COUNTERFEIT CLASSROOMS: SCHOOL LIFE OF INNER-CITY CHILDREN

Abstract

In an ethnographic account of a junior high school, Everhart (1983) distinguishes the “reified knowledge” of teachers on which the formal curriculum is based from the “regenerative knowledge” of students: To compensate for…and in opposition to the domination of reified knowledge, regenerative knowledge emerges in those organizational hiatuses that exist through the inefficiencies of mass education – inefficiencies in the manner by which school occupies student’s time, the amount of time that formal education “takes up,” and the standardization of tasks that “fits” so few students at any one point in time (p. 194).Recent ethnographic research on school children focuses almost exclusively on student culture or “regenerative knowledge” rather than on “reified knowledge” (Adler & Adler, 1998; Eckert, 1989; Eder, 1995; Thorne, 1993). What goes on in classrooms with respect to teaching and learning has only a shadowy presence in these research reports, often by design.¹ Understanding student or peer culture, however, cannot by itself capture children’s lives in schools. What goes on in classrooms where education is assumed to occur also plays an important part.

Citation

Matthews, S.H. (2003), "COUNTERFEIT CLASSROOMS: SCHOOL LIFE OF INNER-CITY CHILDREN", Sociological Studies of Children and Youth (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 9), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 209-224. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1537-4661(03)09011-1