Imagining Power and Poverty: Making Meaning and Forms of Capital in the Classroom

• In Event: Places, Encounters, and Imaginings: Exploring Curricular Perspectives Across Educational Locations

Abstract

This research evaluates the ways that forms of capital take shape as one class of Kindergarteners develops as readers and students at a public charter school in a small suburban community. The primary research question is: In what ways does our ability to imagine shape the development of different forms of capital in early elementary classrooms? Along with a deep interrogation of what the imagination is, I utilize ethnographic methods to uncover the ways that systems of capital are inscribed in students. Ultimately, the formation of capital is indeed rooted in processes of our imagination. This provides a new frame of critical analysis into the construction of power in the classroom, and new ways of dismantling systems of poverty.

Author

• John B. Porco, University of Wisconsin - Madison