What is your university story?
This is the 6th post in a regular feature Over a cuppa: prompts to reflect on learning and teaching to prompt you to reflect on your learning and teaching during the time it takes to make and drink a cuppa.
Did you start an undergraduate degree straight from school, complete in minimum time and go on to further study? Or was your pathway more rocky? If so, you’re in good company. Your classroom has students who are first in family, underachieved at school, have had interrupted education, manage learning difficulties, are studying part-time, and a myriad of other factors that make up a university story. Your story shapes your implicit understandings, and questioning these is Schön’s (1983) definition of reflection.
Another way of framing this question from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: what is your educational capital? Rowlands (2018) defines it as the “various inherited and acquired resources that students bring to bear upon their education” (p 1824). Are you aware of a gap between your education capital and that of your students, or between students in your classroom?
This checklist on white privilege by Peggy McIntosh (1989) focuses on race, but can be adapted for class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, age, employment, indeed any social, cultural or symbolic capital.
Here are some of those statements applied to privilege in the university:
- I will be given curricular materials written by and representing people like me
- I feel welcome in this institution/ discipline/ department/ classroom
- I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to talk with me and advise me about my next steps professionally
- My chief worries at university do not concern others’ attitude towards me
- I can go home from most meetings of organizations/ groups/ teams I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared.
Reflect on your responses, your university story and your educational capital.
Rowlands, J. (2018) Deepening understandings of Bourdieu’s academic and intellectual capital through a study of academic voice within academic governance. Studies in Higher Education, 43(11), 1823-1836.
Schön, D. A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books.
Coming up next week:
Memories of learning
Catch up on previous posts in this series:
The second sip – Put on your ‘teaching cloak’.
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