Social class-internal

• Labelling -

  • teachers pass judgment on their students based on pre existing stereotypes of what is the ideal pupil
  • during Beckers study of 60 Chicago school teachers he found that the teachers stereotype the pupils based off their work ,conduct and appearance
  • teachers saw the working class pupil as the furthest away from the ideal pupil
• labelling-

  • Keddies study found that teachers do not distribute knowledge evenly around the classroom
  • they are more likely to give high ability students high status knowledge and low ability students low status knowledge
  • low ability groups were mainly working class ,basic and dumbed down
  • high ability groups were majority middle class ,detailed and full curriculum
• labelling -

  • gillborn and youdell found that teachers are more likely to see middle class students as having the ability to enter higher level exams this is based of the teachers perceptions
  • this results in discrimination against working class students who are denied the opportunity to attempt to gain higher grades

  evaluation-

  • labels can be rejected
  • labelling theory is deterministic in suggesting that failure is inevitable fo those with negative labels attached to them
• language codes -

  • Bernstein argued that the working class have limited vocabulary and the middle class have a wider one with longer grammatical sentences which offers them an advantage in school
  • the language used in working class homes is inefficient with families communicating with gesture or single words this is known as the restricted speech code
  • the middle class speak in elaborated code this consists of a wider range of vocabulary and more complex sentences
  • he argues that the middle class are at an advantage as the elaborated code is the one used by teachers ,textbooks and exams
• subcultures-

  • Lacey -pro school subcultures are :high streamed, middle class, high status ,committed to schools values, keen to learn
  • anti school subcultures :low streams ,working class ,failure in tests and exams ,lo self esteem ,form the anti school subcultures to gain status

  evaluation-

  • the division between pro and anti school subcultures is to simplistic as there are a variety of possible pupil responses to the culture of the school
• Pupil identities -

  • archer -found that working class pupils feel that to be educationally successful they would have to change the way they talked and presented themselves
  • they felt unable to access middle class spaces such as university
  • archer argues that the schools middle class habits stigmatises working class pupil identities