Abstract
Cultural capital theory has long proposed that class location determines teachers’ responses to students, with less, although increasing, attention to race. Drawing on Calarco’s definition of cultural capital, this ethnographic study examines whether and how first-grade teachers in two schools unequally reward socioeconomically and racially diverse students’ attempts to secure academic advantages. Whether students behave in ways teachers say they expect or attempt to negotiate extra academic advantages, I find that teachers more frequently and effusively reward White and Asian students and more frequently and reproachfully punish Black and Latinx students for similar behaviors. I introduce the term “conditionally rewarding” to describe how cultural capital is unequally rewarded by a salient hierarchical status characteristic other than social class (race). Results support the need to adopt more color-conscious approaches to cultural capital theory and have implications for processes by which educational (dis)advantage is reproduced across student status intersections.
Cultural capital theory has long explored how social class shapes cultural “toolkits” (Swidler 1986) that are differentially expected and rewarded in schools (Bourdieu and Passeron [1977] 1990; Calarco 2011, 2018; Collier and Morgan 2008). Students who perform middle-class behaviors, such as comfortably but not excessively (Khan 2011) seeking help, attention, accommodations, or customized experiences (Calarco 2011, 2018; Collier and Morgan 2008; Jack 2016), regularly elicit rewards from teachers, with implications for achievement. Although working-class skills are valued in some school contexts (Anyon 1981; Golann 2015; Nelson and Schutz 2007), students who perform behaviors associated with the working class, such as discomfort with, deference to, or avoidance of authority, often receive less teacher attention, instruction, or assistance that could otherwise advantage them (Calarco 2018; Collier and Morgan 2008; Jack 2016). Because today’s “best practice” pedagogy prizes student voice, autonomy, and initiative (Heaysman and Tubin 2019), middle-class skills and strategies reflect advantageous cultural capital in schools (Calarco 2018; Collier and Morgan 2008; Jack 2016).
If such skills are capital, students performing them should be institutionally rewarded. Yet in the United States, race is also linked to stratified outcomes in school (Irizarry 2015). An intersectional perspective recognizes that race and social class, among other hierarchical statuses, simultaneously shape student experience because they are linked to interlocking systems of inequality in society’s institutions, including education (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Collins, 2016). In fact, recent cultural capital scholarship argues that race, along with class, is a central feature of the everyday ideologies, practices, and norms that gatekeepers such as teachers use in the field of education (Richards et al. 2023). Therefore, teachers may afford multiply advantaged students (e.g., middle-class and White students) uniquely advantageous evaluations of their skills, whereas multiply disadvantaged students (e.g., lower-class and Black students) may be subject to multiplicative marginalization when performing similar behaviors (Beal 1970; Bowleg 2008; King 1988). Such evidence would offer support for Cartwright’s (2022) recent theoretical position that what constitutes cultural capital varies by racial position instead of being a uniform set of classed skills. Although race has been considered in cultural capital scholarship more broadly (Bettie 2003; Carter 2003; Cartwright 2022; Richards et al. 2023; Rollock et al. 2015; Wallace 2017; Yosso 2005), studies have been slower to demonstrate how race shapes institutional response to one type of cultural capital: middle-class skills and behaviors that students perform to elicit academic rewards for themselves (Calarco 2011, 2018).
Although other kinds of tastes, attributes, and cultural performance exist as important forms of cultural capital (Davies and Rizk 2017), strategies that aim to secure academic rewards have direct implications for student learning, opportunity, and ability evaluation. These skills tend to be highly visible when performed, usually necessitate a teacher’s response (thus also making visible their profits), and are key drivers of inequality reproduction (Farkas 2003). Sometimes, middle-class strategies that elicit rewards reflect “matched” expectations between teachers and students (e.g., seeking help as teachers expect). Sometimess middle-class behaviors do not align with teacher expectations but nonetheless elicit academic rewards (e.g., securing an extension on a late assignment). Such behaviors, called “negotiated advantages,” are also argued to also be valuable cultural capital (Calarco 2018). In this study, I focus on interactional moments—such as seeking extra help, clarification, accommodations, praise, or customization—that students perform to elicit rewards for themselves (Calarco 2018), whether they reflect matched expectations between teachers and students or negotiated advantages above and beyond what teachers expect to give.
Through an eight-month ethnography of first-grade classrooms in two racially and socioeconomically diverse elementary schools and districts, I find racial patterns in how teachers reward middle-class behaviors they said they desired. I find that teachers more often and effusively rewarded Asian and White students and were more likely to ignore or reprimand Black and Latinx students for similar behaviors. When teachers did not reward White and Asian students, they often explained why, as if they owed them an explanation. Teachers even offered higher socioeconomic status (SES) White boys extra validation or apology when punished. Although recent scholarship has highlighted the benefits of students performing middle-class behaviors to elicit academic rewards for themselves (Calarco 2011; 2014a, 2018), this study is among the first to demonstrate that this particular middle-class “advantage” is also racialized.
Heeding a recent call by scholars to unpack the racialized field of American education (Richards et al. 2023), this study offers several important theoretical and empirical contributions. First, by focusing on institutional (teacher) response to cultural capital rather than different displays of it, findings suggest that institutional agents do not interpret and respond to classed behaviors equally dis/similarly regardless of one’s racial position (Cartwright 2022). Second, teachers instead engage in a process I call “conditional rewarding” that leads to segmented cultural capital returns—rewards for some and punishment or invisibility for others conditional on a salient hierarchical status characteristic (race). Third, although many studies of racialized mis/treatment abound, most emphasize how teachers unequally construct or respond to real or imagined student misbehavior (Gilliam et al. 2016; Lewis and Diamond 2015; Morris and Perry 2017; Musto 2019; Rafalow 2020), which is not considered cultural capital in school. When teachers respond unequally to institutionally “advantageous” behavior, especially behavior they say they expect, this calls into question what cultural capital is—a critical cornerstone of cultural capital theory. Finally, findings from this study suggest another mechanism by which educational inequality, more broadly, is exacerbated.
