Of course we may not actually consciously chose at all, rather, we may be (pre)-disposed, conditioned etc.

We can always say that individual make choices, as long as we do not forget that they do not chose the principals of these choices.

[Wacquant, 1989 #42, p 45]

The habitus and its relation to practice seem to be based not upon causality, (and potentially, by implication, intentionality) but on relations. Ludwig Wittgenstein problematises the notion of causality:

The proposition that your action has such and such a cause, is a hypoStudy. The hypoStudy is well-formed if one had a number of experiences, which roughly speaking agree in showing that your action is the regular sequel of certain conditions which we then call causes of the action. In order to know the reason which you had for making a certain statement, for acting in a particular way, etc. no number of agreeing experiences is necessary, and the statement of your reason is not a hypoStudy. The difference between the grammar of ‘reason’ and ‘cause’ is quite similar to that between the grammars of ‘motive’ and ‘cause’. Of the cause one can say that one can’t know it but can only conjecture it. On the other hand one often says “surely I must know why I did it” talking of the motive. When I say ‘we can only conjecture the cause, but we know the motive this statement will be seen later on to be a grammatical one. The ‘can’ refers to a logical possibility.

[Wittgenstein, 1958 #337, p 15]

This seems a reasonable position to take, and one that is consistent with a Bourdieuian position.

It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know.

[Bourdieu, 1977 #36]

It does seem reasonable to argue that the dispositions we come to assume are quite intimately connected to the frameworks that guide and organise our thinking, as Seth Kreisberg suggests.

Ideology and hegemony work directly on the body as well that is on the level of our everyday unconscious experience. On fundamental levels, who we are, what we want, what we need, and thus what kinds of social relationships we seek out and create are shaped by the patterns and daily routines of our everyday lives. In part this occurs through the process by which ideology seeps deep within our personalities into the depth of our unconscious, shaping our personalities, needs and desires. I want to argue though that the process by which social practices become sedimented and reproduce themselves, while connected to ideological processes of reproduction are also distinct from these processes. People tend to relate to others in the same way others relate to them. We tend to act in ways we see and experience others’ actions. Experience solidifies into habit, in fact hegemony is most encompassing when a dominant hegemony reflects and is expressed in everyday experience and in a range of social practices and structures in a society. In this society relationships of domination are maintained by just such a correspondence of consciousness and experience, which while never total and static is still powerful and broadly encompassing.

[Kreisberg, 1992 #325, p 16]

Seth Kreisberg raises an important issue here and touches upon the relationships between personality, habitus and ideology. The relationship between personality, habitus and ideology is not greatly theorised in teacher education and part of my aim is to construct some mapping between them. This is a central issue, because an understanding of how our dispositions are shaped and organised by social structure and conversely how our dispositions mirror those structures is crucial in exploring the agency/structure relationship. Furthermore, it is crucial in understanding how and upon what teachers’ conceptions are constructed and how they are related to social structures. Hence, there is an imperative to explore the suture point between habitus and ideology (which I discuss in the next section).

3.2.5 The habitus as symbolic violence

One of the key elements of Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to understanding the role schools play in social reproduction is symbolic violence [Bourdieu, 1977 #36], a forceful phrase for quite a subtle idea (which I discussed in Section 2.2.4). Symbolic violence occurs where the arbitrary cultural norms of the dominant groups are presented not as arbitrary, but as the legitimate and natural norms of behaviour. Important concepts for Pierre Bourdieu here are recognition and misrecognition. Symbolic violence is not simply covert oppression, but involves resignation, a recognition of boundaries, but a misrecognition of these boundaries as natural rather then oppressive. Power relations are obscured, and this creates a ‘false consciousness’ or “méconnaissance” [Bourdieu, 1979: 1984 #45, p 387]. Translating this as ‘misrecognition’ loses the subtlety of Pierre Bourdieu’s original concept. Participants do not conceal or disguise a practice, but render it invisible through reconstruing as something else that “goes without saying” [Harker, 1990 #668, p 19]. An example of this would be the description of certain pupils using forms of language and phrases such as ‘less able’, ‘having special needs’ and so on. Use of such categorisations in turn impinge on the formulation of the habitus of the pupils, they become constructed or constituted by such structures and thereby their individual trajectories are specified through both objective structures in the system and the interaction with the habitus of others. Pierre Bourdieu considers this a symbolic form of violence that places constraints on the curriculum further delimiting equality of opportunity. Yet the discourses give the construal (that is the reconstrual) of wanting to do the best for the pupils, that restricting the curriculum is not only appropriate, but is in the best interests of the pupils. A pupil’s habitus becomes constrained or bounded by linguistic symbolic violence into considering and positioning themselves as less able and placing them structurally in relation to others. This might then impinge upon their own view of self, society and ideological belief about power, social structure, nature of mathematics, ones positioning as mathematics learner etc.

