Children’s Bodies in Schools: Corporeal Performances of Social Class: Corporeal Performances of Social Class

By S. Henry

Bringing together sociology of the body with powerful examinations of educational theory and social class, Henry examines how children's experiences of school and pedagogy are shaped by their bodies and the ideas of social class and class identity that their bodies carry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Release date: Jun 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781137442635

Book preview

Children’s Bodies in Schools: Corporeal Performances of Social Class

Sue Ellen Henry

Associate Professor of Education, Bucknell University, USA

CHILDREN’S BODIES IN SCHOOLS

Copyright © Sue Ellen Henry, 2014.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2014 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®

in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978–1–137–44263–5  EPUB

ISBN: 978–1–137–44263–5   PDF

ISBN: 978–1–137–44262–8  Hardback

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

First edition: 2014

www.palgrave.com/pivot

DOI: 10.1057/9781137442635

Contents

Acknowledgments

Series Editor’s Preface

1 Children’s Bodies and Corporeal Expectations of Schooling

2 Social Class Inequities and the Body

3 Theoretical Frameworks for Understanding Social Class Corporeality

4 Corporeal Implications of Contemporary Schooling Practices

References

Index

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank:

imag Bucknell University, for providing me a noncompetetive research leave in 2013–2014, during which the bulk of this writing and research was conducted;

imag my students, who over the past 17 years, have never failed to enlighten and challenge me;

imag my Writing Center partners: Peg Cronin, Sabrina Kirby, and most especially Deirdre O’Connor, who are superb conspirators and critics, always friendly, well-dressed, and kind;

imag my friends, Mary Bushnell-Greiner, Bill Flack, Lynn Hoffman, Kathleen Knight-Abowitz, Jaxi Rothman, Roger Rothman, and many others, who graciously asked me how the writing was going and listened to the answer;

imag my family, Mom, Dad, Peter, Auntie Judi, Uncle Ronell, Jacob, Ruby, and Benjamin, who somehow never fail to believe in me;

imag my husband and the best critical friend I could ask for, Abe Feuerstein, with whom all things are possible.

Series Editor’s Preface

Children learn both about and through explicit and hidden curriculums each day at school. Schools have been and still are contested sites for enacting social change as well as social reproduction. While schools most often are socially reproductive institutions, both social change and reproduction are transmitted and enacted through schooling and curricular offerings. So too, in explicit and in subtle ways, one’s bodily manners, gestures, and comportment are moulded in schools. Description and analysis of the corporeal elements of teaching and learning in schools has not made its way into educational theory or practice until lately. Sue Ellen Henry’s book is on the vanguard of such powerful social critique, using corporeal manifestations by students and teachers to understand educational practices and especially cultural reproduction in schools.

Henry grounds her inquiry in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Annette Lareau. Bourdieu developed a social theory to analyze and assess how culture and, most importantly, social class are inscribed and made manifest in bodily habit and comportment. Henry uses Bourdieu’s constructs with Lareau’s recent work on child-rearing practice to highlight the importance of how bodily habit and comportment as well as linguistic competence and acuity are transmitted to the young or uninitiated in a culture. These practices are collectively a social game key to school success, which some play well due to internalization of cues and abundant social capital, while others barely succeed or fail. Henry notes that in schools, these social games of bodily comportment and linguistic competence are matched up to socioeconomic status, where poor or working-class students manifest different corporeal and linguistic habits than do middle- or upper-class students. The rub is that the game of succeeding in school is heavily weighted in favor of advantaged students, as the school and home for these students share similar linguistic and corporeal habits, practices, and norms.

In a brilliant section of the book where she uses categories of Lareau, Henry contrasts the concerted cultivation of advantaged students with the accomplishment of natural growth of less advantaged students. The logic of concerted cultivation maps well beyond the intimacy of the family to structured achievement arenas such as classrooms. The intimate and less formal family orientation and playful lassitude of the logic of natural growth may make those students happier or at least less stressed, but does not advantage them at school the way concerted cultivation does. As Henry points out, many teachers more easily privilege children of concerted cultivation over those others of natural growth and thus the achievement gap between the two groups only will widen.