Background
Cultural Capital
According to Bourdieu (1990), social contexts, including schools, can be thought of as “fields” that abide by unspoken standards, rules, and norms. Performing unspoken expectations and standards “correctly” within the field constitutes cultural capital that is rewarded by institutional agents; performing “incorrectly” produces exclusion from the field’s rewards (Bourdieu 1990; Lamont and Lareau 1988). Yet “correctness” is not arbitrary; instead, it aligns with the practices and interests of the dominant class. According to Bourdieu, “‘dominants always tend to impose the skills they have mastered as necessary and legitimate and to include in their definition of excellence the practices at which they excel’” (Lareau and Weininger 2003:582). Although cultural capital has been conceptualized and measured in many ways (see Davies and Rizk 2017), Lareau and Weininger (2003) argue that the skills and practices most pertinent to school success are the micro-interactional processes that allow members of the dominant social classes to effectively navigate schools (Lareau and Weininger 2003). “Navigating schools” can mean different things and necessitate different kinds of micro-interactions. In this study, I focus on how students navigate securing academic rewards, such as extra help, clarification, accommodations, customization, or praise, from their teachers (Calarco 2018).
Although schools, programs, and other agents of socialization can cultivate students’ institutional navigation skills (Gorski 2020; Harvey 2023; Lareau 2015), these behaviors are learned primarily from parents (Calarco 2014a). Because of disparate financial resources and personal experience engaging institutions, parents socialize their children into different sets of classed skills (Calarco 2018; Lareau 2011; Roksa and Potter 2011) that unequally elicit rewards from teachers, such as extra attention, clarification, favorable evaluation of ability, or leniency (Calarco 2011, 2018; Collier and Morgan 2008; Jack 2016). Middle-class parents develop in their children an “emerging sense of entitlement” (Lareau 2011), which, when activated in classrooms, includes behaviors such as comfortably interacting with authority figures (Jack 2016; Khan 2011; Lareau 2011), demonstrating institutionally valuable knowledge (Kozlowski 2020; Streib 2011), engaging or questioning authority for personal gain, attention seeking (Calarco 2018; Lareau 2011), help seeking (Calarco 2011, 2018; Collier and Morgan 2008; Jack 2016; Richards 2022), and demanding accommodations or customized experiences (Calarco 2018; Jack 2016). The children of working-class and poor parents develop institutional engagement toolkits that differ from middle-class peers. Because of their own professional experience submitting to authority (Bowles and Gintis 1976) and lack of insider institutional familiarity, working-class and poor parents see excessive question asking, accommodation seeking, and authority contestation as lazy, disrespectful, and detrimental to strong work ethic (Calarco 2014a). They therefore instill in their children an “emerging sense of constraint” (Lareau 2011).
Resource-rich, desirable, majority-affluent schools like those I studied typically expect higher-class skills in formal and informal interaction with teachers (Lareau and Weininger 2003). Because schools often (although not always—see Anyon 1981; Golann 2015) center students’ voices and agency in instruction (Heaysman and Tubin 2019), students who assert their own ideas—what Streib (2011) calls “taking the floor”—gain more attention and favorable “ability” evaluation from their teachers (Calarco 2018; Streib 2011) than working-class students who believe they ought not be heard. Similarly, teachers and faculty from preschool to college expect students to engage with them in and outside of class, especially when they are struggling (Calarco 2011; Collier and Morgan 2008; Gaztambide-Fernández 2009; Jack 2016; Karabenick 1998; Khan 2011; Streib 2011). Unless coached differently through programs, institutions, or cultural “guides” (Gorski 2020; Harvey 2023; Jack 2016; Lareau 2015; Richards 2022), working-class students, whose socialization into constraint promotes deference to and fear of authority (Lareau 2011), are less likely to admit needing or asking for help from teachers (Calarco 2011; Collier and Morgan 2008; Jack 2016). Middle-class students, however, more comfortably seek assistance and gain more teacher attention, clarification, and feedback (Calarco 2011; Collier and Morgan 2008; Jack 2016). Taking the floor and help seeking have therefore come to represent particularly valuable forms of matched cultural capital in the classroom—that is, micro-interactions that match teachers’ expectations.
However, other ways students attempt to secure academic rewards reflect negotiated advantages that exceed what teachers expect (Calarco 2018). Sometimes, teachers’ expectations can be dynamic and ambiguous, at times expecting students to ask for help and other times expecting students not to (Calarco 2014b, 2018). Students who negotiate extra help or customized educational experiences may come to acquire additional feedback, instruction, or opportunity from teachers even if teachers did not intend to give it (Calarco 2018). In these situations, students are still activating cultural capital because classed logics dictate whether students see ambiguous moments as opportunities for rewards or not (Calarco 2014b) and because in the end, the behaviors do elicit a reward (Calarco 2018). In this study, I focus on interactional moments that elicit rewards (Calarco 2018), whether they reflect matched expectations between teachers and students or negotiated advantages above and beyond what teachers expect.
Race, Cultural Capital, and Unequal Rewards
Because Bourdieu’s theory, by definition, aligns with the practices and interests of the dominant social class, a class-based “master narrative” characterizes most cultural capital scholarship (Richards 2020). This includes foundational works inspiring this study (Calarco 2011, 2014b; Lareau 2011). However, cultural capital can only “[derive] value in relationship to the field” (Richards et al. 2023:282), and the field of American education’s “rules of the game” has been and continues to be racialized (Richards et al. 2023). Access, curricula, credentialing, and interactional culture in education were all constructed during a “context defined by colonialism, slavery, racialized capitalism, and [what Christian (2018) calls] a ‘deep and malleable Whiteness’” (Richards et al. 2023:282).
