Seemingly Benign: Examining Kindergarten Academic Redshirting Through a Lens informed by Bourdieu’s Conceptual Framework

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Identity and Cultural Capital in Remote, Rural, and Underresourced Settings (Table 9)

Abstract

Academic redshirting, or delaying entry to kindergarten, may be a strategy to give children the gift of time. However, this opportunity to mature is a luxury afforded to families with social and economic capital enough to pay for an extra year of preschool. It is key that many of those able to redshirt are White and middle to upper class. The salience of race and social class are often experienced simultaneously. Redshirting illustrates one means of leveraging capital which multiplies advantage and favor in schools.
The complex, tangled relationship between capital and advantage is reciprocal and messy, yet an analysis, informed by Bourdieu's conceptual frame has the potential to move exploration of struggle and advantage beyond a hollow false narrative.

Author

• Rosalyn R. Washington, University of Delaware