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The Urban Review

, Volume 46, Issue 1, pp 86–111 | Cite as

Intended Consequences: Challenging White Teachers’ Habitus and Its Influence in Urban Schools Implementing an Arts-Based Educational Reform

  • Susan Woollen
  • Stacy Otto
Article
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Abstract

Reform efforts like the urban, arts-based initiative Project ARTS are designed to provide intentional, equitable methods of improving students’ learning, yet few urban educators have been sufficiently trained to recognize differences in habitus between themselves and their students. For equitable reform to occur teachers must understand their own habitus and the habitus-forming experiences of their students. In this paper, we analyze qualitative project data using Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts of cultural capital, field, habitus, symbolic violence and misrecognition to explore teachers’ and students’ experiences in order to determine the extent to which power and privilege begin to be challenged within participating schools. We explore the ways in which teacher habitus has shifted to recognize, include or become empathetic to student habitus as a result of Project ARTS curricula, co-teaching and professional development while also considering the possibility the program produces unintended consequences at odds with the project’s mission: reproducing the status quo by advancing the cultural capital of teachers rather than that of students. Finding markedly fewer teacher narratives confirming the social reproduction of inequitable power relationships than when the project began, we conclude by discussing the transformation of teacher habitus, student outcomes, and school climate after 5 years of Project ARTS participation, proposing implications for urban teachers and leaders, their communities, and policymakers intent upon implementing equitable educational reform and the social transformation reform intends.

Keywords

Habitus Arts-based reform Bourdieu Transformation Urban schools 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Criminal Justice SciencesIllinois State UniversityNormalUSA
  2. 2.Department of Educational Administration and FoundationsIllinois State UniversityNormalUSA

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