Thinking With Habitus in the Study of Learner Identities

• In Event: "It's Not Just Theory": Toward Theory as Method in Critical Theoretical Research Methods in 21st Century Equitable Education

Abstract

Objectives
Habitus, as a thinking tool, represents an attempt to extend understandings around internalised behaviours, perceptions, and beliefs that individuals carry with them and which, in part, are translated into practices as they transfer to and from the fields in which they interact. Bourdieu argues that the school is a central generative space for habitus, where the learner is directly and indirectly imparted with patterns of thinking and being. Serving as a critical reflection on how habitus has been used in educational research concerning, the presentation considers three key aspects integral to the use of habitus to explore learner identities: 1) aspiring to the institutional ideal, 2) hexis and the 3) classed nature of the learner.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
As a social theorist, Bourdieu’s theory of practice intends to show how relations of privilege and domination are produced through the interaction of habitus, a matrix of dispositions that shape how the individual operates in the social world; capital that is economic, cultural, social, and symbolic; and field. As a tool, habitus has been useful to educational researchers. This presentation examines how habitus has been operationalized to examine the constitution of learner identities highlighting areas where it has led to significant insights.

Methods/Data Sources
The presentation draws on both Bourdieu’s original texts and on contemporary scholarship which investigates learner identities using habitus in order to make a contribution to knowledge.

Results/Significance
In terms of significance, the presentation outlines three key aspects which are integral to using habitus to theorize learner identities.

Learner Identity and aspiring to the institutional ideal
Students are often required in overt and subtle ways to orientate themselves to idealized ways of being in line with the demands of formal schooling. With this ideal in mind there is always a pressure around where learners are engaged in an internal deliberation in aspiring to an ideal that may never be achievable.

The hexis of the Learner Identity
As the body of the learner proceeds through school it is conditioned in terms of its corporeality. Habitus is composed of a set of dispositions inculcated in the familial environment and as these dispositions become embodied, through immersion in repetitive social practices and relations, this is what Bourdieu and Passeron (1977, p. 82) call the ‘bodily hexis’.

The classed nature of the Learner Identity
Bourdieu (1990) brings attention to how habitus in terms of individual subjects is “not the instantaneous ego of a sort of singular cogito, but the individual trace of an entire collective history” (1990, p. 91). In this way, habitus takes on particular classed dispositions which are utilised in differing ways across educational fields.

Authors

• Garth Stahl, The University of Queensland

• Sarah McDonald, University of South Australia