Today, Whiteness still pervades ideologies and practices of the field’s gatekeepers; therefore, what cultural capital is and how it is learned is also necessarily informed by race (Richards et al. 2023). Elite schools, for example, are “overwhelmingly White” in terms of “what constitutes elite knowledge, whose knowledge counts, how knowledge is expressed, and who is permitted to make a claim to . . . the right kind of knowledge and . . . way of knowing” (Gaztambide-Fernández and Angod 2020:732). Accordingly, “Whiteness demarks . . . gestures, modes of speech, and behaviours” that become capital in schools (Gaztambide-Fernández and Angod 2020:732). Race informs “appropriateness” to the advantage of White styles, tastes, and dispositions (Lewis and Diamond 2015), and non-White students who adopt White, middle-class aesthetic norms tend to be received favorably by teachers as well (Bettie 2003). Other attributes, knowledge, and dispositions, so long as they are perceived to be “nonthreatening” to Whiteness, can also become valuable cultural capital for non-White students (Cartwright 2022; Wallace 2016).
Research also finds that race matters for cultivation of unique cultural capital that allows students of color to succeed despite its Whiteness (Yosso 2005). Across ethnic groups, parents cultivate racialized cultural capital to give marginalized students access to ethnic pride, history, networks, and resources that can matter for institutional navigation (Cheadle and Amato 2011; Dow 2019; Heard 2024; Rollock et al. 2014; Zhou and Lee 2017). Such findings suggest that cultural capital must vary by racial position instead of constituting uniformly classed institutional advantages (Cartwright 2022).
However, much of the scholarship on how race informs cultural capital focuses on cultural capital as styles, knowledge, or dispositions, with less attention to moments in which students attempt to secure for themselves an academic reward (Calarco 2018). Foundational studies in this latter tradition (Calarco 2018; Lareau 2011) imply that if cultural capital is possessed and performed, teachers should reward it regardless of who performs it. Yet racism is persistent in education, leaving open questions about whether this assumption is true. For instance, teachers have lower academic expectations of and disproportionately reprimand Black and Latinx students (Ferguson 2000; Gilliam et al. 2016; McKown and Weinstein 2008; Ochoa 2013). At the same time, teachers expect more from and more favorably treat Asian Americans because of “model minority” stereotypes that pit their presumed work ethic against African Americans’ erroneously presumed laziness (Kozlowski 2015; Lee 2009; Okura 2022; Poon et al. 2016). Such patterns reflect the institutionalized legacy of social, economic, political, and cultural practices and ideologies that position racial and ethnic others as inferior to White individuals (Golash-Boza 2015). Given the persistence of racial stratification, which is both intersected with and independent of class inequality in the United States (Richards 2020), it is important to understand whether teachers prize higher-class skills, such as proactive help seeking, regardless of which students exhibit them or if race matters for which skills become “capital.”
The few studies that examine how class and race simultaneously matter for securing academic rewards are limited in a few ways. First, some studies focus on how parents try to secure academic rewards for their children rather than how children secure academic rewards for themselves (Lareau and Horvat 1999; Lewis-McCoy 2014; Rollock et al. 2014). This leaves open questions about how successfully students of diverse backgrounds secure or negotiate academic advantages. Second, those that do center student experiences focus on differences in cultural capital display rather than teacher response. For instance, Streib (2011) reveals how racially diverse preschoolers perform class, finding that wealthier students, regardless of race, tend to take the floor with their own stories and interruptions compared to less wealthy students. However, it is unclear from this study how teachers responsd to those displays. Lastly, studies that examine how teachers respond to student cultural capital are either focused primarily on White students, preventing intersectional analyses (Calarco 2011, 2014a, 2018), or are based on interviews with students about how they perceive teachers to reward them, without an ethnography to confirm how teachers are actually rewarding them (Jack 2016; Wallace 2016; for an exception, see Wallace 2023).
Racially and ethnically diverse students do perceive favorable evaluation, treatment, and academic advantages from teachers when they perform valuable cultural capital. For instance, Wallace’s (2016) Black Caribbean respondents found that when they performed “conventional” expectations (looked teachers in the eye, participated in class discussion, and spent time outside of class talking with teachers), they felt their teachers treated them with respect. Similarly, one of Jack’s (2016:6) Black, middle-class respondents felt that she “reaped the benefits of being close to faculty members” by proactively getting to know them. Such findings would predict that racial position does not interfere with the ability to secure academic rewards through middle-class strategies.
Wallace’s (2023) recent study, however, suggests that transnational cultural expectations based on intersections of ethnicity and gender do shape how teachers treat Black Caribbean students’ attempts to be academically successful. Whether in London, where Black Caribbean boys are assumed to be trouble, or in New York, where model minority cultural expectations extend to Caribbean students, teachers are quicker to reward Black Caribbean boys for “good,” polite, deferential behavior when exhibited than Black Caribbean girls, whose feminine goodness is assumed. Students activated this deference to reduce reputational damage or prevent ethnic advantage loss, depending on context, to maximize success in school. Wallace (2023) therefore shows that matched expectations may be what I call “conditionally rewarded” for a particular gender-ethnicity intersection. Wallace’s (2023) findings open the possibility to observe conditional rewarding of other status groups, like those I study here: African American, Hispanic/Latin American, Asian American, and White American students of different social classes.
