The role of school in enhancing cultural capital

When the 2019/20 school year began we started being bombarded by the term "cultural capital" and the new focus on the "whole child" as a result of changes in Ofsted frameworks. I was pretty happy about this as I was never a big fan of data and exam obsession (have we moved away from that though? Like really?). One of the first things my school did was to create a "cultural capital day". We took our students out to museums around London to help promote cultural capital. Again, I was happy, as our students are mostly quite underprivileged they usually don't get to see most places in London. At some point in the process, however, I overheard a teacher saying that London is the cultural capital of the UK and that is why we were going to museums for cultural capital day (cultural capital as in capital city of culture?). At that point I realised the extent of the problem we are facing when trying to address cultural capital.

The problem is: what is cultural capital? That day it became clear to me that we (teachers) don't have a consensus on what it means. When we started discussing it I remembered reading Bourdieu in uni, about the different types of capital and their influence on how we learn. But then after some more thinking I realised that I never really considered my role as a teacher in enhancing cultural capital. What does it look like in practical terms? I always thought it was just a byproduct of our curriculum. But is that enough?

As you can conclude by now I am not an expert in the topic, so I will try to explain briefly what I understand about cultural capital, but if you are interested I highly recommend reading Bourdieu's "The forms of capital" or (if you don't have time or if your brain starts to fry after the first paragraph) this short commentary here.

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The idea of capital started as an economic one - the accumulation of wealth as a result of labour. From that Bourdieu (and I'm sure others - please let me know if you have recommendations of stuff to read!) created another three categories of capital - social, cultural and symbolic. Wealthy families have more cultural capital as they have access to books, they are more likely to go on trips abroad, visit museums, watch/discuss news with their children. They also have more "free time" to spend on their children's cultural capital as they are less likely to have multiple jobs etc. As a result, children of wealthy families usually "accumulate" culture which leads them to succeed in their education and later on in life.

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I know, that was simplistic. I still recommend the original - it's nice to feel your brain fry right? Right?

That is the theory. When I did my deeper reading on this a while ago I was researching about other stuff, so I need to try this new lens: what does that mean for us as teachers? The idea here is that if we can help our students with their cultural capital they are more likely to succeed in their learning. You might then ask if there is research to evidence it and the truth is I don't know. I'm only just starting to get my head around this, but I honestly believe we are on to something here! Thank you Ofsted!

While I'm reading about all this stuff I immediately ask myself how I can do this in practice. Again, I don't know exactly (bet you thought I was going to have some answers!) but I just want to share some of the things I have been doing to try to address the issue (probably just scratching the surface at this point). You might be doing all these things already as they are pretty basic for any teacher, but then it might be useful to know you can use these things for when you get that visit from our heroes - starts with O!

1. I have been doing trips to my school library (maybe soon even the local library) to have a look at what books are related to my subject so I can recommend to my students and creating lists of books to recommend. Sometimes I will do some sort of activity where they have to bring one of the books to a lesson, but a lot of times I will just recommend the books enthusiastically. :)

2. As a result of this I have also started to recommend new books to the library so we can have some new and exciting stuff to discuss.

3. I have been creating lists of online resources to share with students. These are articles, websites, games, videos, documentaries that they can use at home, sometimes related to the topic we are learning and sometimes about geography in general. Again, I will sometimes make it compulsory for them to watch something from the list and sometimes just recommend them.

4. I normally (forget lockdown) use google classroom to post anything on the news that I find interesting and relevant on the news/youtube etc.

5. I am now also creating a "geography newsletter" where I have volunteer students to help me highlight interesting/relevant things to students.

I will be happy to hear thoughts and what other teachers/schools are doing.

The next debate we can have on this topic is: can schools actually make up for the lack of cultural capital in families? And should they?

Food for thought.