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A feel for the game … of teaching? Bourdieu and a
theory of pedagogy
The best way to praise and appraise Bourdieu’s work is also the most
straightforward - use it.
(Chuck Dyke 1999: 190)
The appropriate way to emulate Bourdieu … is to follow the procedures
whereby his research detected social tendencies in such a way as to
anticipate or actualise future developments.
(Robbins 1998: 28)
Judith Gill
University of South Australia
A paper presented to the Collaborative Learning Group
at
Mawson Lakes Campus
Univeristy of South Australia
28 May 2003
A Feel for the game
1
The relevance of Bourdieu’s theory in developing an understanding of learning
Bourdieu believed in the centrality of educational structures as offering a window on to the
ways in which societies functioned. Hence he is hailed as both a sociologist and an educational
sociologist – seeing the latter not as a subset or secondary position to the former but rather as a
prime means of entry into understanding of the social world. Educational institutions are in
Bourdieu somewhat akin to the laboratory for a physical scientist in that they offer a site for
investigation.
His theoretical vision embraces understanding at the level of person and of wider society – his
key contribution has perhaps been to refuse the conventional distinction between the two and
to insist that interactions between people are both revealing and constitutive of broader social
dimensions.
Some of his central concepts – cultural capital, symbolic violence and habitus – are involved in
his explication of the ways in which people come together to constitute society. He wrote often
about the ‘rules of the game’ and the need to get a ‘feeling for the rules’ in order to fully
participate. All of these concepts are involved in his analysis of schooling - and importantly
nor are they limited to schooling. All sorts of learning involves aspects of enculturation –
getting a feel for ‘how we do it here’, whether the ‘it’ refers to a workplace practice, the role of
a University student, of a third grader, a young woman and so on – and each will be different
depending on the context.
In this short presentation I will endeavour to spell out these central concepts and to suggest
the usefulness of Bourdieu’s approach for education, especially when education involves an
attempt to transform sociocultural positioning and work towards a more inclusive society.
Judith Gill
Underdale 2003
A Feel for the game
2
A feel for the game … of teaching? Bourdieu and a theory of
pedagogy
The best way to praise and appraise Bourdieu’s work is also the most straightforward - use it.
(Chuck Dyke 1999: 190)
Introduction
The task of thinking about the ways in which a study of Bourdieu could assist the University
in its teaching and learning project came to me out of the blue. I claim some familiarity with
the theory, I had admired its comprehensiveness, I had used it in analysis of young people’s
gender behaviour … but had not regarded Bourdieu as a ‘helping hand’ when it came to
teaching. Basically I thought it was the Wrong Question: how can Bourdieu help us with
teaching and learning? It felt to me like I had entered one of those children’s books where you
flip the top half of one animal against the lower half of another and in so doing produce a very
strange beast indeed.
In a previous existence I have had more than a passing acquaintance with Educational
Psychology wherein I’d had lots of experience with theories of learning. From this perspective
theorising learning means consulting the standard channels – the behaviourists, Pavlov,
Watson, Skinner et al, the information processing theorists for whom mind has been the
model for computer technology, not to mention the cognitive theorists such as Piaget,
Vygotsky, Kohlberg and so on, for so long giants in the intellectual landscape that has
concerned itself with the theorisation of learning. Bourdieu has no truck with this company at
all. I could not imagine them in conversation.
But then … a slow glimmer of an idea began to stir. All of these standard learning theory
approaches have looked specifically at the individual, not necessarily subjectively (thinking of
the behaviourists here), but their focus is on the internal goings on within individual minds,
the connections made, the strategies deployed, the knowledge accumulated. They have taken
an imaginary magnifying glass/microscope to individual heads and built theory around what
they imagined was going on inside.
Bourdieu’s position is different and contrasting. The focus here is not within individual heads,
nor even whole persons. His concern is much more with the spaces between people, the
medium within which living takes place, the context of action and interaction which seeps
through into group understandings of ‘how it’s done’ here. I am reminded suddenly of the
Russell Drysdale painting of the game of cricket. In this work stick figures, one of whom holds
a bat, are positioned within the overweening red brown landscape of the Australian outback.
