Language, Literacy, and Pedagogy in Postindustrial Societies

Postindustrial capitalism and the problems with Bourdieu’s social and cultural capital in understanding the Black/White achievement gap in the United States and United Kingdom

“…In both instances, educational practitioners seek to resolve this burden of acting White, lack of middle-class values or capital, and opportunity gap by prescribing equitable funding of schools and teaching African Americans the dominant cultural and social capital, which are viewed as race neutral and are assumed by schools, required to become successful in school at the expense of their non-dominant Black cultural forms (Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey, 1998;Cook and Ludwig, 1998;Downey and Ainsworth-Darnell, 2002;Farkas et al, 2002;Gordon, 2006;Ogbu, 1991;Steele, 1997;Tyson et al, 2005;Wilson, 1998), that is, push for equitable funding of schools and resources, and teach Black students through social, community, and parental involvement (social capital) the linguistic and cultural competencies (cultural capital) of middle-class parents that schools require while undermining or overlooking their non-dominant cultural capital of the inner cities (Carter, 2003). This same logic holds true for Black British Caribbean students in the United Kingdom as well (Mocombe and Tomlin, 2013).…”

“…However, unlike Coleman who emphasizes the social and cultural capital of Bourdieu’s theory, Carter and Tyson focus on the political and economic capital as the determining factor in contributing to Black academic underachievement. These processes, Mocombe, Tomlin (2010, 2013); Mocombe, Tomlin and Showunmi (2016) demonstrate have also been applied to understanding the Black/White academic achievement gap as it pertains to Black British Caribbean youth in the United Kingdom. Yet in spite of these countless efforts to resolve the gap as it exist in the United States and United Kingdom, the problem persists and has become more profound.…”

“…The Black–White test score gap is an empirical problematic that dates back to the 1940s. On many standardized tests the mean scores of Black students on average are typically at least 1 standard deviation below the mean scores of White students (Fryer and Levitt, 2004; Jencks and Phillips, 1998; Mocombe and Tomlin, 2013). As Fryer and Levitt (2004) point out, a wide variety of possible explanations for the test-score gap have been put forth.…”

“…Be that as it may, this continual need to develop a cultural realm to explain agency within capitalist relations of production as Bourdieu has done with his theory of praxis actually negates the agential moments of the Black underclass actors through the commodification of their structural position, which brings Bourdieu’s theory and the actions of those who lack bourgeois capital back to the structural realm of analysis, and subsequently fails to explain the persistence of Black academic underachievement, which is a result of two factors, linguistic structure and role conflict (Mocombe, 2005a, 2005b, 2010; Mocombe and Tomlin, 2010, 2013). This hermeneutical essay, using Paul C. Mocombe’s structural Marxist paradigm that posits structural differentiation and reproduction in capitalist societies of the contemporary world-system to be a result of the mode of production and its ideological apparatuses (education, the church, the streets, prisons, and athletic and entertainment industries), demonstrates why and how Bourdieu’s social reproduction theory is, therefore, neither an adequate explanation for completely understanding praxis nor the Black/White academic achievement gap in contemporary postindustrial economies like that of the United States and the United Kingdom.…”

Classic and Revisionist Sociocultural Theory, and their analyses of expressive language

“…Mrs Jones' behavior is also culture-centric in that she acts as an agent of class society in encouraging middle-class students like Mindy to acquire and practice middle-class discourse, while discouraging lower-class students like Deena from acquiring this linguistic cultural capital-competence (Bernstein, 1975: 64;see Ratner, 2002: 19-20;Mocombe and Tomlin, 2013). In this sense, the teacher was not a poor teacher, she was a good teacher (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990).…”