Zafar, so good: middle‐class students, school habitus and secondary schooling in the city of Buenos Aires (Argentina)

Abstract

This article examines how students from the ‘loser’ sections of the middle class dealt with the game of secondary schooling in a ‘good’ state school in the city of Buenos Aires (Argentina). It engages with Bourdieu’s theory of social practice and, in particular, with its concepts of game, habitus and cultural capital. It argues that middle‐class students embody a school habitus, which I call zafar. Zafar (a Spanish slang word) refers to students’ dispositions, practices and strategies towards social and educational demands of teachers and their school. Zafar propels middle‐class students to be just ‘good enough’ students, and promote an instrumental approach to schooling and learning. Although this paper offers an account within which the reproduction of relative educational advantage of a group of middle‐class students takes place, it also poses questions about their future educational and occupational opportunities.

Keywords:

• secondary schooling
• habitus
• Bourdieu
• Argentina
• middle class

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Stephen Ball, Andrew Parker, Christina Hughes, Paul Wakeling and Cath Lambert for their insightful comments on previous versions of this paper. She also thanks participants of the Oxford Ethnography Education Conference 2009 for their critical engagements with a previous version of this paper, and Carolina Juneman for her advice on higher education in Argentina. She especially thanks two anonymous referees for their insightful and constructive comments. She thanks colleagues at the Department of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies (Institute of Education) for providing stimulating intellectual environments to critically develop her ideas. She acknowledges the support from the Department of Sociology (University of Warwick), where she is currently Visiting Fellow. The author also appreciates the financial support of the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant reference PTA‐026‐27‐2053), the British Sociological Association and the British Educational Research Association. Finally, the author especially thanks the permanent support of the school’s authorities, teachers, pastoral assistants and students from High Mountain.

Notes

1. Names of people and institutions are pseudonyms.

2. Bourdieu’s use of the term ‘game’ differs from that of some game theorists in the field of economy. He criticises many of them for their neoclassical underpinnings and lack of acknowledgement of the historical and political nature of the preferences invoked by players (Bourdieu 2005).

3. The school year runs from March to March.

4. The word chicos is widely used by adults and young people. Chicos is plural and is in masculine. However, this word could refer to both boys and girls or only to a collective of boys.

5. There were different sanctions: firmas (signature), apercibimiento (warning), and suspensión (suspension), which I call ‘severe sanction’.

6. Statistics, as Bourdieu asserts (Lamaison 1986), reflect a regularity of the game of secondary school as it was played by teachers and students.

7. Teachers and students used zafar to refer to set of practices and actions, and to their outcomes. The former and the latter are analytically distinctive aspects of the game of schooling. Here, I use zafar to refer to students’ school habitus.

8. Zafar is an infinite verb. Zafé and zafo are the first‐person singular in past tense and in the simple present, respectively. Zafa is the third‐person singular. Zafando is the present continuous of the verb zafar.

9. Students pass a module only if they had an annual average score of six out of 10, and if, in the last trimester, the average mark was six or higher. If a student had an annual average score lower than six and higher than four or a score equal to or higher than six but lower than six in the last trimester, they had to sit examinations in December for the didactic sub‐units or trimesters in which they got a mark lower than six. Moreover, those who got an annual average score lower than four and those who failed in December should sit examinations in March. A student passes an academic year if: they pass all modules that school year; or if they have failed a maximum of two modules during the current and/or previous school years.

10. Modules were very different in terms of number of hours, status and integration.

11. The Estatuto del Docente (Teachers’ Statute) and various modifications regulated recruitment, payment and working conditions.

12. British ethnographers have also identified the ability of middle‐class students of getting by while appearing not to make any effort (see Youdell 2006).

13. British research offers evidence of this ‘juggling act’ (Francis, Skelton, and Read 2010; Jackson 2006).