The painter has paid little attention to the individual players – they are stick figures after all –
but they serve to underscore the overarching landscape in its colour, its dryness, its all
pervading presence. There is a sense of conjointness in the painting – all the figures are
focussed on the game, but it is the space in between the figures to which the eye of the
observer is drawn. That space operates as a stage upon which the unwritten rules of the game
are played out, the imaginary lines of distinction, the judgements, the stance, the turn taking
and the cheers – and everybody there knows what’s going on and takes part.
My own involvement with Bourdieu had been in developing the theoretical framework for my
doctoral study completed over ten years ago in 1991. I used this theory to analyse data drawn
from an ethnographic study of schooling in which I attempted to demonstrate the ways in
A Feel for the game
3
which gender construction was happening in standard schooling practice. Certainly I had
found ready application of the theory in my analysis of school life. Even though Bourdieu had
made only the briefest mention of gender in his work with the Kabyle and had not at that
stage engaged with the study of masculinities which became one of his later works, the theory
presented itself with a means of analysis of the lived experience of schooling which suited my
purposes admirably. But Bourdieu and teaching and learning?
A good question
After spending some time thinking about the difference between Bourdieu’s location as an
anthropologist/sociologist and hence a student of the ways in which society works, I’ve come
to think it is indeed important for a teacher to engage with these sorts of understandings. I
now see the question that brought me here as a very pertinent one to raise – what is the
connection between Bourdieu and learning? How could an engagement with Bourdieu’s
theory enrich pedagogical approaches in the university?
I’m going to try to explain why I think this is a very good question in terms of three key
elements of Bourdieu’s theory: cultural capital, symbolic violence and habitus.
But first some general points. Bourdieu chose to study the ways in which social groups hang
together. He took account of the structural differences between, say, rich and poor, and his
concern was to look at the ways in which social institutions supported those differences. He
broke from the smoothly running vision of the structural functionalists for whom social order
was paramount and to whom the various parts of social groupings whirred together like so
many differently coloured cogs in a well oiled machine. Bourdieu’s social vision is similar to
that of Gramsci in terms of the struggle over power – those in power need to continually work
to maintain their position above the wannabes, the aspirational voters in current Australian
parlance. For him the fundamental social division was that of social class, derived from the
economic structure of the market in which there were clearly more and less powerful sectors.
He saw educational institutions as particularly important in the work of containing the
contestation and of legitimating and reproducing class division.
For instance, look at Adelaide. Each year the local newspaper writes with shock horror as its
latest group of cub reporters ‘discover’ the amazing fact the young people from the largely
working class areas to the north have a significantly lower chance of getting to University than
do those from the leafy eastern suburbs. Bourdieu’s analysis suggests that a compelling
explanation for these differences lies within the ways in which educational institutions
function.
It is precisely its relative autonomy that enables the traditional education system to
make specific contribution towards reproducing the structure of class relations, since it
need only obey its own rules to obey, additionally, the external imperatives defining its
function of legitimating the social order …
(Bourdieu and Passeron 1977: 199)
According to Bourdieu it is the very fact of the school being seen as autonomous that enables
it to mask the effects that it seeks to reproduce, delivering them as proper outcomes of the
educational process. He writes of the “existence of an educational system offering (very
unequally) the possibility of learning by institutionalised stages in accordance with
standardised levels and syllabuses” (Bourdieu 1984: 328). All students are seen as having
equal access to schooling, to the standard conservative viewpoint the fact that some achieve
A Feel for the game
4
enormously higher than others is accountable in terms of their ability – the cream rising to the
top. However Bourdieu suggests there are key factors involved which work in pre-determined
ways to bring about more or less expected results.
