Field (Bourdieu)

About: Field (Bourdieu) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 11421 publications have been published within this topic receiving 180769 citations.

Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States: The State of the Field

Abstract: The growing Hispanic population in the United States and the importance of its language in all areas of everyday life, including education, have challenged specialists from diverse disciplines; they have responded by exploring new fields to understand and aid the development of programmes to facilitate the life of this community. Linguistic, sociolinguistic and historical studies about the language spoken in the territory known as the United States of America since 1513 offer a firm basis for the study of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL). Initially, the majority of studies related to the teaching of Spanish but the participation of the Hispanic community in other areas—health, the media, the judiciary system, business—opened up new lines of instruction and investigation. The editors of this volume have collected together fourteen studies written by some of the most active researchers in the field of SHL. Besides Beaudrie’s and Fairclough’s introduction, which contextualizes the discipline and discusses its main issues, they have incorporated a closing chapter by Guadalupe Valdés, in which she states that future research in the field should investigate diverse aspects of SHL and also consider those aspects that are shared with other languages within the larger field of Heritage Language (HL) where many groups have similar experiences. Among the many definitions put forward, the editors favour Joshua Fishman’s 2001 definition of the heritage speaker as ‘an individual who has personal or familial connection to a nonmajority language’ (7) and consider that the main objective of the study of Spanish as a heritage language is its maintenance (5). The first section of this volume offers an overview of the field and includes four works that discuss the discipline from a variety of angles—historical, sociological and theoretical. Introducing concrete examples from the legal system and the entertainment world, Glenn Martínez’s study, for instance, offers evidence to demonstrate the need for language policy and language planning. Research and instruction must help the Spanish-speaking community to conduct its life in the various areas of society; therefore instruction to SHL students should prepare them for different professions and develop them as leaders. According to Martínez, a move in these two directions will promote a positive attitude towards bilingualism in the wider community. The second part of the volume is made up of three chapters that summarize research conducted in Spanish-speaking communities of the United States as well as in SHL classrooms from grammatical, pragmatic and code-switching perspectives. In one of these studies, Silvina Montrul examines critically several investigations that have applied quantitative analysis to data collected in bilingual communities. Among other studies, she discusses Carmen Silva-Corvalán’s renowned work on language attrition in the tense-aspect and mood verb system across generations in the Spanish of Mexican-Americans, and concludes that Silva-Corvalán considers that the changes found are internally motivated. For Montrul, studies that try to determine the grammatical competence of speakers offer information about the nature of language knowledge, and about language use and change in bilingual contexts, which is useful information in language teaching environments. Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XCI, Number 8, 2014

Trailblazing in Entrepreneurship: Creating New Paths for Understanding the Field

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The Field of Knowledge and the Policy Field in Education: PISA and the production of knowledge for policy

Abstract: This article is about the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and its actors. It analyses the development and role of PISA as a ‘cultural product’ from the perspective of Bourdieu’s field theory. The authors attempt to answer the following questions: Of which field is PISA the product? In which field and by whom is PISA used and ‘consumed’? The authors argue that the development of PISA is part of a broader transformation of equilibria within the field of (education) knowledge – i.e. a move away from its autonomous pole towards its heteronomous pole. Such a move transforms the very form and shape of the field of knowledge: it has expanded and attracts a growing number of internal and external actors around its heteronomous pole. This (cor)responds to a transformation of the equilibrium within the general field of power, where the ntellectual bourgeoisie (artists, professors, academics, writers) is increasingly subordinated to – indeed, sometimes working for – economic and political interests. The authors further argue that the incorporation of PISA at the level of education policy fields also transforms their form and shape in two main ways. Within policy fields, the diffusion and reception of PISA reinforces a heteronomous understanding of education which is defined mostly in terms of its contribution to external interests. The diffusion of PISA also extends and, in a sense, dissolves the very boundaries of (national) education policy fields. Specifically, the authors underline that such an internationalisation of the education policy fields progresses mainly at their heteronomous poles and through a heteronomous definition of education.