Pensamiento visual: La importancia de conocer las imágenes; interpretación,

Like Dewey, Bourdieu gives credence to the importance of a person’s environment to create a context in which reflective action occurs. Like Dewey, Bourdieu sees the importance of education as a place of social activity that determines how the world is perceived, acted and reacted with. This section will explore Bourdieu’s exploration of capital ⎯ social, cultural and economic ⎯ and how they are interrelated to generate outcomes particularly in social institutes such as schools, where differentiation and failure are largely predictable. For the HPS concept, therein lies the challenge: if health is social, then how does a school as a setting for health both contribute to and ameliorate the health of its students?

Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is represented in the ‘ways of talking, acting, modes of style, moving, socialising, forms of knowledge, language practices, and values’ (2002, p.116). Cultural capital can exist in the embodied state, as

long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state as cultural artefacts such as pictures, books, diplomas, and other material objects; and in the institutional state, which confers original properties on the cultural capital which it guarantees’ (McLaren, 1994, p.190).

Thus, in Bourdieu’s terms schools are central to the development of social class in that they are the sites at which the objective interests of the dominant class are promoted and the distinctions made between students, including the identification and management of social deviance (Nash 2002; Webb et al. 2002).

At the core of Bourdieu’s work on how schools act as sites where cultural capital is conferred to varying degrees and social reproduction occurs is the concept of habitus. For Bourdieu ‘the habitus is a cultural agent before it is a social form of identity. . . . it is cultural practices that shape, determine and help reproduce social relations’ (Webb et al. 2002, p 117). Bourdieu’s understanding of how schools work to reproduce social inequities can be analysised though the habitus, where it is possible to see how the cultural rules link economic control and distribution (Nash 2002; Apple 1990). When dominate groups or agencies are able to utilise cultural rules to their own advantage it is known as a process called hegemony. Such dominance is an ongoing struggle but not one of open aggression or force rather the result of social practices, forms and structures that are consensual (Connell et al. 1985; McLaren 1994; Apple 2000a). When dominant groups or agencies secure hegemonic meaning they control how ‘social authority and unequal relations of power and privilege remain hidden’ (McLaren 1994, p.182). Oppressed, subordinate groups or agencies actively subscribe to these culturally constructed meanings (Connell et al. 1985; McLaren 1994) thereby generating and integrating habitus (Apple 2003).

The distribution of cultural capital is therefore uneven. Those in some social positions are inevitably privileged as the result of their positions and dispositions because they have access to knowledge and skills that are valued and mark distinction and social privilege (Bourdieu 1984, 2002; Webb et al. 2002). Such privilege (or lack thereof) arises out of the circular relationship between education, qualifications, employment, connectedness, sociability (Bourdieu 1990a) and other attributes that constitute capital in all of its forms. Parents with a degree of affluence are more likely to have the necessary informal knowledge and skill (i.e. habitus) to decode, to ‘work the system’ to their own and their children’s benefit and to make use of unseen capital and informal cultural rules (Apple 2001; Ball, Bowe & Gewirtz 1994).

The use of the education field to meet the objective interests of dominant groups is facilitated through the curriculum, hidden and overt; through expectations of teachers and through the school itself (Webb et al.2002). The creation of habitus in schools enables those students with more familial cultural capital to acquire still more at an incremental level. ‘The capacity to be empowered tends to be confined to those who are in some sense empowered already’ (Webb et al.2002, p.124), so there are students who arrive at school with the ability to deal in the operative schemes of the school (Nash 2002), who already have an appreciation of what it is to be called ‘cultured’ (Bourdieu 2002), who have access to resources that support their education (Ball et al.1994; Connell et al.1985), and who have academic rather than

technical/manual skills (Sidorkin 2001).

Students who succeed at school do so because in consequence of their ambitions, academic self-confidence, and positive response to the process of schooling, they reveal a habituated willingness to be educated in accordance with a concept of the educated person that continues, despite ambiguities and contradictions, to be transmitted by the school (Nash 2002, p.46).