Cultural capital
First among these is cultural capital which he propounds as a feature akin to economic capital
in that you are ‘born into it’ in terms of the values, attitudes and practices of your parents,
wider family and your social circle. Thus some young people come to school with a love of
books, an understanding that symbolic systems need to be mastered, a practised quickness
with numbers and an expectation that their curiosity about how things work will be fostered
and catered to. They expect to love school and to do well there as their parents have done.
Others do not bring this cultural baggage; this is of course not to say they come without
cultural effects, but theirs are less useful to them in picking up the school’s offerings. Their
cultural repertoire may even include an accumulated negativity in light of their parents’ brief
encounter with a forbidding, shaming institution. In Bourdieu:
…the inheritance of cultural wealth which has been accumulated and bequeathed by previous
generations only really belongs (although it is theoretically offered to everyone) to those endowed
with the means of appropriating it for themselves.
(Bourdieu 1977a: 488)
School achievement, which children are positioned unequally to access, is further and
importantly legitimated by the award of credentials celebrating what some already have or
are well positioned to access over others who do not come prepared in this way. The very fact
that this process passes largely unrecognised allows the school to continue with the work of
social division and class reproduction which it so effectively does.
Symbolic violence
In Bourdieu’s writing the concept of symbolic violence refers to the ways in which many of
the unwritten aspects of the negotiated understandings between teacher and taught are the
result of the imposition of an authority structure which may or may not be based on legitimate
pedagogic authority. Thus he writes:
The absence of a genuine law … must not lead us to forget that any socially recognised
formulation contains within it an intrinsic power to reinforce dispositions symbolically.
(Bourdieu 1977b: 21)
Through symbolic violence Bourdieu claims that whole systems of signification are
transmitted in such conventional phrases as ‘sit up straight’ or ‘that’s not the way to hold your
knife’. Note that here the pedagogic authority could be operating within the family, the
church or social institutions other than the school, but note too the implicit power involved
with the speaker being cast as the definer who must be obeyed.
And our bodies respond to these dicta and incorporate them into our physical repertoire
almost without our being aware. In Bourdieu’s words:
Adopting a phrase of Proust’s, one might say that arms and legs are full of dumb
imperatives. One could endlessly enumerate the values given body, made body, by the
hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy which can make a whole cosmology through
injunctions as insignificant as ‘sit up straight’ or ‘don’t hold your knife in your left hand’.
(Bourdieu 1990: 69-70)
A Feel for the game
5
Such instances are readily observable in practices around teaching children to conform to
stereotypical gender norms – big boys don’t cry, young ladies always speak softly and so on.
The crucial feature of Bourdieu’s formulation of symbolic violence lies in its explanation of
compliance in which it echoes Althusserian notion of ideology’s power of interpellation. For
Bourdieu, symbolic violence is “the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with
her/his complicity…” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1996: 167).
The concept of symbolic violence has also been used to refer to the pre-packaging of
knowledge into subject containers. Institutionalised education is essentially complicit in the
creation of knowledge hierarchies which canonise some knowing as important and as
associated with particular vocabularies which further underline their importance (by keeping
out the uninitiated) whereas other knowing is not valorised in this manner and consequently
not regarded as important, not connected with public status and power. Bourdieu points to
the arbitrariness of much of this classification as well as its relation to very different post
school life choices.
People, too, are forcibly classified within schooling as a result of their class position wherein
they are thereby limited in terms of their self understandings, their aspirations and their
possibilities. Bourdieu cites empirical evidence drawn from teachers’ comments on student
work to sustain this position. In a series of studies he was able to show that the teacher’s
comments varied qualitatively in terms of his/her perceptions of the class location of the
student. (Certainly feminist researchers have shown similar forces at work in the case of
gender). Generations of people have been characterised as ‘bright’ and ‘not bright’ as a result
of their schooling experience. They have often as not internalised the labelling and adjusted
their life choices accordingly.
In Bourdieu it is the concept of symbolic violence which links his theoretical stance to the
work of linguistic philosophers such as Saussure and Derrida who have focused on the ways
in which language use serves to constrain and contain whole worlds of meaning. Together
with habitus Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence directs attention to the discursive
practices that have become a key feature in postmodern cultural analysis.
