Declan Dancing: Tracing Pedagogic Habitus Across a Two-Year Ethnographic Study of the Impact of a Group of Artists in a School

• In Event: Bridging New Literacy Studies, Classroom Language Ethnography, and Bourdieu’s Social Philosophy

Abstract

The presentation aims to show how, by adopting a Bourdieusian framework, it is possible to trace the different ways in which children, artists and teachers all come to engage with creative teaching and learning. A three level analysis of the different fields of play, which constitute ‘creativity’, is used. Drawing on a linguistic ethnographic approach, this presentation will show, by focusing on participatory research by children, the different ways in which artists, teachers and children play out their habitus in a field of play, the classroom and the school and traces their agency in one creative project. The focus of this presentation is on the children’s interpretative framework.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework: This presentation combines perspectives from the New Literacy Studies (Street 2000), linguistic ethnography (Rampton 2007), the analysis of multimodal texts (Kress 1997), and Bourdieusian social philosophy. This includes a focus on the relationship between habitus and field and the way in which the ‘pedagogic habitus’ (Grenfell 1996) plays out within specific interactional settings.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry: The paper uses linguistic ethnography (Maybin 2007) emphasizing foregrounds and focusing on language in use across classroom and out of classroom contexts. It also included participatory research methodologies (Clark et al 2005) as children were involved in the collecting, analysing, interpreting and writing up of the data set. Indeed, one focus of the paper is reporting the foci the children took in their research efforts, how they traced versions of creativity, how those versions of creativity made sense to them, and how they described where they were in the picture.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials: The evidence includes video, audio tape, field-notes, interviews with artists, teachers and children and group analytic discussion

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view: . In this study, the children identified a moment, ‘Declan dancing’, which is their own key insight into creative learning and teaching in the classroom. In doing so, they unpacked the difference in their perception of the ‘field’ of the classroom, as opposed to the teachers or the artists.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work: Since studies by Nespor (1997) it has been important to ask whose version of the classroom and learning counts in the community that is schooling. . By seeing the concept of ‘field’ as contested, and using the concept of the ‘pedagogic habitus’ (Grenfell 1996) it is possible to see educational sites such as classrooms as complex spaces of contested meanings.

Author

• Kate Heron Pahl, The University of Sheffield