Relatedly, scholarship on how teachers respond to parents who attempt to secure negotiated academic advantages for their children also suggests that cultural capital activation may generate unequal returns. For instance, Black parents in suburban schools find less success attempting to customize their children’s experiences (Lewis-McCoy 2014), whereas White “helicopter” parents’ excessive entitlement is often rewarded because schools rely on their economic, social, and logistical support (Calarco 2020).
In short, micro-interactional cultural capital research has clearly identified disparate sets of matched and negotiated skills/advantages (Calarco 2011; Collier and Morgan 2008; Jack 2016; Streib 2011), primarily learned from families (Calarco 2018; Lareau 2011; Roksa and Potter 2011), that teachers reward unequally (Calarco 2011, 2018; Collier and Morgan 2008). We might expect students of any racial or ethnic background performing such skills—especially matched expectations—to be rewarded by teachers. However, race shapes institutional experience and life outcomes, and limited attention has been paid to whether and how teachers respond to diverse students’ attempts to secure for themselves academic rewards and thus diverse students’ ability to profit from them. This exposes a major gap in cultural capital theory’s ability to predict classroom dis/advantage. To bridge this gap, I illustrate in the findings that follow that teachers conditionally reward matched expectations and attempts to negotiate advantages by race.
Methods
Research Site
I draw on data from an eight-month (September–April) ethnography and interviews of teachers, teaching assistants, and first-grade students in two socioeconomically and racially diverse schools, each in a different urban school district in the Southeast (for more, see Kozlowski 2022). This study is part of a larger project on student success (Kozlowski 2022), where I also interviewed and collected demographic surveys from 20 families. I draw on surveys for demographic classification but not extensively on parent interviews for this study.
I selected two different schools in two different districts to ensure that patterns were not idiosyncratic. After a five-month district application and approval process, I received permission to conduct research in both schools. Cumberland (all names are pseudonyms), a small “campus” nestled in the woods on the outskirts of a small city, is a well-resourced, high-performing (A rated, according to state accountability metrics) public elementary school. A majority (82 percent) of Cumberland’s families are affluent, or at least, do not qualify for free or reduced lunch (FRL), according to the state’s Department of Education (see Table 1). About 74 percent of parents in the city have college degrees, and the median local home value is about $400,000 (US Census Bureau 2014). The community surrounding Cumberland is considered progressive, which is mirrored in the school’s attempts to incorporate diversity into standard curriculum (e.g., Spanish lessons; investigations about worldwide holidays, customs, and traditions; multicultural speakers and programs; schoolwide multicultural festival).
Characteristics and Counts of Districts, Classrooms, Teachers, and Students at Foxcroft Elementary and Cumberland Elementary.
Note. FRL = free or reduced lunch; SES = socioeconomic status.
Classifications according to state accountability metrics.
Two boys, one Latinx and one Black, moved away after the first month.
One girl (Black) moved away after the first month.
Foxcroft Elementary is a well-resourced B rated magnet school in one of the historical areas of a large urban district. Like Cumberland, a majority (70 percent) of students come from affluent socioeconomic backgrounds. Most (about 70 percent) of the students are assigned to the school and walk or drive from surrounding affluent neighborhoods (home values range from $400,000 to $800,000) or bus in from comparatively poorer neighborhoods (rentals and owned homes of about $90,000 to $100,000). The few magnet students (about 30 percent of the school) drive in from affluent suburbs near the city’s edges. Magnet families are often drawn to Foxcroft by its explicit global and multicultural theme.
Research Participants
I observed three teachers (these three I also interviewed), one student teacher, two full-time teaching assistants (TAs), one TA turned full-time teacher, and occasional substitutes and guest instructors. All teachers and TAs were women and ranged in experience from novice to 30+ years. One student teacher and two TAs were Black, one teacher was Middle Eastern and identifiably Muslim (she wore a hijab), and the rest were White (see Table 1). All lead teachers were at least middle-class. Several had traveled extensively or lived abroad, and one belonged to the Junior League, an elite women’s social club. All teachers also adopted middle-class institutional norms. They relied on families to volunteer in school and oversee their children’s learning at home (Lareau 1987) and used student-centered instructional styles to foster autonomy, opinion, and creativity rather than compliance and memorization (Anyon 1981; Nelson and Schutz 2007). With their near minimum wage salaries and lack of higher education, several TAs could have been working-class or working poor, but TAs did not dictate classroom norms and were rarely in charge of classroom instruction.
I regularly observed 56 students at Foxcroft and 21 at Cumberland. About 55 percent were White, according to my classifications, which I triangulated with parent surveys when possible. Twenty-one percent were Black, 10 percent were Hispanic/Latinx, 10 percent were Asian, 1 and 3 percent were multiracial. Most Hispanic/Latinx students were phenotypically non-White immigrants or children of immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries. One phenotypically White Hispanic student, Sergio, had recently immigrated from Spain, and Charlotte, another phenotypically White student, was classified by her mother as both White and Hispanic because her father was Cuban. Because (1) Sergio can only be categorized as Hispanic (not Latino) given his country of origin, (2) Sergio and Charlotte are the only two students who are both phenotypically White and Hispanic, and (3) “Hispanic” ethnic identity is more likely to co-occur with racial Whiteness than “Latino” ethnic identity (Martínez and Gonzalez 2021), I refer to Sergio and Charlotte as White Hispanic students. I refer to the non-White Hispanic/Latinx students primarily as Latinx.
When possible, I identified students’ social class by parents’ highest level of education, occupation, income, and wealth (or home value). Parent education and occupation correspond to meaningful patterns in classed childrearing because of relationship to means of production and authority (Attewell and Lavin 2007; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Calarco 2018; Lareau 2011). I also include financial resources (income and wealth) into students’ categorization because resources dramatically shape childrearing and cultural capital socialization via access to communities, social networks, information, and time to “cultivate” children (Lareau 2011; Lewis-McCoy 2014; Oliver and Shapiro 2006).