Habitus
This concept is at the core of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework. It refers to the network of
understanding that is acquired, often early in life, which predisposes members of a society to
interact in ways consistent with the specific societal norms of their group. For Bourdieu then
habitus stands for an “embodied understanding”, a system of ‘durable transposable
dispositions’, which refer, inter alia, to bodily comportment, to holding oneself or to gesturing
in a certain way. A bodily disposition is a habitus when it encodes a certain cultural
understanding. It therefore represents the physical and spatial knowledge displayed by group
members in ways of which they may or may not be consciously aware. The domain of the
habitus is a ‘practical sense which reactivates the sense objectified in institutions’. We notice
that actors, and in particular mimers, display such an awareness as they seek to reproduce
culturally familiar characters such as the Italian waiter who constantly gesticulates, the upper
class English gentleman with his stiff demeanour and supercilious expression or the Edna
Everage mode of dress as the archetypal Australian housewife. Brief encounters with such
images convey whole worlds of meaning.
A Feel for the game
6
The central function of the habitus is to generate an ensemble of practices consonant with
member positions within the total social formation, even and possibly especially when those
positions are unequally located. As Bohman writes:
Habitus is supposed to explain how it is that agents come to share a culture and its
practices, even when there are asymmetrical social positions and relations of
domination. Bourdieu solves the Parsonian problem of social order not through the
internalization of norms, but through the ‘inculcation’ of dispositions that come not
only from being socialised into a culture generally, but into a particular
subordinate or dominant position within it. It operates through the agent’s own
dispositions rather than coercion, through ‘generative and implicit schemata’ rather
than sanctioned rules. Even if sanctions or rules were present, it would still have to
be explained why it is that agents are predisposed to accept them. This is the role of
the habitus.
(Bohman 1999: 133)
Although Roy Nash (1990) disagrees, in my view habitus is a much more complex and useful
concept than ‘socialisation’ to which it bears some superficial resemblance. Habitus is the
enabling factor that allows society to happen, the invisible glue that sustains the continuation
of the identifiable social group. Nash has termed it an ‘inherently ambiguous and overloaded’
concept (Nash 1990: 446), perhaps as a result of the somewhat opaque terminology used by
Bourdieu in coining the term. In Bourdieu habitus operates as a ‘system of dispositions”, “a
system of durably acquired schemes of perceptions of thought and action engendered by
objective conditions but tending to persist even after alteration to those conditions” (Bourdieu
1977b). This last is important in that it shows that, while habitus may be grounded in the
objective conditions, its continuance outlasts those conditions as it becomes intertwined with
the existence of the group, albeit not simply in a functional way. The role of the habitus is
symbolic rather than functional in Bourdieu’s account, as in:
Habitus is the product of the work of inculcation and appropriation necessary in
order for those products of collective history, the objective structures (of language,
the economy etc) to succeed in reproducing themselves more or less completely, in
the form of durable dispositions, in the organisms (which one can, if one wishes, call
individuals) lastingly subjected to the same conditionings
(Bourdieu 1977c: 85)
Thus it falls to the habitus to account for the continuation of the culture. And it is the
sociological focus on the group, the society and its shared aspects of culture that contain both
objective and subjective elements that constitutes Bourdieu’s enduring focus of analysis. (Note
his disinclination to use the term individual in the above quotation.)
The habitus appears to operate at the pre-conscious or unconscious level rather than as a
response to a conscious recognition as with a rule of behaviour. In Bourdieu the habitus
… entertains with the social world that has produced it a real ontological complicity,
a source of cognition without consciousness, intentionality without intention, and a
practical mastery of the world’s regularities which allows one to anticipate the future
without even needing to posit it as such.
(Bourdieu 1990: 11-12)
Later in the same work he continues:
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the source of historical action … is not an active subject confronting society as if that
society were an object constituted externally. This source resides neither in
consciousness nor in things but in the relation between two states of the social, that
is, between the history objectified in things, in the form of institutions, and the
history incarnated in bodies, in the form of that system of enduring dispositions that I
call habitus. The body is in the social world but the social world is also in the body.
