"Flipping" the Social Field: Language and Power Among Schools, Communities, and Families

• In Event: Using Theories of Language and Power to Investigate Pressing Aspects of Education

Abstract

The theories provided by Barthes, Foucault, Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Fairclough, Luke and de Certeau, provide a lens to examine ways that mothers, teachers, families, and communities engage with schools and theories of social change. By re-narrating their positions as moral educators, Latina mothers disrupt the dominant framing that deems them deficit (Villenas, 2001). Teachers take disruptions of “common sense” one step further by changing the relationship between schools and families by entering communities as learners (Gonzalez, Moll & Amanti, 2005). Working-class families, despite fear, resist state attempts to dictate their child-rearing practices (Lareau, 2011). Community organizing creates change not only at the individual level but at the community and institutional levels as well by focusing on building new relationships and power (Warren and Mapp, 2011).

This paper examines these studies and the language-and-power theories beneath them in order to consider how unequal power relations among schools, communities and families become naturalized via language use and incorporated into dominant structures as generalizable “myths” (Barthes, 1972) or “common sense” Fairclough, (1989). Discursive mechanisms such as deficit thinking (Luke, 1995), or meritocracy, scarcity, and scientific expertise serve as “technologies of power” (Foucault, 1977) in schools—and perpetuate imbalanced power dynamics that legitimize the cultural capital, language, and lifestyle of the dominant class (Bourdieu, 1991; Lareau, 2011). Barthes (1972), Fairclough (1989) and Freire (1970) are used in this paper to challenge this neutrality by asking people to become “readers of myth,” practicing critical discourse analysis, and “reading the world into the word” (Freire, 1970). Similarly, as this year’s annual theme revisits John Dewey’s call on educators and scholars to engage with the “publics” in “ways that raise awareness of social problems,” this paper argues that “flipping” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983) the hegemonic language practices of the current social field can begin with reading, subverting, and reframing, dominant myths. However, this new consciousness must be coupled with building new social relationships in education and community settings, and developing the “capacity to act” (Warren and Mapp, 2011) among the publics in order to continue social change.

Following this year’s annual meeting theme, this paper argues that engaging in new kinds of scholarship that value collaboration among communities and researchers encourages public inquiry from all and not solely from professionals. Disrupting hegemonic myths can facilitate a new consciousness and subsequent educational relationships based on equity. Researchers can contribute to this new consciousness through public scholarship and collaborative research. For more equitable conditions to take root, a fundamental change must occur in not only the structures of society, but in its discourses surrounding those structures as well. Building relationships characterized by trust and reciprocity between researchers and the public challenges the inequitable social field that currently hinders the world’s educational systems and related societies.

Author

• Saugher Nojan, University of California - Santa Cruz