Through the Looking Glass: Assessing and Enhancing the Effectiveness of Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice to Understand the Achievement Gap in British Columbia's Inner-City Schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper emerges from a 2016 conceptual study borne out of an ongoing practitioner inquiry in which I, as a practicing K-12 inner-city Canadian teacher, tried to understand, on a theoretical level, why the children at my inner-city school in Vancouver consistently underperform in an academic sense in spite of being provided with additional learning resources. The achievement gap that exists between British Columbia’s inner-city children and their more affluent peers cannot be adequately explained by differences in finances alone, but it has sociological roots, which I explored in this study. To understand the achievement gap, I chose to filter it through Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice (1992) and evaluate the effectiveness of his theory in being able to effectively explain the who, what, where, when, why, and how of this problem for me as an inner-city educator. Methodologically, I utilized the qualitative approach of hermeneutics (Gadamer, 2013) to fuse my horizon with that of Bourdieu so as to develop a deep understanding of his Theory of Practice and its core concepts of cultural capital, habitus, field, and symbolic violence, and their implications for inner-city school children. Hermeneutics permitted me to uncover multiple layers of theoretical evidence that I used ultimately to make an inductive argument that finds in favor of using theory of practice to understand academic underperformance among British Columbia’s inner-city school children. This paper is a presentation of the theoretical merits of Theory of Practice as an analytical lens for practitioners who wish to understand the achievement gap. This paper also explains how the efficacy of Theory of Practice can be enhanced when it is coupled with Lareau’s (2013) scholarship on class-based parenting practices. My second paper provides practitioner-scholars who are exploring this topic with recommendations as to how best to use Theory of Practice for maximum benefit.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.058 | 0.118 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".