(Bourdieu 1990: 190)
In this quotation, reminiscent of the old cliche about ‘you can take the boy out of the country
but you can’t take the country out of the boy’, Bourdieu has sought to explain how we become
part of our social world, in the sense of taking into ourselves at a subconscious level the way
our cultural location affects our being-in-the-world and the habitus becomes the mechanism
for that transformation.
A crucial feature of habitus is that it is always represented as a system, ‘an ensemble of
practices’ never just a single instance. Bourdieu called the work of the habitus a ‘dialectic of
objectification and embodiment’ (we might say it’s the way of taking into our subconscious
awareness the features which structure our social world). In Bourdieu through the habitus
attention is still on the social landscape rather than the individual actors but it is now taking
into consideration the ways in which the social actors re-produce their particular social sector.
Habitus works at the largely (or at least originally) unconscious level – it’s ‘how we do things
here’ in ways that are not necessarily spelled out. The derivation of habitus comes from
Bourdieu’s focus on the spaces between people, their social milieu, rather than on what’s
going on inside their heads.
While the theory does allow for individual variants of habitus, its essence remains with the
group and personal differences are only interesting insofar as they serve to underscore the
group system. Relatedly, I am always made uncomfortable by the use of habitus as a
possession of individuals, something they own in terms of his is different from ours etc. It
strikes me that such was never the orientation that Bourdieu’s use of the term commends.
Habitus is like the air we breathe invisible but necessary, no one’s and everyone’s at the same
moment; it’s like the water in the goldfish tank of which the goldfish is unaware but can’t
function without. And in my view it’s not portable – you can’t take it with you; it is only
sustainable in terms of the group. You can of course be a ‘fish out of water’ in which
circumstance you need to discover the unwritten rules of the group and seek to ‘pass’. Cross
cultural experiences are often relevant here - as in the recent bestseller “Almost French”
(Turnbull 2002) in which a young Australian woman gives an account of her trials in terms of
not fitting in with the largely unconscious but all pervading group norms of the Parisian
society of her French boyfriend. Her self appointed task became one of finding out the rules
and the reasoning behind them. In her text it is clear that her French partner (native
informant) experienced a good deal of difficulty spelling out the rules as for him they didn’t
exist as such. Even less successful were his attempts to rationalise the rules, for example when
he attempted to explain why she should not go down the street in her track pants, “le
pantalon pour jogging” as he called it, he was reduced to “it is not nice for the butcher”, an
explanation that was seen as quite ridiculous to the young Australian, and equally so to her
Australian readers.
Finally habitus works to render the group practices as normal and natural – the implication is
that the way we do things here is the right and only way to do things. In the words of one
Bourdieu scholar:
A Feel for the game
8
The crucial thing about habitus is that it naturalises itself and the cultural rules, agendas
and values that make it possible.
(Webb et al 2002: 40)
At the same time it is important to recognise that in Bourdieu the concept of habitus does not
preclude change and agency often realised as the result of struggle. It is perhaps not
surprising that Bourdieu returned again and again to the idea of habitus throughout his
writing life, seeking to clarify, refine and ever more clearly define (albeit in a fluid and flexible
way) this central feature of his theoretical edifice. In an interview in 2000, in what is perhaps
his most concise encapsulation of habitus and agency, he declares both his recognition of
structural division as lived out by social actors and his refusal of the subjective/objective
binary distinction:
I developed the concept of habitus to incorporate the objective structures of society and the
subjective role of agents within it. The habitus is a set of dispositions, reflexes and forms of
behaviour that people acquire through acting in society. It reflects the different positions
people have in society, for example, whether they are brought up in a middle class
environment or in a working class suburb. It is part of how society produces itself. But
there is also change. Conflict is built into society. People can find their expectations and
ways of living are suddenly out of step with the new social position they find themselves in
… then the question of social agency and political intervention becomes very important.