Henry discusses two popular practices of current American schooling, Ruby Payne’s curriculum for understanding students of poverty and the charter school organization, Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). She shows how the regimented and controlled corporeal and linguistic practices advocated by Payne are similar to what is enacted in KIPP schools. She decries as inhumane the neoliberal shift toward producing human capital via the explicit linguistic and corporeal practices and norms that Payne’s curriculum and KIPP schools promote.

The link between linguistic competence and school success is well known. Henry is right that much educational research focuses on linguistic competence and the mastery of formal school language that facilitates social and academic success in school. Focus on children’s bodies, however, remains embryonic. She presents us with a compelling and rich argument that corporeal performance and habit should be investigated by educational researchers much further.

A.G. Rud

1

Children’s Bodies and Corporeal Expectations of Schooling

Abstract: This chapter foregrounds the central question of the text: how are children’s corporeal performances—shaped by their social class upbringing—interpreted by teachers and how might these (mis)interpretations influence the social reproductive effects of schooling? It asserts that important theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu and Annette Lareau can help researchers understand the corporeal performances of children in different social class backgrounds. Self-control is explored as a central mechanism by which different corporeal performances become advantageous or detrimental in navigating the somatic expectations of school. This chapter concludes by arguing that neoliberal educational practices have detrimental consequences for children’s development of authentic forms of self-control.

Keywords: corporeal performance; self-control; social class

Henry, Sue Ellen. Children’s Bodies in Schools: Corporeal Performances of Social Class. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137442635.0004.

An invitation

What is your first or near-first memory of instruction on how to move your body in a particular way? Maybe your story comes from the world of sport, having a coach demonstrate the right way to throw a ball, run and kick simultaneously, or run backward. Perhaps a parent or family elder told you to sit up at the table, or chew with your mouth closed, or some other sort of instruction related to eating.

Or, perhaps your story takes place in school: a teacher giving a direct lesson on proper desk posture, hand position when holding a pencil, or appropriate position for reading. One of my most profound memories of instruction for the body occurred at school, but the lesson was given by my then dearest friend Meredith, in 7th grade. We were in the school cafeteria. Over our lunches of hamburger and tater tots, we talked about our days, and whether we were going to have a sleepover at her house that weekend. As lunch ended, we got up to empty our trash and return the trays to their cart. As I walked back to Meredith to go to our 5th period class, she conveyed something that even then I knew was important.

You walk so heavy and swing your arms too much, Meredith critiqued. Don’t stomp and keep your arms at your sides, here, like this, she said, as she demonstrated the daintier, feminine gait that she thought was appropriate for all girls. Indeed, her walk did appear different from the way I felt my body moving when I walked. I walked with a distinct purpose, a direction, fast and focused. Meredith’s walk was more graceful and gentle, aiming in a direction but not nearly as hurried and stiff as my gait. Meredith’s instructions were jarring in their force. Her critique reminded me that I was visible and that others were watching. She framed the gendered and classed social environment in which I was operating at school and she gave me clear advice on how to participate more appropriately (expectedly) within it.

Such lessons are ubiquitous, particularly in school. This ubiquity has the paradoxical effect of concealing our awareness of the comprehensive impact of these lessons. The fact that teachers, parents, and other children are consistently giving feedback on corporeal presentation and performance has a puzzlingly persuasive influence on our consciousness of our bodies. The ways in which we move our bodies throughout our lives—the gestures we make, the way we hold our hands, our gait, our stance, our facial expressions—are the comprehensive expression of a lifetime of ordinary moments and points of feedback. As literary theorist Kenneth Burke articulates with regard to the development of rhetorical skill, we might best think of how we corporeally move through the world as the totality of a life’s persuasion rather the result of one key lesson. Corporeal performance grows over time not through one particular address, but [through] a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reinforcement . . . (Burke 1969: 26). In other words, the lessons we receive about our comportment are extraordinary due to their ordinariness.