In being called an injurious name one is paradoxically given a certain possibility of social existence, initiated into a temporal life of language that exceeds the prior purposes that animate the call.

[Butler, 1997 #341, p 2]

We have to see the name as part of the totality of the pupil’s social existence and interactions. Does it fit with my view of myself? Does it fit with how I perceive other’s view of me? [Althusser, 1971 #29]. This process of enforcement of legitimate order plays its part in the structuring of the habitus. The habitus, partially formed by early family experiences, influences the way in which the school is interpreted. Conversely, the way symbolic violence is enacted in the school influences in its part the way family life is interpreted. Pedagogic action and authority both convey the acceptability of the practices as well as work to exclude alternatives as unnatural or unthinkable. Power may not be exercised or enforced directly or explicitly in everyday verbal and other exchanges, but may be exercised more implicitly through a range of more subtle strategies that the teacher may be unaware of – and which raises some problems for the researcher.

Empirical issues arise around a more immediate sense of consciousness and the various ways in which participants of interaction can be said to be unaware of exercising power or seek to convey the idea of not exercising power. What strategies are employed that resist displays of power or that seek to neutralise it?

[Cicourel, 1993 #49, p 192]

Teachers will be positioned by their involvement in a system in which symbolic violence is enacted, and will react differentially. Aaron Cicourel is arguing that while there may be a lack of awareness of the exercise of power - and by association, symbolic violence – teachers may adopt strategies that seek to position themselves within or to distance themselves from displays of social power.

3.2.6 Working with the habitus

Working within such a Bourdieuian framework has implications for my research methodology. Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to the agency/structure issue is to be critical of much anthropology, which he sees as representing two main streams – the structuralist which sees culture as the mode of communication of meaning, and the functionalist wherein culture is an ideological force for social control. He criticises the first because it reifies cultural forms as structure and the second because it overemphasises ideology as all pervasive or as false consciousness, imposing domination and social control. In contrast, he attempts to reconcile different approaches with a fresh perspective. He sees objective structures not only as actually structure, but also as structuring; as both constituting the individual, and dynamically constitutive of society. With such a perspective as this, the whole subjectivist/objectivist debate becomes largely artificial. In this research, this means there is a need to concretise the four components of the habitus into an explicit theoretical framework, which informs both the research design and the data collection, but also allows me to analyse a teacher’s professional frameworks. I need then to construct a set of:

dialectical relations between objective structures and the subjective dispositions within which these structures are actualised and which tend to reproduce them.

[Bourdieu, 1977 #36, p 3]

This is quite a tall order and I will begin by attempting to clarify my own interpretation of the empirical issues in working with the habitus.