Educationally ‘successful’ students are therefore more likely to come from families that already have a disposition for such cultural capital and can support its further development and acquisition.

‘Practical reason, as a dimension of habitus, is the capacity people have to make sense of, and negotiate, the situations they are confronted with in the social world’ (Webb et al. 2002, p.139) and ‘. . . the unconscious dimension of the habitus means that social agents tend not to reflect on the forces that dispose them to act and behave as they do’ (Webb et al. 2002, p.141). It is this apparent contradiction in habitus and how it operates that is described by Delanty (1999) as a weakness in Bourdieu’s approach, where ‘[h]is actors may act strategically, but do not undergo change since they are constrained by the habitus’ (Delanty 1999, p.68). So while habitus enables negotiation of the social world, it also predisposes the way in which such negotiation can actually occur ⎯ certain responses are thinkable and others unthinkable. However, it is important to note that the consecration of what determines hegemonic positioning and habitus is not necessarily fixed and unchanging (Connell et al. 1985: McLaren 1994). ‘Who and what gets consecrated within the educational field is, however, open to transformation’ (Webb et al. 2002, p.122) and it is in this space that opportunities

for difference lie.

The promotion of hegemonic values and perspectives is perennial. They are played out in ways that promote naturalistic and normal social positions. Schools, as logical sites for the transmission of reproductive values and ideals, are often a field of contestation. The education field has of late been strongly contested by the New Right where indicators of efficacy and efficiency pervade, a focus on marketisation predominates, and fundamentialism ⎯ managerial and Christian ⎯ underpins discourse (Apple 2001, 1990; Ball et al. 1994). The argument for New Right ideology and approaches has been put forward as natural, and

[e]very power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force adds its own specifically symbolic force to those power relations (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977, p.5).

So the education field is where there is both imposition of and complicity in the use of New Right ideals in schools. And schools are required to filter students according to their ability to operate within a social context and habitus dominated most latterly by New Right ‘rules’.

And so the same can be said of the HPS. The school in this model is aligning the health and education systems; therefore there is opportunity to impose another power relationship by cooperating with the health sector. In reality, a range of factors

⎯ including the type of school, the way in which it operates and the families that make up the school community ⎯ will temper the degree to which health sector agendas are enacted within the HPS. Applying Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to the HPS provides a perspective to explore the ways in which the HPS in practice can produce varying journeys in aligning health and education.

The presentation of particular health issues is done in a way that is both naturalistic and normal. For instance, the ways in which nutrition information is conveyed and promulgated represent the current scientific understandings as the rational approach (Renwick 1997; Crotty 1995; Santich 1995). However science evolves, and so with it does prescribed behaviour. The linkage of science and nutrition has been a close one

and dietary reform was often linked with social reform (Crotty 1995) where the dietary advice was more readily accepted by privileged classes and was used with considerable evangelism and zealotry to manage others (Renwick 1997; Tannahill 1988). Equally, the focus of dietary advice reflects Anglo-European perspectives that assume equal access to food, preparation resources and skills that are constructed within a Western context, excluding the experience of others (Renwick 1997)6_.

The authoritative voice of health is not usually contested. The way in which it develops its positions on healthy lifestyles through a particular style of research and discourse is essentially invisible to a school community and ‘common sense’ ⎯ from a health perspective ⎯ presented in a prima facie manner and so is largely accepted. In doing so the HPS becomes the conduit for symbolic violence (Webb et al.2002) towards its community. Thus, the HPS absorbs information, imperatives and directions from the health sector in a naive, trusting manner. There is little thought about a mismatch between behaviouralist intentions and the constructivist nature of schools and the inherent tensions between education and health sector habitus. With little effort to acknowledge or resolve such tensionsthe foundations of the HPS are unsafe at best. Health promotion in the school setting without reflection on the appropriateness of the ‘message’ or any cognisance of the ability of community members to implement or sustain the behaviour change (Daykin & Naidoo 1995; Douglas 1995) leaves little room for success in either sector’s terms.

