Tamsin Bowers-Brown: PhD Candidate

Email: edq08tb@sheffield.ac.uk

Supervisor: Dr Julia Davies and Professor Jerry Wellington

Working Title of Topic:

Educational choices: girls' achievement and their post-16 expectations

Details:

My research focuses on constructions of achievement within secondary education and how this links with the choices girls make about the educational pathways they pursue. This study adds to a growing body of work (Jackson, 2006; Evans 2009; Lucey, Melody & Walkerdine, 2003) which contributes to a repositioning of the spotlight which over the past fifteen years has predominantly focused on a discussion of boys' underachievement (Platen, 1999; Epstein, 1998, Arnold, 1997, Butt et al 2004, Ingram 2009). My research within a case study secondary school explores notions of achievement, educational choice and girls' perceptions of their educational futures. I use a Bourdieusian framework (Bourdieu: 1977, 1984, 2000, 2006) to work through the research, operationalising the ideas of habitus, field, forms of capital and symbolic violence. These concepts are useful to my study because they consider both the individual (through habitus) the institution and its role within the education sector (through the field) alongside the values that are placed on different knowledge (capital and symbolic violence) both strategically in relation to government policy as well as at a micro level within the school.

I am currently researching within my case-study school conducting research with staff, students and parents. I hope to complete my study by October 2012.