Individuals are possessed, constituted by structural generative schemes that organise our social practices. Yet, practice is a cognitive, social operation reproducing the structures from which it came. However, the distinction here is between reproduction rather than replication. Reproduction allows for some variation and diversity, some break from staticity, yet at the same time, it imposes some boundaries and limitations on what we can do and conceive. It is here that the habitus becomes significant since it is the generative force behind this diversity and limitation working at the interface of cognition and social action. Schools, schooling and education, both formal, in institutions, and informal in the home and locality, are particularly significant and generating. The habitus is important for social reproduction because it confers upon some children an advantageous positioning in society. Those pupils whose habitus best fits the legitimate modus operandi of the institutions - that of the dominant social group - draw favors which dispose them to acquire greater exchangeable cultural capital. This however expands from educational disposition and qualification to an entire social and cultural disposition, taste etc. Such dispositions are acquired, unconsciously, assimilated in our everyday lives and interactions. We thereby acquire a construction of the ‘real’ world rather than a reflection of it, but this construction informs and organises our own practice and in turn becomes constitutive of the reality of the social world [Bourdieu, 1979: 1984 #45, p 467].

Reading Pierre Bourdieu – or the many articles and books spawned by his work – is unlikely to produce crisp clear definitions of the habitus; we should not search the productions of the habitus for more logic than they contain [Bourdieu, 1992 #342, p 23]. Furthermore, “the logic of practice is logical up to the point where to be illogical would cease to be practical”. That is there is always some flexibility and non-determination in our activity that might be dependent somewhat on the habitus, but is not over-determined by it. Being embodied and tacit, the habitus acts as our second nature, permeating our tastes, acceptable social practices, dress demeanor and forms of interactions. This tacit nature allows us to improvise our practices and demonstrate an apparent implicit competence in our social practices [Bourdieu, 1990 #37, p 68]. These practices however are not to be seen as psychological predilections appertaining to our individual psychological makeup, but are formed out of and become embedded within social structures.

Practice, what people do, is not the product of rules internalised by actors, but is produced by less specific and less definite dispositions. Practice is fundamentally improvisatory, the spinning out over time of the process of adjustment between the constraints, opportunities and demands of specific social fields and the dispositions of the habitus.

[Jenkins, 1992 #59, p 179]

So rather than living by explicit rules, the suggestion is we live by ‘dispositions’ – a central notion in conceptualising the habitus. The habitus allows individuals to generate a range of practices and responses, relationships and stances as a response to diverse and continually changing and adapting social situations without these being reproduced as a fixed set of rules, principles or relations. Hence rather than being imprinted with rules, individuals are endowed with a “logic of challenge and riposte” [Bourdieu, 1977 #36, p 15]. Two quotes from Pierre Bourdieu appear ubiquitously in the literature and bear repeating here. The habitus is –

a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which integrate past experiences functioning at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions, and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks thanks to transfers of schemes permitting the solution of similarly structured problems

[Bourdieu, 1977 #36, pps 82 - 83]

. . . systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organise practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming to ends or an express mastery of the operation necessary in order to attain them.

[Bourdieu, 1990 #38, p 53]

Here, two features of the habitus are offered: that it is durable and it is transposable. ‘Durable’ because we become formed by or molded by the habitus; it is reflected in everything we do, our actions, the language we use, our body postures, relationships. As Richard Jenkins says the habitus is “not just manifest in our behaviour, it is an integral part of it” [Jenkins, 1992 #59, p 75]. The habitus is ‘transposable’ because it can generate our behaviour in conditions other than those that it previously occurred and was initially acquired. The habitus is not a straightjacket though, not an objective imposition of personalities. The habitus is not explicitly taught - though some aspects of it may be. Rather the habitus is inculcated through our experiences - our own personal trajectories.

Operationalising Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the habitus requires some work and interpretation. I will do so drawing on his various writings [Bourdieu, 1977 #36; Bourdieu, 1977: 2nd Edition 1990 #39; Bourdieu, 1979: 1984 #45; Bourdieu, 1990 #37; Bourdieu, 1990 #38].