(Bourdieu 2000: 19)
In order to bring students to a critical appraisal of their world and their positions within it,
teachers must begin by developing an awareness of their own habitus, meaning the existing
dispositions, values, attitudes and the practices they commend. Acknowledgement of the
teacher’s position of interest places the students more powerfully in terms of accessing the
material. Failure to do this would leave the material to be adapted in terms of the student
habitus which may well account for outcomes very different from the teacher’s intentions.
In schools teachers should attend to the need for explicitness about a whole range of
behavioural expectations most especially when interacting with students from social groups
different from their own. Most teachers come from middle class society and the majority of
students, especially in the public schools, do not. The problem here is when teachers assume
that their values, attitudes and practices are shared with and/or the same as those of their
students, rather than declaring their own position and inviting recognition of other positions.
Successful teaching can involve the establishment of particular shared understandings to
operate within that classroom around that subject area, the explicit generation of the ‘rules of
the game’ in terms of particular environment. This is of course not the same thing as
generating habitus (even if such a thing could be done!). As Bourdieu carefully and repeatedly
points out, habitus does not come down to a simple system of rules or codes of behaviour and
he distinguishes habitus as:
that regulated disposition to generate regulated and regular behaviour outside any
reference rules; and in societies where the work of codification is not particularly
advanced, the habitus is the principle of most modes of practice.
(Bourdieu 1987: 81-2)
The last point indicates a possible explanation for some of the problems teachers have
experienced in attempting to interact with young people whose backgrounds are relatively
A Feel for the game
9
free from the rule boundedness of families in western capitalist society. For these children,
their regulated behaviour cannot be explained in terms of a set of rules about bedtimes and
putting away toys and folding clothes. At the same time, some of the most successful accounts
of educating young indigenous Australians involve cases of a good deal of explicitness around
the expectations of the learners and the teachers (see for eg Sara 2002).
At this point the discussion turns to an analysis of a classroom setting in which Bourdieu’s
theory is used to explain what is really going on and to indicate the likely outcomes in terms
of teaching and learning.
Notes from the field
In my doctoral study I attempted to apply insights from Bourdieu’s theory along with the then
new ‘linguistic turn’ in educational research to analyse data drawn from a long ethnographic
study of schooling focused on gender construction. I travelled with a group of young people
for a couple of yeas as they negotiated the move from primary to high school. Some of them
attended a coeducational high school whereas others went to a neighbouring girls’ school.
The following excerpt is from the field notes taken from observing a geography class in the
girls’ school taught by a male teacher. Note that it’s not the fact of his being a male teacher that
is the problem here (certainly not taking habitus as indicative of the need to ensure teacher and
taught are from the same social group), but rather his lack of awareness of his own position
that has precluded effective teaching and learning.
The lesson begins.
SM (loud voice): Now that we’re all ready … and we’re not RULING THINGS UP … (making sure
he has everyone’s attention) … what would you say about the varieties of agriculture in Australia?
… ummmmm…
There is a stony silence.
SM: Bet you don’t know what intensive and extensive mean .. do you?
Analysis. All sorts of things involved here. He’s using their lack of cultural capital to produce
them as ignorant. He’s augmenting the already existing gender difference and difference in
positional power to produce difference in knowledge acquisition in ways that confirm the
girls in their ignorance.
Later in the same lesson:
SM (talking about gas flow and a solar pond): And this is the confusing part for you girls …
(afterthought) and for any of us I suppose ..
Later again
SM: This is a very difficult thing for you girls to understand …
Analysis. Symbolic violence. The teacher is using their gender as the explanation of his
ineffective teaching, he’s making it extremely unlikely that they will strive to understand
whatever it is. He’s constructing them as girls in contradistinction to learners. He might as
well have said “You won’t get this because you are girls.”
Another day. Same class. The lesson is on compass directions.
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SM: How many of you have rooms with a northerly aspect and your mother sits out there in the sun in
the afternoon?