I obtained social class information in several ways. Twenty families, who agreed to be interviewed for the larger project on student learning and success, 2 filled out detailed demographic surveys. 3 I obtained parent education, occupation, or home value for 34 additional students through informal conversation with parents and teachers. I interviewed most families at their home, and they shared with me who from their child’s class also lived in the neighborhood. With websites like Zillow.com, I could approximate their home values. I use FRL status for the remaining 23 students. Students who ate school-provided meals and snacks were highly visible to an observer. To ensure that FRL status sufficiently approximated social class categories, I triangulated FRL with demographic surveys and observations.
“Higher-SES” students did not eat FRL; their parents had at least a college degree (usually more), worked in White-collar professional occupations, had incomes and wealth far above the local median, and owned a home valued far above the local median (see Table 2). “Lower-SES” students ate FRL. Their parents had no college degree, worked in low-status/low-income occupations that submit to authority (e.g., construction, low-wage service positions), had income and wealth below the national median, and did not own their homes. “Lower-middle SES” students often ate FRL. Their parents had up to some college, one had a college degree but worked in low-status occupations, had incomes below the median, and if they owned their home, it was valued far below the local median. In total, 54 students were higher SES, 15 were lower SES, and 6 were lower-middle SES. Two were difficult to classify because of unclear information and are only included in analyses (count data) pertaining to race.
Student Characteristics.
Note. FRL = free or reduced lunch; SES = socioeconomic status.
Due to structural inequality in housing and school assignment (Logan, Minca, and Adar 2012; Oliver and Shapiro 2006), social class was correlated with race/ethnicity at both schools. Although it would be ideal to have equal numbers of students across ethnoracial categories within social class groups, a local research site with that ideal distribution did not exist. Therefore, some groups of students, such as lower-SES Asians, are missing from the analysis, and other groups, such as lower-SES White, higher-SES Black, and higher-SES Latinx students, are present in small numbers. I unpack results with this limitation in mind.
Defining Key Terms: Cultural Capital in Context
My analytical focus is on how teachers respond to moments when students attempt to secure academic advantages from teachers (Calarco 2018). Some behaviors reflect matched expectations from teachers, and others reflect negotiated advantages. Examples include comfortably interacting with an authority figure (Collier and Morgan 2008; Jack 2016; Khan 2011; Lareau 2011); interrupting, blurting out, or sharing (unsolicited) information, stories, experience, or institutionally valuable knowledge (Kozlowski 2020; Streib 2011); seeking help (Calarco 2011; Collier and Morgan 2008; Richards 2022); seeking attention or validation (Calarco 2018); seeking accommodations to customize learning (Calarco 2014a, 2018); solving problems in self-serving ways (Calarco 2014a, 2018); negotiating with authority (Calarco 2018; Hadley 2009); or questioning authority for personal gain (Lareau 2011).
I then pay attention to whether and how teachers “reward” or “punish” student attempts to secure academic advantages. “Rewards” include positive attention, praise, accommodations, extra feedback, direct instruction, or tacitly accepting the behavior. Punishments, or rather, not rewarding a student, include refusing to acquiesce to a request, reprimanding behavior, signaling disdain or frustration through tone, ignoring the student, or forgetting about them. Sometimes, teachers doled out a mix of both, such as a reprimand coupled with joking affection or acquiescence coupled with a warning. These moments will be unpacked further in the findings, but for the most part, it was clear whether students ultimately received what they were looking for (reward) or not (punishment). 4
Data Collection and Positionality
I observed one classroom per day, four days a week, one to three hours at a time, rotating the time and day to make sure observations captured patterned daily/weekly activities. During large group instruction, I watched everyone as best as possible, quickly jotting notes in a notebook that I carried with me and unpacked into full, detailed, chronological notes later in the day. During differentiated, simultaneous group activities, I spent 5 to 10 minutes with one group and then switched to another until I had watched everyone. I—and the teachers—told students I was there to watch them learn, and they quickly acclimated to me sitting with them at their tables and on the floor. I tried not to be an authority figure so students would act naturally around me. For instance, I did not reprimand students or redirect them when they were off task. As a result, students did act naturally around me—talking to, joking with, misbehaving around, or ignoring me as they would any peer. However, I was also obviously an adult, so students sometimes asked for feedback, help, and attention, which I gave to them.
Although teachers never asked me to facilitate activities and rarely asked for assistance, they treated me as a colleague. They interacted comfortably and casually with me, and I with them, on personal topics (e.g., whether I was going to have children), professional issues (e.g., lesson plans), and pejorative opinions 5 of students, their families, or employer. I was a visibly young, White, upper-middle-class (by upbringing) female—not so different from many of them. I also pitched my project as an exploration of how diverse students learned what it took to be academically successful and did not say I would be attuned to racialized interactions with students. I therefore believe representations are accurate.
Analysis
I uploaded field notes and transcripts (2,000 pages’ worth) into Atlas.ti, which I used to code for patterns and themes about student behavior and teacher responses. My process was iterative and required multiple passes through the field notes. I began coding specific student behaviors and then began paying closer attention to student motivation for behavior and conditions surrounding it, such as whether teachers invited blurt outs or asked students to raise their hands. This generated more interpretive codes in line with extant micro-interactional cultural capital research (e.g., “seeks advantage”). From there, I looked for and pulled into a report all instances in which students activated advantageous micro-interactional cultural capital.