Through our dispositions, the most improbable practices are excluded as unthinkable, which inclines us to be predisposed to act in ways that we have done in the past. The habitus produces practices that reproduce the regularities of experience while slightly adjusting to the demands of the situation. In practice the habitus is history turned into nature. Our unconscious is therefore the unforgetting of our history turning our actions instead into second nature. The habitus is the product of inculcation and appropriation. It is through this that objective structures and relations of domination reproduce themselves [Bourdieu, 1977 #36, pps 72 - 83]

This is because the regularities that seem to exist appear to us as natural since we are predisposed to see them as such through the way we perceive the world. We tend to ignore the limitations of our previous experiences and give them more weight than they deserve. In this way, both individual and collective practices are produced. Past experiences achieve a constancy over time as we become more tied obeying the past than considering the future. Our actions tend to be habitual - creating a ‘structure’ to our practices - or as patterns to our behaviour [Bourdieu, 1990 #37, pps 52 - 59]. This is in some ways just what Emile Durkheim has said in not so many words:

In each one of us, in differing degrees, is contained the person we were yesterday, and indeed, in the nature of things it is even true that our past personae predominate in us, since the present is necessarily insignificant when compared with the long period of the past because of which we have emerged in the form we have today. It is just that we don’t feel the influence of these past selves precisely because they are so deeply rooted within us. They constitute the unconscious part of ourselves. Consequently we have a strong tendency not to recognise their existence and to ignore their legitimate demands.

[Durkheim, 1938: 1977 #336, p 111]

Habitus is in the head; it is also in the relation, which derives in part from the prevailing economic relations. One issue in this aspect of Pierre Bourdieu’s work is the role of the conscious in practice.

The habitus then contributes to the reproduction and regeneration of the status quo. It is embodied structure leading to action. It is about the way we behave and the way we conceptualise ourselves. it is both personal structuring and social structural relations of domination. It draws on the individual’s history, but is shaped by the present. Furthermore the individual habitus in not just individual. It plays a part on the collective action.

[Bourdieu, 1990 #37, p 70]

The habitus is more than just personnel predilections, but exposes social and cultural differences. Most recently, Pierre Bourdieu has written that the dominant classes actually feel themselves to be superior, rather than act as if they were [Bourdieu, 1984, 1993 #339, p 177], and that those bought up within that dominant culture internalise an unconscious taken for granted superiority, internalised in the habitus as categories of perception [Bourdieu, 1985 #340, p 728]. Furthermore in Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu describes examples of internalisation of middle class characteristics and their demonstration through gestures, postures, glances etc. [Bourdieu, 1979: 1984 #45]. Consequently, there are some characteristics deeply engrained in the collective and individual habitus of teachers of mathematics which come through in the dispersion through the field of the collective taken-for-granted practices which impose themselves on individuals and become seen as essential. Incorporating the habitus into my conceptual framework thus requires me to develop a methodological framework that allows access to such deeply engrained characteristics and dispositions.

Ideas like those of habitus, practice and cultural capital, and so on, were intended among other things to point out that there is a practical knowledge that has its own logic, which cannot be reduced to that of theoretical knowledge; that in a sense, agents know the social world better than the theoreticians. And at the same time, I am saying that of course, they really do not know it and the scientist’s work consists in making explicit this practical knowledge, in accordance with its own articulations.

[Bourdieu, 1991 #44, p 252]

Part of the operationalisation of the habitus is in articulating the practical knowledge that might be held by a teacher and the logic thereof. I have thus far organised this chapter around four aspects of the habitus – as social structure, as habit and disposition, as a structuring device and as symbolic violence. Thus, there is a requirement to recognise the legitimacy of the social roots of the practice of everyday life, and in research terms to search for that underlying social structure embedded in a teacher’s professional discourse.

More specifically, such an approach underlines the importance of predispositions and orientations in coming to an understanding of the organisation of teachers’ structures of thought. In particular this requires an examination of how the habitus manifests itself in such aspects as use of language, how one envisages one’s interrelationships to others, one’s style of dress, figures of speech, the roles ascribed to individuals and how these are to be carried out. I need to consider also the legitimacy of the influence of collective history in enacting and facilitating social organisation. Additionally I need to explore how dominant power relations are enacted and conceptualised through misrecognition, what is accepted without the need for elaboration for example. Also, I need to look for how the habitus predisposes us to position ourselves and relate to dominant discourses. Finally, in recognising the existence of a practical logic I need to look for patterns – for regularities of orientation in different contexts and different situations.

