Jean Anyon published an essay titled “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” in 1980, where she described four types of schools, defined by the socioeconomic status of each family: Working-Class School, Middle Class School, Affluent Professional School and Executive Elite School.
What differences in teaching methods and in the student-teacher relationship do they reflect?Teaching methods:
In The Working-Class, children are encouraged to follow the steps of a procedure, which are given by the teacher. The latter usually writes the steps on the board and the students must copy and study them; their work is evaluated well if they've followed the steps given, even if the final result is incorrect.
Similar to that, kids in The Middle-Class are told to follow the steps of a procedure, with the difference that these steps and the content of the lessons are provided mostly from textbooks the teacher uses. The students should focus on getting the right answer which can lead, sometimes, in involving more thinking.
The Affluent Professional is rather different to the two above: kids are encouraged to think for themselves, create, express how they feel about a specific topic, show their individuality, learn from their own experiences, consider all the possible answers and to try to choose the correct one. The knowledge is gained through experience. Teacher’s duty is to guide and provide tools and information.
And lastly, The Executive Elite’s teachers tend to emphasize in activities that develop student’s analytical intellectual skills, they are asked to reason through a problem, and the answer and their performance is expected to be logically sound and of top academic quality since they’re expected to be the future’s professionals. To get the right answer, the pupils should reason the topic, explain it to the class and discuss it.
The student-teacher relationship:
In The Working-Class, kids see the teacher as someone demanding, controlling; and the latter isn’t often caring for them, tend to give orders, and isn’t’ polite when asking for something. In The Middle-Class, teachers are less strict, they still tend to have a lot of rules, but these are mostly based on external ones and regulations. Close relationships are rare here too.
In contrast to that, in The Affluent Professional, teachers engage their students. They both tend to enjoy the process of making and working to a goal or a task. The teacher respects the work of the kid and is willing to negotiate with them. In extreme cases, she/he gives direct orders.
The teacher-pupil relationship in The Executive Elite isn’t necessarily affectionate, the teacher is there only to instill knowledge and give the tools to reason. When the pupils misbehave, the teacher tries to make them think about the consequences of that, not giving a direct order. He/she is usually polite, call them by their name and is often available before and after school to help them out.
2. What other differences do you note in the schools?
Control over the time and space of the classroom
On the one hand, we have The Working-Class’s teachers that usually ignore the bells to switch class and keep the kids in the room longer than necessary, and if they want to leave the room, they have to get a permission. As for The Middle-Class, teachers aren’t as controlling and always respect the bell to switch classes. On the other hand, in The Affluent Class is more about negotiating. When switching classes, students can just sign their name on the chalkboard and leave and anyone can go to the library to get a book. The only relevant rule here is that no more than three children may be out of the room at once. Finally, in The Executive Elite bells don’t demarcate the periods of time, however, teachers are strict about changing classes on time. In the classroom, students are free to leave when they want to, nevertheless they don’t tend to do so due to the pressure of finishing their tasks on time.
3. What schools in your geographic region would closely approximate the working-class, middle-class, affluent professional, and executive elite schools of her article?
In order to answer this, I will choose my own geographic region. However, this explanation will be of great example to your own particular answer.
Geographic region: Villa Asia (Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela).
In Villa Asia, the Middle-class is predominant. Here, you can find mostly schools similar to the Middle-Class School Anyon describes. Some of those schools are CIMOS, LOEFING and Colegio Don Bosco. Here kids go to school because they are told to, but not necessarily because they’re eager to learn. Teachers usually attempt to explain the lessons with activities, however, the education provided is deficient, since the curriculum lacks of creativity and attention to diversity. Kids are told to read a certain content of a book, study it (or “memorize it”) and do an exam.