Through this process, I noticed differences in how teachers responded to student activations. By paying attention to word choice, facial expressions, and tone, I realized that sometimes teachers rewarded students and that sometimes they punished students (or at least, did not reward them). So I went back through the field notes to count and collect into a report every incident in which a student performed and the teacher responded to a behavior that reflected a matched expectation or negotiated advantage. The full report contained approximately 2,260 incidents. Because the teacher’s response is my unit of analysis, I excluded moments when I failed to document the teacher’s response in my field notes. For the same reason, I excluded moments students sought an advantage from me unless they were also directing their efforts to a teacher.
I then compared teacher responses to student characteristics (race, social class, and gender), teacher characteristics (race, age, personal perceptions of students), and other contextual factors (activity directions, typical activity norms, time of year) to identify themes and patterns. To ensure that themes are accurate, I counted from the report each individual student’s number of times they were rewarded or punished and then compared ratios of reward to punishment by race and social class. I also paid close attention to negative cases and disconfirming evidence.
In the findings that follow, I first describe what teachers say they expected. Then, I discuss differences in whether teachers responded to students’ micro-interactional cultural capital by race in the context of how often they displayed those behaviors. Then, I describe racialized differences in how teachers responded to students when they rewarded them, followed by differences in how teachers responded to students when they did not. 6
Teacher Expectations
Teachers at Foxcroft and Cumberland identified a few key behaviors that could constitute valuable cultural capital, with implications for securing academic rewards. First, in line with existing scholarship on help seeking (Calarco 2011; Karabenick 1998), teachers said they expected students to ask for help, first from peers and then ultimately from them. As Mrs. Miller shared, “the ideal student . . . [will] try [a task] first, then ask a friend before you come to me.” Mrs. Miller often made this expectation clear to students, reminding them during reading time, math centers, or writer’s workshop that they should ask their friends for help if needed. A poster in Ms. Jennifer’s room even institutionalized “ask a friend for help” as a key strategy for students if they were unsure what to do. I also observed a few moments when teachers grew frustrated that students did not proactively seek help or solve their own problem. For instance, one day, a student in Ms. Jennifer’s class quietly raised his hand for 15 minutes, waiting for the teacher to tell him what to do. Amid the chaos, Ms. Jennifer did not see his hand raised until nearly the end of the activity, when she happened to walk past him. After answering his question, she scrunched her face and asked if he had been “sitting there the whole time waiting for a solution to that problem.” When the student said yes, Ms. Jennifer replied, “Next time, ask your friends.”
Teachers recognized that sometimes, answers needed to come from them instead of peers. All teachers and TAs regularly walked around the room to assess individual needs, offer suggestions, and field questions. One TA mentioned to me that “it is so hard for the two of us [herself and the lead teacher] to get around to everyone,” but teachers still expected students to ask them questions. I observed teachers casually remind students to ask them for help, like Mrs. Miller did one morning when she told students to ask her if they needed help with their weekly job activity. In interviews, teachers also mentioned that students who were doing well asked for help. Ms. Janwari, for example, noted that one table of three was “doing great” because “if they have a question, they will raise their hand and I will go to them.”
Relatedly, teachers expected students to be independent and solve problems that could impede their learning. For instance, Mrs. Miller expected that students relocate from a distracting peer, even in the middle of instruction, if needed. Several teachers expected students to use classroom resources when completing tasks, especially during centers or breakout activities. For instance, one day, a student asked Ms. LaToya how to spell “orange.” Digging into the table’s crayon caddy, Ms. LaToya picked up an orange crayon. “Use your resources. See? It’s right here,” she said to the student. In short, help seeking and problem-solving constituted important expectations that, as I show later, students benefited unequally from.
A second important expectation of teachers was for students to display their academic knowledge (see Kozlowski 2022). Although only one teacher (Ms. Jennifer) used the term “constructivist” to describe her educational philosophy, all teachers I observed created environments in which student discovery and autonomy over their learning prevailed. As opposed to traditional models where students passively receive information from teachers, the teachers I observed expected to “construct learning together,” as Ms. Jennifer put it. By this, she meant that she expected students to bring their own knowledge and experience to the classroom, share observations, and ask questions. Ms. Janwari was even more specific about the kinds of knowledge she expected students to demonstrate and questions she expected students to ask: advanced knowledge.
I would hope for them to not just do what the grade level requirement is . . . I’m hoping for them to take themselves a step further and do more work [than what is] required. . . . If it’s writing, I’m hoping you know they will take it and stretch it out and add details. . . . [If it’s math], show me different ways they can find the answer . . . when they’re on the rug listening or when I’m teaching, [ideal students] would be asking me questions, um [pause] like critical thinking kinds of questions.
In Streib’s (2011) study of how preschoolers perform class, she suggests that middle-class students take the floor with their own stories, connections, and questions perhaps because they have more ease engaging authority or enough entitlement to believe they ought to be heard. For constructivist teachers, such as those at Foxcroft and Cumberland, taking the floor, particularly by demonstrating academic knowledge, becomes an implicit expectation for how learning occurs.
Lastly, Ms. Jennifer expects ideal first graders to have a “mischievous,” playful side that often looks like rule bending. Rule bending can elicit rewards for the middle-class students who do it (Calarco 2018; Musto 2019), suggesting that such behaviors are not matched expectations but rather, negotiated advantages (Calarco 2018). Because two of the teachers I observed did not highlight rule bending as an expected skill and at times expressed frustration with students who “always questioned [their] choices,” I argue that rule bending was a negotiated advantage for Mrs. Miller and Ms. Janwari. This was not the case for Ms. Jennifer, who expected students to question, bend rules, and negotiate with her. Said Ms. Jennifer in an interview: So, do I expect kids in here to bend the rules? Absolutely. Do I expect you to question me, and do you know what I mean, like . . . maybe get almost to that breaking point without breaking it? Sure I do. Because I do the same thing. And that’s a life skill. And everybody does it. And you’re gonna need to know how to do that.
