Bourdieu: can Taste be tasty? Victoria Neumark Jones London Metropolitan

Transcription

1 Bourdieu: can Taste be tasty? Victoria Neumark Jones London Metropolitan

2 Journalism at London Metropolitan University: background A range of learning and teaching methods characterise our approach from exposition to discussion, small group activity, pair work and writing tasks in-class coaching. We embed elearning in the course, for instance making FoI requests, using Twitter, news articles, Youtube videos and archive radio material. We run newsdays and news weeks, which simulate news production, with deadlines, conference, and final products programmes, newspapers, blogs. Our Facebook group offers students an instant shortcut to allaying learners fears and anxieties. They also feed back into our course very directly, both formally and informally. For instance, after a peer mentoring meeting, we immediately invited two columnists to speak about writing opinion pieces. Journalism needs both individual and group working skills. My own teaching techniques are interactive. I foster active learning, for instance using parlour games to create trust and open up creativity with language, subject of a piece in the AJE journal. I never speak for longer than 15 minutes without pause. Graduated and guided practice in writing skills, from basic grammar to a familiarity with rhetoric, underpins the journey to narrative construction.

3 Rationale I have developed these techniques from my own teacher training but also from many years of writing about education as an education journalist and observing successful lessons. From this, I concluded that lecturing does not work; students just don t listen. Our students generally enter the course with a weak set of A levels or none (in the case of mature students, about 5% of our intake). Such is the impact of the learning process across cognition, meta-cognition and employable social skills, that graduates leave as confident communicators, who have gone on to jobs in television, radio, news agencies and magazines. Feedback from them includes: You have made the difference to my life. Teaching relies on communicating with learners at the level at which they operate, rather than assuming that they are ready to take in information by just sitting and listening. They have to engage in concrete activities in order to internalise ideas. My practice draws especially on the seminal ideas of Bruner (1960 and 1985) but also Montessori, Froebel and Piaget (passim), on the move from concretisation to abstraction. If we are to turn out critical thinkers who can express their own ideas, they first of all have to learn how to challenge themselves (Bruner 1985). For instance, to explain Pierre Bourdieu s idea of class fractions, their tastes and habits as evidence for their competition for dominance of a field (as in Distinction 1979), I get them to compile shopping lists for different groups and then tell me how they know what is on the lists and what it shows. One student then told me how he had surfed the net to watch all Bourdieu s videos.

4 Approach Personalising learning by constantly using active feedback develops critical thinking skills and personal confidence. We encourage students to challenge us, on any basis, be it fact, attitude, expression, class, race, gender or sexual orientation and they do! For example, discussing why the ABC figures on circulation do not routinely include ethnic minority news media, why we have used a particular phrase, or how women or the poor are represented in news. Such constant personalized feedback techniques draw on the work of Kolb (1984) and Goleman (1998) [PV 3]. 600 words Bourdieu, Pierre (1979, trans 1984) Distinction. Boston: Harvard Bruner, Jerome (1960) The Process of Education. Boston: Harvard Bruner, Jerome (1985) Actual Minds: Possible Worlds. Boston: Harvard Froebel The Education of Man (1887 but ed 2005). London: Dover Goleman, Daniel (1998). Working with Emotional Intelligence. London: Bloomsbury Kolb, Daniel (1984) Experiential Learning. New York. Prentice Hall. Montessori, Maria (1949, reprint 1995). The Absorbent Mind. UK: Holt Piaget, Jean (1947, ed 2001). The Psychology of Intelligence. London: Routledge

5 What I actually do Bourdieu: social, cultural capital What s in your shopping basket. Work in pairs Scribe on board Note overlaps Point out what Bourdieu means when he talks about social and cultural capital

6 Bourdieu: The forms of capital And the structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world. Depending on the field in which it functions, capital can present itself in three fundamental guises: as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the forms of property rights; as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of educational qualifications; and as social capital, made up of social obligations ( connections ), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of a title of nobility. Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.; and in the institutionalized state, a form of objectification which must be set apart because, as will be seen in the case of educational qualifications, it confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee. Social capital is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition or in other words, to membership in a group [1 which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a credential which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word. These relationships may exist only in the practical state, in material and/or symbolic exchanges which help to maintain them. They may also be socially instituted and guaranteed by the application of a common name (the name of a family, a class, or a tribe or of a school, a party, etc.) and by a whole set of instituting acts designed simultaneously to form and inform those who undergo them; in this case, they are more or less really enacted and so maintained and reinforced, in exchanges. Being based on indissolubly material and symbolic exchanges, the establishment and maintenance of which presuppose reacknowledgment of proximity, they are also partially irreducible to objective relations of proximity in physical (geographical) space or even in economic and social space. The volume of the social capital possessed by a given agent thus depends on the size of the network of connections he can effectively mobilize and on the volume of the capital (economic, cultural or symbolic) possessed in his own right by each of those to whom he is connected. [

7 Second exercise How did you get your job? How did you hear of it, how did you apply, who did you give as references? From mn Rw