The Mis-selling of Science Education: Bourdieu’s Notion of Cultural Capital and its Implications for the Science Curriculum

• In Event: Science Education, Capital, and Power

Abstract

Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) – an approach which has rarely been used within research and scholarship within science education – this presentation will argue that his theoretical framework has significant value for identifying the ‘worth’ of a science education. In our work, his notion of ‘embodied’, ‘objectified’ and ‘institutionalized’ cultural capital is used as a theoretical lens to identify both the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge and its extrinsic value for future employment.As Bourdieu points out, for many students, much of their embodied cultural capital is acquired within a ‘habitus’ which is dominated by the home, friends and family through diffuse forms of education. Using the ideas of Hirsch (1987), who has often been misinterpreted by the educational community, we argue that formal science education offers both significant forms of embodied and institutionalized cultural capital and that the function of a science education committed to social justice is to provide access to that capital (Delpit, 2006)as cultures are only democratic to the extent that they support access to valued forms of cultural capital by all students. An education science can therefore make an important contribution to students’ cultural capital by providing an understanding of the significant ideas derived from science that permeate contemporary culture;enhance students’ ability to comprehend and use informational texts (Pearson, Moje, & Greenleaf, 2010); and develop the critical, enquiring disposition of mind that is so highly valued as a 21st Century skill (Osborne, 2010). Potentially its most important form of capital it can offer students, however, is a knowledge and understanding of the institutionalized capital that it providesas qualifications that enable employment in a wide diversity of professions both within, and without science.

Drawing on an extensive literature of what students perceive to be the value of science (Archer et al., 2010; Lyons & Quinn, 2009; Osborne, Simon, & Collins, 2003), we argue that the data would suggest that science education misses three opportunities to establish its value both to its students and the wider public. First, it commonly has a poor understanding of the nature of embodied capital that it offers, failing to communicate the cultural achievement that science represents. Second, it fails to see itself as a means of developing the critical dispositions of mind that are the hallmark of the scientist. Third, given the policy emphasis on educating the next generation of scientists(Congress, 2007; Lord Sainsbury of Turville, 2007),science education fails to exploit the one major element of cultural capital that parents and students perceive it to offer – that is, the value of the institutionalized capital that science qualifications affordfor future employment. Hence, the omission of any exploration of the potential careers that the study of science offers is at best perplexing and at worst, perverse. The theoretical perspective and analysisput forth in this paper helps both to identify and valorize the ‘worth’ of a science education and to see how science education is, and has been, consistently mis-sold.

Authors

• Stephanie Claussen, Stanford University

• Jonathan F. Osborne, Stanford University