Corporeal Implications of Contemporary Schooling Practices

Abstract

Lacking empirical data on how teachers read students’ bodies for social class status, this chapter suggests that one can consider this question by examining the corporeal implications of contemporary curricular and programmatic influences in schools. This chapter analyzes Ruby Payne’s A Framework for Understanding Poverty and the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter school movement as two examples of such educational practices. This chapter argues that due to their deficit constructions of poor children, these programs narrowly define self-control as requiring poor children to comport themselves as middle-class children do, which results in a form of symbolic violence against working-class children.