3.2.7 The habitus and ideology

Pierre Bourdieu’s writing can help us to look at how power or forms of domination are maintained and reproduced in families, groups and society, such that they result in the maintenance of social order by dominant groups. The habitus can help us to examine domination as everyday practice. Schools are interesting places to examine these everyday practices, since children and teachers interact in such a way to initiate children, as novices, in the ‘rules of the game’. Furthermore, schools are important because of the political and social significance of the site in reproduction and as a location of the ideological state apparatus.

Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus might be read as a formulation of Althusser’s notion of ideology. Where Althusser will write that ideology constructs the ordinariness of the subject, but that this ideology is the effect of a dispositif. The same term re-emerges in Bourdieu to describe the way in which a habitus generates certain beliefs. Dispositions are generative and transposable.

[Butler, 1997 #341, p 180-1, note 21]

A theory of ideology might provide a structure, which might otherwise be lacking in Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu’s work, which otherwise fragments human activity, discourses and dispositions. The habitus has a source located in the social context and social structure; it reflects the production of mental categories via dispositions, is contextualised, is class relative and generates practice. So, to some extent it might be argued that the habitus is little more than ideology in practice. There are differences though and there is an advantage in seeing habitus, ideology and discourse, as distinct tools. Ideologies may be more covert systems of ideas, which may achieve their expression through engaging in discourses. Discourses are more overt, based in linguistic expression and involve agents in participation with others in a social field. At this point, I will move on to considering a conceptualisation and an operationalisation of ideology and discourse.

3.3 The Place of Ideology and Discourse

There is no social practice outside of ideology

[Hall, 1985 #637, p 103]

To study ideology is to study language in the social world.

[Thompson, 1984 #331, p 2]

There are some acts that only speech can perform. But there are some acts that speech alone cannot accomplish. You cannot heal the sick by pronouncing them well; you cannot uplift the poor my declaring them to be rich.

(Henry Louis Gates Jnr.)

In this section, I discuss the problematic nature of ideology and its relation to discourse. I begin by considering the limitations in some previous approaches to ideological descriptions, by seeing ideology as a coherent set of ideas related to social organisation and functioning. In rejecting ideology as ‘false consciousness’, I present an alternative approach where instead we see ideology as representing fundamental and often unchallenged, taken-for-granted positions, concerning the working of society and relations between individuals and groups within it. I move onto considering the nature of discourse and consider my orientation toward it, in particular by elaborating the distance between myself and a Foucauldian conception of discourse and power.

3.3.1 Mapping teacher ideologies

There have been several attempts to investigate the ideological positions taken up by teachers, such as Paul Ernest’s ‘five ideologies’, Mairead Dunne’s ‘three teacher ideologies’ and Máirtín Mac an Ghail’s ‘three plus one’ ideological positions’. In addition, some studies have looked at teacher educator ideological discourses [Beyer, 1987 #777; Grundy, 1995 #135]. I will very briefly describe these approaches.

Paul Ernest’s ‘five ideologies’

Paul Ernest defines ideology as:

competing belief systems combining both epistemological and moral value positions.

[Ernest, 1991 #210, p 111]

From this he describes five “ideologies” [Ernest, 1991 #210] of mathematics education, derived from Raymond Williams’ analysis of the social groups that have influenced the education system [Williams, 1961 #675]:

• Industrial trainers

• Old humanist

• Public educators

• Technological pragmatist

• Progressive educator

There is however often slippage in Paul Ernests’ writing, over the use of ‘ideology’, ‘perspective’, ‘values’, ‘beliefs’, ‘personal philosophy’ and ‘position’. What Paul Ernest’s analysis usefully does is to map ideologies onto some underlying social perspective which provide a useful framework for analysis. It is not however an empirical study, and produces idealistic categories rather than material classifications. Paul Ernest does recognise this oversimplification in his account [Ernest, 1991 #210, p 140]. Consequently, this model of ideology is more analogous to the structural models of teachers’ knowledge, than to those in ideology. Such characterisations as we are offered are closer to idealistic typologies than grounded descriptions of lived ideologies. Such typologies however are useful in understanding and characterising the nature of broad allegiances within the teaching profession, but in my view fail to provide a clear account of what goes on in mathematics classrooms or in the heads of teachers.