If we accept the social-reproductive aspect of Bourdieu’s theories ⎯ that the HPS is no more than another aspect of social control and that a foundation concept of health promotion is that health status is social ⎯ then the reinforcement of health inequities is inevitable. By accessing the ‘form and content of the culture and knowledge of powerful groups and defining it as legitimate knowledge to be

preserved and passed on’ (Apple 1995 p.38) schools, health promoting or otherwise contribute to inequality. Schools are therefore sites in which effective dominant cultures both create and recreate the social and contractual relationships required by

6 _{The five food groups are the basis for a healthy diet in the Australian context. The model is built on a Western} diet and assumes the need for proportional access to all five. Traditional Indo-Chinese diets are unlikely to include dairy products, but dietary-related calcium conditions such as osteoporosis are not overly common. Also, the experience of menopause is different when compared with that of European women, which is thought to be due to the greater intake of phyto-ostrogen found in plant products such as soy beans.

capital (Apple 1995) consistently benefiting 20 per cent of the population often at the expense of the other 80 per cent (Navarro 1976). Statistics from the New South Wales Department of Health demonstrate that individuals in the highest socio- economic status have a higher life expectancy than all other groups in the population between 1993 and 2004. The differential pattern applied to both males and females further indicating that the advantage of accumulating social, cultural and resultant economic capital (Health NSW 2007).

Using Bourdieu’s and Marx’s premise that the prevailing view of the world is that of the dominant (Webb et al. 2002), then the writing of ‘history’ inevitably requires the New Right alliance to commandeer the health promotion concept and to redefine its language and suppositions. Democracy is no longer a political concept, but has been transformed into an economic one (Apple 1996). The New Right has created an environment where health promotion can be put forward with a managerial focus. It appears only common sense to do so because it is natural and inevitable (Bourdieu 1990b), modifying existing values and dispositions, and thus creating habitus

(Bourdieu 1977). The new public health and health promotion can be viewed as the means to deliver on returns (Owen & Lennie 1992; Cohen & Henderson 1988) and because its social perspective is readily reinterpreted through a neo-liberal perspective (Nettleton & Bunton 1995) it can therefore be viewed as capital transformed in a manner that enables those with more cultural capital to accrue still more.

Bourdieu is often classified as a social-reproduction theorist because he argues that the links between the educational and cultural systems contribute to the maintenance of the relations of dominance and exploitation (Webb et al.2002; Apple 1990). However, Bourdieu also offers reflective understanding as a means by which

students (and teachers) can navigate objective relations because they understand how they underpin the work of the school, thereby developing empowerment and the ability to rewrite their own futures (Webb et al.2002; Apple 1995). Clearly, not everyone fits the prescribed social path, as there are examples of people who have managed to make objective relations work for them (Apple 1995) and in so doing managed to accumulate cultural capital. As the world changes, so too does the education field. Such change permits negotiation of the habitus⎯ who and what can

be transformed, thereby enabling new possibilities for action and yet another space for contestation by hegemonic groups as the habitus begins to change in a way such that existing values and dispositions no longer make sense (Webb et al. 2002).

The most recent past has seen change in the habitus in such a way as to allow New Right ideology to redefine cultural and social capital in managerialist terms ⎯ efficiency and efficacy. The New Right has managed to claim the work of schools and to determine what counts as knowledge (Apple 1996, 2001; Clements 1996; Chitty 1997) using schooling as a tool of the economy (Ball et al.1994; Apple 1995, 2001; Reid 1995). In the following section, Apple’s critique of the New Right

perspective will be explored with reference to its ascendancy to hegemonic status and the way it enables social determinism within the HPS context by creating a different version of commonsense and habits by which people perceive and live their lives.