In short, first-grade teachers at Foxcroft and Cumberland expected students to seek help when needed, solve their own problems, use classroom resources to their advantage, and even (in the case of one teacher) question authority and bend the rules. Middle-class students from preschool to college regularly display these types of micro-interactions, with implications for classed advantage (Calarco 2014b; Collier and Morgan 2008; Jack 2016; Khan 2011; Lareau 2015; Streib 2011). Yet most of the observational research on how teachers reward students’ expected and negotiated advantage is based on White students (Calarco 2011, 2014b, 2018). In the findings that follow, I demonstrate that when teachers respond to such behaviors, they are more likely to respond favorably to White and Asian students through a process I call “conditional rewarding.”
Conditional Rewards
When students sought assistance, teachers usually helped, especially during independent activities. For example, one day, Minsuh (Asian, higher SES) walked up to Ms. Jennifer’s teaching assistant, Ms. LaToya, and asked what she should do during center time. Ms. LaToya suggested “Play Doh letters.” “How do you make letters with Play Doh?,” Minsuh asked. Patiently, Ms. LaToya responded, “Let me show you.” Ms. LaToya retrieved a container of Play Doh and demonstrated how to roll out the clay to make different letters of the alphabet. Thus, Ms. LaToya fully assisted Minsuh—a student who is both higher SES and Asian—not just by telling her what to do but also how to do it.
Even when teachers were busy, had already explained instructions, or were managing multiple students’ demands, teachers generally answered questions. In rare moments teachers did not, students tended to be Black or Hispanic. For example, one day, Mrs. Cooper had instructed students to draw a picture of themselves at age 100 to celebrate the 100th day of school. Because several students laughed and gasped at the idea, Mrs. Cooper asked questions to spur students’ creativity: “What color hair will you have?” (“Gray,” “white,” responded several students.) “What about your skin? Will it be smooth?” One student was still unsure. “Can you help us?,” asked Allison (Black, higher SES). “How can I help you? I don’t know what you’ll look like at 100 years old,” replied Mrs. Cooper. Here, Mrs. Cooper had just asked probing questions precisely because she did have some ideas about what students might look like at age 100. Mrs. Cooper could have reminded Allison of her peers’ responses or encouraged her to use different resources. Instead, Mrs. Cooper signaled an unwillingness to further help Allison, a girl who is higher SES and Black.
Teachers also expected students to demonstrate their academic knowledge. During large group instruction and activities, teachers welcomed questions that showed critical thinking, connections between the material and their life, and their command of new information. However, teachers were most inclined to entertain these attempts to take the floor (Streib 2011) when White and Asian students were doing it. For instance, one day during math instruction, Ms. Jennifer asked students to draw the number 5 in different ways (i.e., numeral “5,” five lines) on individual white boards. She interrupted momentarily to say, “Mathematicians [i.e., you should] talk about their thinking.” Ethan (White, higher SES) subsequently announced, “I drew a five.” In attempting to talk about Ethan’s mathematical thinking as instructed, Marcus (higher SES, Black) asked Ethan, “Five dots?” Ms. Jennifer hissed “Shh!” at Marcus—a clear punishment for behavior she had earlier indicated that she expected. Even if Ms. Jennifer had intended for students to raise their hands instead of speaking out, Ms. Jennifer’s responses to Marcus’s and Ethan’s rule bending were unequal. Ms. Jennifer reprimanded Marcus but said nothing to Ethan, signaling a tacit acceptance of Ethan’s approach.
Students were also unequally supported when they attempted to use classroom resources to their advantage. One day, students in Ms. Jennifer’s class were doing differentiated center activities. Ethan (higher SES, White), who did not have the materials he needed to complete his task, walked over to a table, grabbed some of the paper and markers from table’s caddy, and then sat down at a different table to complete his activity. On a different day during centers, A’kierra (lower SES, Black) also realized she needed materials her table did not have. She walked over to another group’s table and asked for some pencils. Ms. Jennifer, overhearing the interchange, said to A’kierra sternly, “Sit down and work.” Both students attempted to follow the expectation to use classroom resources to solve a problem. However, Ethan was the one allowed to pursue this agency, thus turning his approach into a form of valuable cultural capital for navigating the educational space. A’kierra was tightly controlled, which both restricts her cultural toolkit and constructs resource seeking as not cultural capital for students like her.
Lastly, although research suggests that teachers are likely to reward middle-class students’ negotiated advantages (Calarco 2018), I found that teachers were more likely to do so when White and Asian students attempted them. For example, Leah (higher SES, White) convinced Ms. Janwari one day to let her share a small container with a leaf and a stick before designated share time. Although Ms. Janwari initially told Leah she could share it later, after lunch (when share time typically happened), Leah claimed, “Well, it’s science,” and Ms. Janwari relented. However, on a different day when Aaliyah (lower SES, Black) asked to share a set of flash cards with the class, Ms. Janwari told her no. Aaliyah tried to explain, “It’s something to do with math.” By doing this, Aaliyah was drawing a parallel between her request and connection to an academic skill—critical thinking Ms. Janwari told me she expected from ideal students. This strategy worked for Leah. However, to Aaliyah, Ms. Janwari replied, “Not right now” and never allowed Aaliyah to share them.
