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Dissertation Information for Fiona Thompson

NAME:
- Fiona Thompson

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Sociology

SCHOOL:
- Temple University (USA) (1995)

ADVISORS:
- Kyriakos Kontopoulos

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: An exploration of the use of cultural capital in home/school interactions around homework

Abstract: "The major issues of this dissertation are the adequacy of Bourdieu's conceptualization of cultural capital as a way of explaining school achievement and the complicated ways in which class and 'race' intersect. Another central concern, partly linked to Bourdieu but coming from a different sociological tradition, is the social construction of social realities, in this case of homework, schooling, and families' understandings of their relationships to schooling through their children ('parent involvement'). These divide into theoretical concerns with cultural capital and social constructionism, and the substantive issue of the lack of fit between various actors in the educational arena.

Fieldwork for this ethnography consisted of a year in a public elementary school in Philadelphia, whose African American students are drawn from a range of social classes. Interviews and observations focused on two third-grade classrooms, the top track and a lower track, and the homes of 47 students.

Analysis shows there is no simple split between social classes or school tracks in terms of family resources and educational strategies. Nonetheless, teachers assume that working-class and poor families are less likely to be using school-preferred strategies expected of middle-class families. Further, in tracking decisions, social class is a mediating mechanism, triggering a meta-interpretation about the likelihood of a child's ability leading to school success, but strategic activation of cultural capital is more crucial than class or 'race'.

The study reveals that homework, an important locus of educational strategies, is socially constructed through interactions among teachers, students, families, and others. This form of constructionism is interpersonal and interinstitutional. In recurrent social processes there is misrecognition as well as recognition of other social actors, but the consequences of misrecognition, like the resources to which they are (indirectly) related, are not the same for the middle class and the poor, white and black, school and family. Homework is a problem, not because of lack of information or lack of familial interest, but because it is a contested discursive terrain, where class conflicts and 'race' antagonisms shape the game which students' families and schools all undertake with much effort and frustration."

MPACT Scores for Fiona Thompson

A = 0
C = 2
A+C = 2
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2010-10-27 17:25:54

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