Beyond Achievement Gaps: A Sociology of Educational Flourishing

• In Event: 21020 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 20: School and Classroom Dynamics: Trust, Discipline, and the Pathways to Educational Flourishing

Abstract

Sociologists of education have extensively documented how schools reproduce inequality through resource distribution, tracking, and cultural processes. While this critical tradition provides essential insights into educational stratification, it has been less attentive to what schools should positively cultivate. This paper develops a sociological approach to educational flourishing that maintains critical analysis of inequality while expanding the field's normative and analytical horizons. Drawing on philosophical, psychological, and policy perspectives on flourishing, I articulate five tenets for a sociology of educational flourishing: (1) Institutional structuring—educational institutions shape what forms of flourishing become possible through organizational arrangements and cultural messages; (2) Relationality—flourishing emerges through social interactions and collective practices rather than as individual achievement; (3) Temporality—flourishing exists simultaneously as present experience and future potential, creating tensions that educational institutions navigate; (4) Inequality—educational inequality operates through differential access to the conditions that enable flourishing, including meaningful engagement, supportive relationships, and identity validation; and (5) Agency beyond resistance—students actively create meaning, purpose, and connection despite institutional constraints. Together, these tenets constitute what I call a "critical-positive dialectic" that examines both how educational institutions constrain flourishing possibilities and how they might better support meaningful development across diverse populations. This approach neither abandons sociology's critical focus on educational inequality nor uncritically embraces positive visions disconnected from structural realities. Instead, it offers analytical tools for understanding how flourishing emerges through complex interactions between institutional structures and human agency, providing new directions for both educational research and practice.

Author

• David Kalim Diehl, Vanderbilt University