A hidden “classed literacy” in a Brazilian privileged school: how a working-class student navigates his middle-class school routine

• In Event: Navigating “Schooled Literacies” Across Contexts

Proposal

Privately funded schools have become increasingly popular in Brazil as they are seen as an asset for social distinction among middle-class families (Ball, 2001) who are grappling with the repercussions of underfunded public schools (Libâneo, 2012). However, legislation demands that the private schools offer full scholarships for former public school students, allowing low-income students to attend these institutions with no clear plan or discussion on promoting integration across class differences. Adding to that, private schools in Brazil are still understudied mainly due to barriers to accessing fieldwork (Nogueira, 2013).

Therefore, there is a need to “open this sociological closed box” and explore, through groundwork, how Brazilian private schools relate to the reproduction of social inequalities. The setting of this study is a prestigious private school that predominantly serves the Brazilian urban middle class.This study shows how a scholarship student faces exclusion through literacy evaluations that reproduce the norms and values of the middle class. His experience illustrates that the notion of "classed literacy" is central to the experience of the popular classes in elite schools in Brazil.

This paper explores an exceptional contradiction: a student from a working-class family in a middle-class school. This tension provides a methodological “window” to explore the processes of exclusion within a Brazilian private school. Through an “ethnographic imagination” (WILLIS, 2000), this paper draws from three months of participant observations and interviews with students and teachers to illuminate scenes of a working-class student’s school routine.

Aligned with the research inquiry, reproduction theory informs this study's conceptual framework. First, the notion of the working-class student as an “oblate” (Bourdieu, 1974) who would possess a “scholarly relation to culture” as opposite to a “natural”, “dilettante” relation to culture (the one that schools value), was used to examine exclusionary processes in the everyday practices of middle-class students. Second, Bourdieu’s notion of “hypercorrection,” meaning the “erroneous hypercorrection and the proliferation of signs of grammatical control”, in an ”anxious reference to the legitimate norm of academic correctness” (1992, p. 146), was mobilized to illuminate how the efforts of the student in his school tasks end up being codified as failure in tests and exams.

This paper advances the conversation about social reproduction in education by analyzing how social class inequality is experienced by a working-class student in a Brazilian middle-class private school through a variety of practices. Specifically, this investigation presents the category of “classed literacy”, in order to critically illuminate how a privileged school’s formal and hidden curriculum decisively impacts one working-class student’s experience (Apple, 1978). The notion of “classed literacy” helps to map exactly how and when working-class culture and identity are consistently codified as “wrong” or “inferior” in the everyday life of the student in school.

Author

• Ricardo Boklis Golbspan, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul