Images of Undergraduate Mathematics Curriculum: A Critical Self-Reflection

Higher education practices in Nepal have been playing an important role to train and develop pre-service school teachers. This paper critically reflects on the curricular and pedagogical practices of mathematics education based on the first author's experiences of learning at the undergraduate level from the perspective of mathematics curriculum images and pedagogical implications. Subscribing to autoethnography as a research methodology, we analysed the first author's experiences as an undergraduate student in one of the public campuses in Nepal which point to two major images of mathematics curriculum: curriculum as a prescription and curriculum as a cultural reproduction. Considering Habermasian Knowledge Constitutive Interest as a theoretical referent, the paper concludes that the transformation of curricular and pedagogical practices in teacher education is essential. The transformative practice in teacher education is insightful to improve pre-service and in-service school teachers' pedagogical and content knowledge in Nepal.

Entering the Street Field: A Case Study on Gangs

This chapter makes the case for criminological ethnography as a form of negotiated boundary work between separate sociocultural domains. Drawing on the conceptualization of “field” articulated by Pierre Bourdieu, as a semiautonomous site of contest, the chapter conceives of fieldwork as a distinct form of emotional labor; in short, as fieldwork. In making this argument, the chapter presents findings from a four-year ethnographic study of street gangs in Glasgow, Scotland, which involved navigating multiple, overlapping fields. The first section introduces the study, covering the experience of entering the “street field” of Langview. The second and third sections outline two empirical contributions flowing from the study, covering cultural reproduction in the “street” field and bureaucratic misrecognition in the “police” field. The fourth is a reflexive account of the disjuncture between the “street” and “academic” field, and the reflections this prompted. In conclusion, the chapter suggests a number of implications and conclusions for ethnography, gang studies, and public policy.

Can the criminalization of reproductive rights be a nationalist project?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate a federal bill pending analysis in the Brazilian Federal Congress – the 5069/2013 bill – which seeks to criminalize further women’s capacity to control issues relating to their sexual health in the country. By analyzing this bill, as well as the political discourses surrounding its proposal and the current arguments for its approval, I seek to highlight the social and political roles attributed by it to Brazilian women, focusing on the implications of the adoption of the nationalist discourse of the bill in official state discourse, should it become law, especially with regards to what the nationalism literature refers to as the “biological and cultural reproduction of the nation,” as well as the impact that these new definitions have on Brazilian women’s citizenship.

Development Against Poverty: A Systemic Model Design Based on Empirical Evidence

The world’s poor numbered almost 2.8 billion in 2001, and 2.5 billion in 2005. During a decade of participatory research in a village in Yucatan, Mexico, we built a systemic model of transition from poverty to wellbeing. Households are the basic units because they are the source of human biological and cultural reproduction. Poverty is characterized by low levels of basic needs (i.e. education, health, income and capital). We applied a strategy of innovation and multiple goals, and exploited interaction between variables, in successive approaches within time cycles. Model application improved child nutrition, investment and savings, and credits levels

Role of Cultural Capital and Cultural Reproduction on Youth Development in India: A Generational Perspective

The present study endeavored to understand the perceptions of Indian older adults (age 60 and above) from urban centres of New Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai, about the state of youth development in India through applying a generational perspective. Drawing from our understanding of Bourdieu’s concept of cultural reproduction of values, the study explored older adults’ thoughts about the current state of Indian youth concerning their civic participation and contribution to the development of Indian society. Additionally, it sought to find familial roles that the elderly would like to undertake to support their younger family members. Thematic analysis revealed that the older adults in this study perceive that youths are not completely engaged in positive youth development and need to contribute more towards their civic societies. Additionally, the older adults expressed their interest in occupying the role of secondary socializing agents in the family due to their perceived intergenerational differences with youth.

What Freirean Critical Pedagogy Says and Overlooks from a Durkheimian Perspective

“Critical pedagogy” has become a prevalent grammar furthering the necessity of a change in pedagogy from a banking‐style to problem‐posing approach, which it argues will facilitate students’ development of independent values and equip them to lead the liberation of society from authoritarianism into democracy. To achieve this, classrooms need to serve as cultural forums, through which either engaged pedagogy or negotiated authority empowers teachers and students to engage in free dialogues that problematize school textbooks as “cultural politics.” This empowerment demands that teachers perform as transformative intellectuals, dedicating themselves to the amelioration of inequity in educational results by reconstructing new texts, making them more accessible to working‐class students. While these theoretical lexicons envision a new perspective for the “educational function,” alleviation of the phenomenon of cultural reproduction can only occur if critical pedagogists pay more attention to academic curricula. Student achievements in such curricula, which respond to the demands of the social division of labor, have a profound influence on their potential social mobility.

Dignity in Red Envelopes: Disreputable Exchange and Cultural Reproduction of Inequality in Informal Medical Payment

Disreputable exchanges are morally disapproved and often legally prohibited exchanges that exacerbate and reproduce social inequality but remain ubiquitous. Although previous literature explains the phenomenon by material interests and structural relations, we propose a cultural approach based on three major conceptions of culture: culture in relations, culture in interactions, and culture in inequality. We illustrate this approach by a case study of China’s hongbao (the red envelope) exchange, a typical disreputable exchange through informal medical payment. Drawing on interviews with doctors and patients, we find that participants of the exchange mobilize items from their cultural repertoires, such as professional ethics, face, power, fairness, and affection, to redefine different situations of interactions and project positive self–images to render their problematic exchanges morally acceptable to each other. Moreover, as the participants’ responses to our vignettes show, they negatively evaluate the exchanges in general moral terms, such as equality and fairness, but culturally justify their own involvement. This discrepancy between saying and doing tends to legitimize the disreputable exchange amid enduring public outrage and institutional prohibition. These cultural processes contribute to the reproduction of unequal access to scarce health care resources. Findings of this research not only offer insights into understanding disreputable exchanges but also contribute to research on other cases of social problems in which deviant behaviors are morally and culturally justified.

An integral model of cultural reproduction: The case of China

Existing quantitative studies use various measurements and methods to examine Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction in the field of education. Yet, most studies either misunderstand the concepts involved or only test part of the theory. This article addresses these gaps by using the ‘structure-disposition-practice’ (SDP) framework to develop an integral model of cultural reproduction and it constructs a more precise measurement of habitus. It aims to provide an in-depth empirical understanding of the interrelationships between social position, parents’ and students’ dispositions, practices and field. Using the Chinese Educational Panel Survey (CEPS) the authors apply a structural equation model (SEM) to test their theoretical framework. They compare the cultural reproduction processes for cognitive development and academic achievements of eighth-grade students. The results suggest parents’ and students’ habitus plays a more crucial role than family’s social position in the cultural reproduction process. The study also finds that families’ social position is more important in reproducing students’ cognitive development than in academic achievements in China. The findings provide a quantitative understanding of the cultural reproduction process with relational thinking.