Social Class Difference - Inside Factors

• Dunne and Gazeley – studied 9 secondary schools and found teachers normalise the underachievement of working-class students as they thought there was nothing to be done to overcome it
• Labelling theorists have been criticised for being too deterministic. Not every student that has been labelled accept their label and may reject it which is known as the self-negating prophecy
• Becker – conducted interviews with 60 teachers and found teachers judge pupils by how closely they fit the image of an 'ideal student'. Their appearance plays a big part in influencing their decision. MC students fit closest to the image
• Some students who are WC can present themselves as an 'ideal student'
• Rosenthal and Jacobson – field experiment in a school carrying out IQ test. After they were completed, some were chosen at random and labelled 'spurters' to the teachers. A year later they returned and repeated the test and found the 'spurters' had a higher success rate
• The study could be a one off as no other studies of the sort have been repeated
• Gillborn and Youdell – schools use teachers as notions of ability to decide how to stream students. Teachers are more likely to perceive working class students as being low ability
• Students could self – negate their label as low ability or work better to reach a higher band
• Lacey – subcultures are created via a 2-stage process: Differentiation – streaming (WC in lower sets and MC in higher sets), Polarisation – moving towards one of two opposite extremes. Top sets form pro-school subcultures and low sets form anti-school subcultures
• Not all students are a part of a subculture, and some don't like to belong to them
• Bourdieu – habitus is formed because of a group's class position and is learnt during socialisation. Schools prefer middle class habitus
• Habitus is the learned ways of thinking, being and acting that are shared by a particular social class. Although one class's habitus is not intrinsically better than another's, the middle-class has the power to define its habitus as superior and to impose it on the education system
• Archer et al found that the young people in the study had constructed identities based upon the wearing of branded sportswear that differentiated them from middle class pupils. The working class identified themselves as 'Nike' is comparison to the middle class 'Gucci'
• Due to some students feeling inferior they construct their identity based on expensive clothing to gain status in schools if they struggle in education
• the act of excluding oneself from some activity. the difficulty in determining that the self-exclusion is truly voluntary where it is apparent that attempts to integrate would be rebuffed
• A student deliberately excluding themselves from social activities could lead to isolation and depression amongst children
• Bartlett – marketisation disadvantages working class students because they're not selected by better schools
• Gillborn and Youdell – marketisation caused the A-C economy. This is when teachers focus all their time on students, they think will achieve 5+