My important lesson from Meredith many years earlier was catalyzed in my mind after a day spent supervising elementary student teachers many years later. It was early September in a kindergarten classroom, in a school with a growing Latino population and 58% of the students on free and reduced lunch. The student teacher was leading the children in a typical morning meeting activity that included counting the number of days of school that had passed. The seasoned cooperating teacher, a white man in his mid-forties, drew a seat next to mine as we both watched the student teacher. He leaned over to me and claimed, I can predict right now who is going to have to repeat kindergarten. The statement shocked me. How? I asked him. Aware that very little of the treatment effect of schooling had happened at this point in the year, that no standardized measures of reading or mathematics skill had been given, I was curious about his rationale. This veteran teacher explained his logic by noting how some children knew how to sit on the carpet during circle time, that some children were more skilled at raising hands to be called upon, and that some children in the class had proper pencil grip. Adding to his calculus, he noted that some children had come to school knowing the alphabet, some had letter-sound correspondence acumen, and some could even write their names. But he began his explanation by remarking on the qualities of children’s bodies, and the children’s differential capacity to control their bodies in school-appropriate ways. I recall leaving that day wondering how this teacher was seeing the children’s bodies as indicative of academic capacities that were, ostensibly, to be learned at school.

My fascination with the ways children’s bodies were interpreted by teachers was reinforced during another student teaching observation later that same year. This time, at the same school, the scene transpired in a fourth grade classroom. "Brandon,¹ come up here, commanded Mr. Coates, a white man in his late thirties, veteran fourth grade teacher, and part time football coach for the local middle school. Brandon was a quiet boy of about four-and-a-half feet tall, white, with dirty blonde hair and an oversized T-shirt hanging to his knees, displaying NASCAR driver Dale Earnhart’s signature. When I ask you to get to work, that’s what I mean, Mr. Coates explained firmly. Brandon stared at the ground. Look at me when I’m talking to you. If you don’t look at me, I don’t feel the respect I deserve. Stand up straight –in our school, you stand up straight and look people in the eye when they are talking. Got it?"

What did Brandon learn about his body from this interaction? Was he displaying a corporeal posture of respect consistent with expectations at his home? Was Mr. Coates’ admonition to look me in the eye a requirement that was familiar to Brandon? Had Brandon intended to be disrespectful with the way he held his body, or was his corporeal code for respect just different from the corporeal expectation of school?

These questions initiated my interest in understanding more about how teachers interpret children’s nonverbal, corporeal performances at school. What sorts of lessons about the body are embedded in the contemporary schooling experience for young learners? How are these lessons shaped by the corporeal learning children bring with them from their home child-rearing experiences? How does our (largely) middle-class teacher population perceive children who come to school with corporeal practices different from their own? This book theorizes on these questions in order to move children’s bodies from the shadows to the spotlight. As a starting point, I map Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social class construction onto Annette Lareau’s recent work exploring the social class nature of child-rearing practices to theorize on the corporeal consequences of such learning. Following this analysis, I examine the influence of neoliberalism on the contemporary context of schooling, and how this ideology shapes both educational practices and children’s bodies in schools. To explore these linkages, I investigate the potential impact of Ruby Payne’s pedagogical advice for teaching poor children and the more recent infiltration of cultural interventionist schooling organizations such as the Knowledge is Power Program, or KIPP (Shuffelton 2013: 300). These regimes, which have broad public appeal, also have important and largely hidden consequences on children’s corporeal performances that merit consideration. This text looks at the ways in which a child’s social class and home environment influence her corporeal performance. When she brings her class-based corporeal performance to school, what might happen? How might she be received by her likely middle-class teacher? How will her corporeal performances be evaluated against the likely unconscious standards of middle-class somatic expectations?

Readers will be reasonably asking about the place of race, gender, (dis)ability, and other identities that shape how people (literally) move throughout their lives. The question is an important one, and many authors have explored the corporeal experiences and performances of these identity markers.² In Chapter 2, I explore some recent research on children living in these identities. The larger aim of this text, however, is to extend the current theorizing on children’s bodies and the identity marker of social class. Because social class is a powerful organizing structure in US society, separating it from other powerful