Class, Culture And Control: the Transformation Of Educational Work In A Gentrifying Primary School

TY - JOUR

T1 - Class, Culture And Control

T2 - the Transformation Of Educational Work In A Gentrifying Primary School

AU - Mansaray, Ayo

PY - 2020/11/19

Y1 - 2020/11/19

N2 - Research indicates that white middle-class families’ engagement with urban schools in gentrifying localities is often characterised by strategies of dominance and control, which support claims of belonging and identity, as well as securing educational advantage for their children. This is referred as ‘class colonisation’ or ‘school gentrification’. However, there has been a neglect of educators’ perspectives and responses to urban social change and middle-class parental practices. In this paper, I offer an institutionally-focused analysis of class colonisation as a feature of educators’ working lives. I argue that class colonisation produces organisational ‘turmoil’ through parental practices and interactions which unsettle staff’s social and cultural control over key aspects of their work situation and institutional boundary maintenance. This turmoil is experienced as disruptive of the social order, generating staff cynicism, conflict, ambivalence, and alienation. I draw on ethnographic data with teachers and teaching assistants from a gentrifying inner-London primary school to empirically specify these arguments. Theoretically, this paper integrates elements of Bourdieu and micro-sociology, to foreground how agents use their unequal resources to negotiate their interpersonal institutional realities, and in the process, re-produce classed and racialised boundaries and relations within the changing contexts of urban education.

AB - Research indicates that white middle-class families’ engagement with urban schools in gentrifying localities is often characterised by strategies of dominance and control, which support claims of belonging and identity, as well as securing educational advantage for their children. This is referred as ‘class colonisation’ or ‘school gentrification’. However, there has been a neglect of educators’ perspectives and responses to urban social change and middle-class parental practices. In this paper, I offer an institutionally-focused analysis of class colonisation as a feature of educators’ working lives. I argue that class colonisation produces organisational ‘turmoil’ through parental practices and interactions which unsettle staff’s social and cultural control over key aspects of their work situation and institutional boundary maintenance. This turmoil is experienced as disruptive of the social order, generating staff cynicism, conflict, ambivalence, and alienation. I draw on ethnographic data with teachers and teaching assistants from a gentrifying inner-London primary school to empirically specify these arguments. Theoretically, this paper integrates elements of Bourdieu and micro-sociology, to foreground how agents use their unequal resources to negotiate their interpersonal institutional realities, and in the process, re-produce classed and racialised boundaries and relations within the changing contexts of urban education.

KW - School gentrification

KW - bourdieu

KW - class colonisation

KW - educational staff

KW - urban education

KW - urban sociology

KW - white middle-class parents

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85096331443&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/02671522.2020.1849377

DO - 10.1080/02671522.2020.1849377

M3 - Article

SN - 0267-1522

VL - 0

SP - 1

EP - 14

JO - Research Papers in Education

JF - Research Papers in Education

IS - 0

ER -