Nicole: I’ve got the northerly aspect but not the mother sitting in the sun …
SM: Haven’t you? My mother used always go out to my room in the afternoons because it was sunny
and she liked to do her sewing in the sun …
Analysis Habitus. Here the teacher makes no concession to the fact that social conditions for
women have changed dramatically in recent years and that most of the mothers of these girls
are in paid work outside the home. Their shared understanding of women’s role which
constructs their habitus, is not shared by the old fashioned nostalgia of their teacher. Note it’s
not that ‘his habitus’ is different – it’s just that his headset is out of tune with the values,
attitudes and dispositions of this class – their habitus (Gill 1991).
In summary
It seems to me then that Bourdieu does have something to contribute to an understanding of
how learning happens - and to an explanation of why it doesn’t happen. As teachers we fall
too easily into the ready made explanation that our students aren’t bright enough to perform
in the ways that we think they should. If anything this tendency to write students off as not
able, as less than adequately prepared for a particular area of study, is even more apparent in
Universities nowadays than in school. The rapid increase in the tertiary student population in
contemporary Australia has meant that significant numbers of first year University students
are the first generation in their families to achieve that level of education. These young people
constitute the frontline of a dynamic cultural change, both within and beyond the University.
They do not come with an ‘ensemble of practices’ or ‘durably acquired pre-dispositions’ such
as have those with University educated professional parents. For these young people the
puzzle of how to ‘do University’ has to be worked out in terms of the particular courses and
student groupings, through the interminable complications of enrolment procedures,
timetables and electives, not to mention the actual lived experience of lectures, tutorials and
seminars. Small things such as the correct mode of address to use when speaking with
lecturers can pose enormous issues. Some of these problems can be alleviated to some degree
by sensitively developed orientation materials and induction sessions. There remains the
question of pedagogy. Following Bourdieu it behoves us as University teachers to adopt a
consciously reflective stance about our teaching, to interrogate our taken for granted
assumptions about what is involved, to monitor our use of language and to struggle for
alternate ways of communicating our ideas. For too long University education has presumed a
particular sort of prior educational experience and operated upon that presumption. The
usefulness of a study of Bourdieu in constructing pedagogy is that the theory requires teachers
to become more self reflective and allows them to anticipate the ways in which students may
or may not take up the material in hand, thus the theory becomes a driver of appropriate
pedagogical action. In Robbins’ terms Bourdieu’s theory directs teachers “to follow the
procedures whereby his research detected social tendencies in such a way as to anticipate or
actualise future developments” (Robbins 1998: 28). Such an orientation commends multiple
ways of seeing the problem at hand, recognises the need for more flexible approaches to
learning and replaces the traditional knowledge transmission treatment so typical of
University lecturing with one of knowledge generation.
On a related point, in Australian schools at the present time there is a recognition of the multi
cultural composition of the classroom. Some schools pride themselves on the numbers of
different cultures and language backgrounds of their students. For others it is a source of
explanation of student’s failure to learn and of the difficulties of teaching in these
A Feel for the game
11
environments. In a similar way the profile of University student population has also radically
altered. Australian Universities have sought increasing numbers of overseas students to swell
their enrolments, so much so that the typical student body comprises a much more diverse
population than the wider public. Hence frequent calls for the ‘internationalisation’ of courses
in terms of content and approaches. These new conditions offer further support for the need
for teachers at all levels to be explicit about their practices, to be proactive in adapting
materials to some degree of relation to student experience, to recognise and celebrate
difference and to encourage discussion. All of these features are consistent with the swing to
constructivism as the dominant teaching and learning theory in current schooling. They are
equally consistent with the reading of Bourdieu presented above.
After all we as teachers, regardless of level, ‘play the game’ unconsciously most of the time
such that it is a self conscious making activity to indulge in the ‘thinking out loud’ which I’m
suggesting is a necessary part of teaching and learning from kindergarten to graduate school.
In the interests of taking up the transformative potential of education, and in line with the
insights derived from a close reading of Bourdieu, I’m suggesting that such a conscious and
practised approach to pedagogy is singularly important.
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A Feel for the game
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