Symbolic violence, academic capital and reflexivity: A case-study of post-apartheid curriculum change for teacher education using Bourdieu
Dirk, Wayne Peter
This paper provides an account of a failed attempt to transform the teacher education curriculum
in the Faculty of Education at a historically white university in South Africa. Based on a larger
study, the paper argues that academics in the Faculty were strongly allied to the apartheidtainted
education philosophy of Fundamental Pedagogics (FP) that caused them to resist
curriculum transformation. Using their dominant positions, the senior academics undermined
the transformation process by deceiving the administrative structures of the university. Using
Bourdieu’s signature concepts of field, habitus, capital and hysteresis (a condition in which the
habitus is no longer in synch with a field that is undergoing fundamental change), this paper
argues that the practices of the senior academics were acts of symbolic violence because they
arbitrarily chose to continue the established culture of FP that was targeted for transformation
by the university. The institutional power of the senior Professors that enabled their practice
of symbolic violence is explained with the concept of academic capital. Bourdieu’s theory of
reflexivity is discussed as a practical intervention that has the potential to assist academics
and university managers to limit the effects of symbolic violence in curriculum production. In
closing, the paper briefly touches on the recent student protests at South African universities
and argues for the extension of Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of symbolic domination to include
the relationship between symbolic and physical violence, which is a neglected area of higher
education studies, particularly in societies with a history of colonialism and racialised social
inequality.
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