Contesting Social Reproduction Within Teachers' Pedagogical Practices: Relics of Factory Model Schooling

• In Event: Marx SIG Session 1

Abstract

This qualitative case study examines whether the social ideologies of secondary school teachers about the future prospects of their Mexican American working-class students influence the pedagogies they deploy in their own classrooms. Drawing from social reproduction theory and earlier studies on social stratification through schooling, we explore how teachers understand their academic duties to students, how through their pedagogical labor teachers serve as social exemplars, and whether they engage their students in learning through their labor. Findings suggest that teachers’ beliefs about students are contradictory and problematic, as are the associated pedagogies they use with them. Though largely unconscious, teachers enact a de facto social reproduction in the way they frame students’ economic opportunities as bleak but inevitable

Author

• Jesus Jaime-Diaz, Colorado State University Pueblo