Teachers and the re‐production of middle‐class culture in Australian schools

Abstract

Based mainly on my own ethnographic research, which is committed to uncovering the constructed or ‘practiced’ nature of social life, I seek to demonstrate the ways in which Australian school teachers, administrators, students and parents are engaged in a re‐productive process that simultaneously reinforces and reinvents schools and schooling. Set against a backdrop of concern bordering on panic among some groups about middle‐class flow away from Australian government schools, this paper explores the practices of social class and its structurating effects. A sample is presented of the ways in which those working in Australian schools tend to direct their energies towards ensuring market share of middle‐class students, a practice emerging out of beliefs and experiences that lead teachers to find middle‐class schools ‘stimulating and encouraging places to teach in’, in contrast to the ‘disruptive’ and ‘wearing’ working‐class schools. The study raises important questions not just about how we want to organize our schools and education system, but ultimately about what sort of society are we seeking to re‐produce right here, right now?

Keywords:

• middle classes
• culture
• structure
• agency
• teachers
• public schools
• Roman Catholic schools
• independent schools
• social reproduction

Notes

1. All names, both of persons and schools used in this paper are pseudonyms.

2. Warraville, which adjoins the suburb of Ravina, is a suburb that contained a high level of public housing in 1998. At that time it was one of the most economically disadvantaged suburbs in Perth.