Mairead Dunne ‘three ideologies’

In her doctoral Study, Mairead Dunne offers three mathematics teacher ideologies that she constructed a priori and offered to groups of teachers in an attempt to identify ideological positioning. Her categories are not too dissimilar from Paul Ernest’s generic ideologies [Dunne, 1995 #650, pps 106 – 115].

• Traditional

• Child-centred

• New right

Máirtín Mac an Ghail ‘three plus one’ ideologies

In his study of approaches to black youth in schools, Máirtín Mac an Ghail offers three plus one ideological positions created out of summaries of surveys of large numbers of teachers [Mac an Ghail, 1988 #651, pps 46 – 49] which he defines as:

• Old disciplinarians

• Liberals

• New right

• All those who don’t fit in the other three.

Teacher educator’s ideological discourses

In exploring the ideologies held by teacher educators, Landon Beyer and Kenneth Zeichner argue that there is a single dominant ideological discourse in teacher education - that of the conservative ideological discourse of “technocratic rationality” [Beyer, 1987 #777]. In re-appraising this position, and distancing themselves from it, Shirley Grundy and Elizabeth Hatton identify several ideological discourses in Australian teacher education [Grundy, 1995 #135, p 11 et. seq.], which they designate as:

• Social reproduction

• Social fulfillment

• Social agnosticism

• Social transformation

This approach is distinct from previous ideology critiques inasmuch as it is an empirical study of the positions held by the members of a teacher education department. Its context is limited however to being a study of positions on “the purpose of education in relation to the current social order” [Grundy, 1995 #135, p 10] and consequently the ideological categories developed reflect that focus.

3.3.2 Approaching a sense of ideology

Ideology is not a concept that has a clear and accepted meaning, and, possibly connected to this, is often treated with a high degree of abstraction. One weakness of previous studies of ideology is that they have either been locked into being a feature of social structure, rather than human agency or they fail to identify the structure of an individual’s consciousness. These approaches underestimate the capability of individuals to think and act autonomously. A useful direction for an operationalisation of ‘ideology’ is as the structure of ideas about society and the relations between the individuals within it and how power is used in order for society to function. Ideology is an element in the constitution of individuals; it is also about how we elaborate meaning, interpret behaviour and how we shape our reality and social relations with others. Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci see a study of ideology as necessarily related to a theory of power located within social antagonisms and class struggle [Giroux, 1997 #386, p 75]. Ideology is about the study of discourses, but is also embedded in the interests that discourses serve and benefit. Hence, studies of ideology must look further than the individual interaction toward the sectional interests of dominant and dominated groups in society. A critique of ideology therefore is an exposure of power relations. Herbert Marcuse argues [Marcuse, 1955 #661] that ideology is rooted both historically and socially in the socio-economic conditions prevailing, but also in the history of disposition and habits. This distinction between ideological underpinnings and dispositions is quite critical in first understanding how human agency operates and second in helping us conceptualise how we might influence current models of schooling through an awareness of the limits and possibilities for teacher change and development.

Ideologies can be expressed as psychological predilections (through attitudes etc.) or social inclinations (through personal and social relationships) and I endeavour here to explore this richness in order to explore empirically where it might reside and how it might operate in teachers’ professional discourses. Studies of ideology need to take account of the development of habits and dispositions, which become sedimented into ideological bedrock and become manifest in the positions taken up in discourses.

In “Ideology. An Introduction” Terry Eagleton gives 16 meanings of the word ideology currently in circulation, some of which are subsuming and some contradictory, and offers 6 distinct meanings with a progressive sharpening of focus:

Heinz Duthel: Theses on Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault

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