Title: Exploring the role of cultural capital in Family-School relationships and connections: A case study of an Irish Postprimary school
Abstract: There are many sociological arguments that have dominated and suffused the notion of family influence and the effect of family structures on children's educational and occupational success. It has been generally recognised that families are critical in promoting educational attainment among children and are pivotal actors in the development of children's cognitive, emotional and social development. Ethnographers have frequently documented the impact of family socioeconomic status on educational outcomes. From an Irish perspective however, emphases within the literature have focused on educational failure and family disadvantage, parental involvement and school effectiveness and exploration of the gendered, classed and raced nature of parental involvement. The Irish Education System is both a complex and deeply rooted one where education has always been valued in Irish society. Drawing on Bourdieu's work on cultural capital and with reference to the Post Primary Longitudinal study (PPLS) conducted by the ESRI and the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) studies this thesis endeavours to examine and explore the cultural elements of Irish families and how these cultural elements impact on education and schooling in Ireland. The research also investigates how various forms of capital coexist and are exchanged within different fields identified in the study. Bourdieu alludes to the production of habitus whereby a system of dispositions such as aspirations arbitrates between structures and practice. Bourdieu describes an inculcation effect exerted directly by families and schools on adolescents or by student's individual social backgrounds, but he also proposes a second effect arising from individual?s predispositions such as the accumulation of academic capital which may cause them to resist the forces of the field with their specific inertia that is, their properties, which may exist in the embodied form, as dispositions or in objectified form in goods, qualifications, etc.? Evidence within the literature indicates that students with more valuable cultural capital attain greater educational outcomes that their otherwise comparable peers with less valuable cultural capital. These theoretical arguments prompted the researcher to construct a case study model to examine and evaluate the influences of cultural capital on students' educational outcomes while attempting to advance the description of the process whereby cultural resources may or may not convert favourably into educational advantages. Data was generated through a mixed methods approach combining both qualitative and quantitative analysis from a cohort of families (parents and post-primary students), staff and management from a coeducational secondary school in the South of Ireland. Five primary data sets were constructed in the study; data through a questionnaire to parents; data generated through a number of focus group with post-primary students; questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with teaching staff and school management and visual data both…
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Date: 2018-01-01
Language: en
Type: dissertation
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