Social class: its (re-)production and its consequences
The role of schools
moving away from the debate "is it schools? is it families" to figuring out what each does in the career of a child (the transformation of a child with potentialities to an adult with grades, degrees, labels, etc.).
testing and tracking as gate-keeping ("chutes and ladders") in the movement from generalized legitimate peripheral participation in the world of adults to a particular "full" position of a particular type.
This is a long journey with many intermediate steps, including the shifting from track to track, or from school to school.
schooling those who will not make it (as identified earlier by school people):
meta-pragmatic discourses: "they are not going to make it" (p. 37); "you know, your basic bottom" (p. 85).
everyday practices of justification and constitution.
one school district (Mapplehurst) and two high schools:
Southmoor: statistically: more professionals, more minorities;
discursively: "easy to teach students" (p. 83) and then differentiation between the tracks.
Marshall: statistically: more workers, less professionals; discursively
"homogeneous ... typically blue collar kids" (p. 128-9)
two ways of doing lower tracks ("Additional needs"). Producing
dis-organization at Southmoor (p. 85ff)
"Education" and its caricature (p. 91)
super-organized at Marshall (p. 137ff)
Conversation analysis of class interaction (beyond Mehan but before formalization of various forms of authoritative interaction)
Discourse analysis of what the teachers say about the students, pedagogy, curriculum
From "achievement gap" to "switching network" (networks or webs moving people into various positions--as well as the people designing and
maintaining the network
from properties to consequences of interaction:
Completing the shift from placing success/failure in (derived) personal properties to focusing on the concrete practices
that identify and label and, most importantly, mete consequences including on one's teaching, that is:
having produced several labels for types of school, types of parents, and types of children, then one changes
one's pedagogy.
tracing the activities (e.g. translation)
Koyama on Latour
a methodological note
ethnography and policy about tracking (p. 248)
Some questions
How would you relate Page to Mehan?
Not teaching, not learning, not being acknowledged as teaching/learning