School as a Sociocultural Activity

1
School as a Sociocultural Activity

• What do students learn from their participation
  in school?

2
What do children and young people learn in school?

• How or where might they learn it?

• What do they learn?

• American history
• To raise their hand before talking in class
• What the coolest song is
• Dirty jokes
• There are social hierarchies between teachers and
  students
• There are social hierarchies among students
• The school is a united community that stands
  together (against other schools)

3
What are young people learning in The Great
Football Ritual? And how are they learning it?
4
Why is Peer Culture Important?

• How are young people being socialized through
  their peers, rather than adults?
• How are schools as institutions creating a
  age-segregated domain that allows for the
  flourishing of a peer culture?
• What is the role that a child culture or youth
  culture plays in our society? Does it prepare
  young people for adult roles or does it look
  different?

5
What is school?

• Classrooms
• Offices
• Lunchroom
• Gym class, art class
• Hallways, bathrooms, and lockers
• Recess, playground, sports fields, parking lot
• Extracurricular activities (sports, choir,
  debate, yearbook, etc)
• Going on the bus to school?
• Friendship networks formed by school?

6
How is football like a ritual?
7
An Anthropological View of Rituals

• Do not have to be sacred, but can be secular
  (like national holidays)
• Follow a distinct, recognizable form
• Draw on powerful symbols
• Dramatic
• Embody and transmit certain worldviews, norms,
  and values
• Can invert those same norms
• Can reify the world around them
• Transform participants into different social
  statuses as well as different states of
  consciousness and emotion
• Bring people together in community sense of
  shared feeling and solidarity

• Primary school students marching on Ignacio
  Allendes birthday, Mexico

8

• Prom, Pennsylvania, 1956

9
Homecoming, 1959
10
(No Transcript)
11
Powderpuff game, p. 51

• What is Foleys analysis?
• Do you agree or disagree with it?