EduLog

A field is a social space with a relatively autonomy and its own unique characteristics including the actors in the field, their position and disposition and the field specific logic and capital involved. Policy enactment at school level is a field with its own agents involved in the process of receiving, interpreting, articulating, translating, enacting and responding to a policy reform. With this in mind, policy enactment is considered a socially constituted process with its complex practices, unique tensions and conflicts, contestations and struggle, power relations, negotiations and position taking. According to Hardy (2015) ‘the field of policy enactment’ is “a social space characterized by conflicting pressure, demands, relations and dispositions amongst those affected about how best to respond to the policy push for curriculum reform” (p.78).  The field of policy enactment has its own distinct actors functioning according to the logic of the field. The policy ena...

Bourdieu’s idea that schools are reproducing inequalities is not appealing at first, especially for people like me from a working class background and who have progressed through to the middle class in a specific context and community. From my personal experience and from people that I know who have accomplished in life just because of their education, Bourdieu’s idea is pessimistic and one wants to just give up on it. However a little more in-depth study, conceptual understanding and a know-how of other concepts in Bourdieu’s theory gives the wider picture which also includes transformation and change in life through opportunities. One thing that caught my attention and is more convincing to me is the historical condition of that time in France when Bourdieu developed his framework. Below I will explain that condition and how Bourdieu’s idea was received by people from different walks of life. Bourdieu brought to light the idea of schools reproducing inequalities at a time in Fra...

Historically researchers argued on two different views of generating knowledge. Some researchers, especially in the natural science believe that knowledge is objectively produced: that is ‘knowledge without a knowing subject'. This kind of knowledge is gained by analysing the structure, the objective conditions and the objective relationship. These researchers contended that it is through controlled experiments that one can reach the truth. For a long time, such kind of objective knowledge was on the landscape of the social sciences and especially education as well. The researcher in the social science discipline attempted to objectively define theories which could be applied in a broader context or generalized in different contexts and settings. However this proved to be a deficit thinking, because such kind of epistemology ignored human experience and social science has to do with human beings and their subjectivity. Thus researchers then argued for the contrary to be true: tha...

Habitus is a set of the acquired dispositions based on the experiences one has passed through. Although relatively durable, habitus evolves with time as individuals encounter different experiences, hence it is a combination of past and present. However it can predict the future actions and provides a sense of how to act and respond in daily life without consciously obeying explicitly posed rules thus working below the level of consciousness. While working below the level of consciousness, habitus can direct moves which can be called organized strategies without intending to be strategic. These strategies can anticipate the future of its own consequences – how? These strategies produce practices that are governed by such a habitus which has adapted to the objective condition in advance so long as these conditions remain the same or are identical. In this condition the habitus successfully adapts to the objective condition. In this way the past is used by the habitus to anticipa...

Legitimization and universalization of rules and regularities of a particular field are the products of the social or historical conditions which produce it. These conditions lead to universalization based on who had access to the required disposition of a field. Here take the example of aesthetic field as a field of pure pleasure. The privileged who had access to the condition of developing this taste legitimize the rule whereas for those who do not have such access accept it as natural/doxa.  Pure pleasure in aesthetics should be for everyone, however the privilege has only access to the conditions in which it is constituted. How? First of all, the constitution of pure taste goes through a long process in which it evolves as an autonomous field (free from political and economic constraints) and sets its own regularities. Secondly, the condition or a certain position in the social world can only give access to the pure aesthetic pleasure. Social world like schooling and or ...