In these examples, students from a variety of social backgrounds activated behaviors that align with matched expectations and behaviors that secure negotiated advantages. Minsuh and Allison proactively sought help when they were struggling (Calarco 2011; Karabenick 1998), Ethan and Marcus took the floor (Streib 2011) to have their ideas or questions heard, Ethan and A’kierra attempted to use classroom resources to their advantage, and Leah and Aaliyah tried to negotiate extra advantages. All students interpreted these moments as an opportunity for a reward (Calarco 2014b), a characteristic typical of middle-class students, because none seemed concerned that their actions would lead to punishment. However, teachers treated Black students’ behaviors differently than the White and Asian students—tacitly accepting or overtly rewarding Minsuh (higher SES and Asian), Ethan, and Leah (both higher SES and White) and implicitly or explicitly reprimanding Allison, Marcus, A’kierra, and Aaliyah (all Black, of mixed SES backgrounds). Such interactions actively construct middle-class cultural capital as racialized, where Whiteness (and Asianness, in this context) act as “credentials” that expand student agency and opportunity to secure resources or rewards (Ray 2019).
These examples are not aberrations. They reflect larger patterns across the data. After counting, categorizing, and comparing moments in which students were rewarded and punished, I found that White and Asian students across social classes were more than twice as likely to be rewarded than punished for attempts to secure academic rewards. Higher-SES Black students were punished less often than lower-SES Black students but were still punished more frequently than White students. Latinx students fell somewhere in the middle, but importantly, higher-SES White Hispanic students were rewarded more frequently than higher-SES Latinx students (see Tables 3 and 4), which reinforces the connection between Whiteness (or proximity to it) and institutional rewards.
Counts of Student Attempts to Secure Academic Advantages, Teacher Rewards, Punishments, and Ratios of Reward to Punishment.
Note. SES = socioeconomic status.
Lower- and lower-middle SES students are combined. There are fewer of them, they are economically similar, and they do not meaningfully differ in whether or how they demonstrate entitlement behavior.
Count includes moments from students who moved away and students from the fourth Foxcroft classroom, which I did not regularly observe. Students rotated between teachers for ability group interventions daily at Foxcroft. I rarely observed ability group time, but total count includes some moments where students from the fourth Foxcroft classroom interact with regularly observed teachers. They are included in race counts only because their social class is unknown.
Intersectional Counts of Student Attempts to Secure Academic Advantages, Teacher Rewards, Teacher Punishments, and Ratios of Reward to Punishment.
Note. SES = socioeconomic status.
Total count includes some students who moved away and some students from the fourth Foxcroft classroom, which I did not regularly observe. Students rotated between teachers for ability group interventions daily at Foxcroft. I rarely observed ability group time, but total count includes some moments where students from the fourth Foxcroft classroom interact with regularly observed teachers.
These unequal responses did not seem to be due to overrepresentation of students of color in lower-SES groups or disparate classed comfort attempting to elicit rewards. 7 Although higher-SES students across ethnoracial groups did activate middle-class behaviors more regularly compared to their lower-SES counterparts (where those comparisons are possible) and teachers did generally reward lower-SES students’ attempts to elicit academic rewards less often on average (see Table 3), unequal racialized teacher responses did not align correspondingly. For instance, lower-SES Black and higher-SES White students attempted to secure academic rewards at the same average per-pupil rates. Yet lower-SES Black students were least likely to be rewarded. Additionally, higher-SES Asian students were the most frequently rewarded yet among the least likely to attempt securing an advantage (see Table 4). I therefore argue that teachers were more likely to conditionally reward matched-expectation behaviors and negotiated advantages by race and ethnicity.
Higher-SES White and Asian Rewards: Warm, Effusive Validation
Because communicators give off implicit messages and meaning to their audience through tone of voice and other nonverbal cues, how teachers rewarded students is just as important as whether teachers rewarded them. When teachers rewarded higher-SES White and Asian students, they often did so effusively, which could send messages of empowerment or exceptionalism. For instance, one day, Ms. Jennifer effusively celebrated an idea of Morgan’s (higher SES, Asian). Ms. Jennifer had been using her own sample topic (“first grade”) to demonstrate what she wanted students to write and draw. She explained, “What I want to say is, first grade kids are all different, but [also] all the same . . I think I’ll choose [this] paper . . . and I’ll draw a picture that has kids holding hands or in a line.” Unsolicited, Morgan hopped up from her spot in home base and scurried down to where Ms. Jennifer was. “I have an idea for your picture,” she said. “You could do half of the world with people on it, like the t-shirt!” Despite the suggestion’s loose association with the topic, Jennifer gasped, and her eyes widened. “That is such a great idea!” This reaction, which demonstrates palpable excitement, is notably different from how Ms. Jennifer responded to Nia (higher SES, Black) during a math discussion. Ms. Jennifer had been pulling a variety of objects (thermometers, rulers, scales, etc.) from a bag so students could discover different measurement tools. Noticing a number line nearby, Nia blurted out, “There’s a tool right there!” Jennifer turned to see the number line and nodded. Without the same exuberance, Ms. Jennifer quickly moved on. This could send a message to Nia that her contribution is less valuable than Morgan’s.
In a similarly muted way, Ms. Janwari responded to Carlos (higher SES, Latino) when he got up from his spot to demonstrate his own ideas during science. Ms. Janwari was demonstrating Earth and moon rotation with a craft she had rendered, and wanting to add his own (unsolicited) knowledge, Carlos marched from his table to Ms. Janwari, pointed at the craft, and said, “When the moon goes here [he pointed to the spot where the moon would be between the sun and the Earth], it will be a half moon.” Even though these are the kinds of critical thinking connections Ms. Janwari said she expected students to demonstrate, Ms. Janwari did not respond to Carlos and instead moved on to another student’s question. Carlos returned to his seat, not having been reprimanded but also not having been acknowledged (let alone effusively celebrated). Yet on a different day when CJ (higher SES, White female) blurted out her own observation of the pages on a book Ms. Janwari had just finished reading to the class (“It says twelve o’clock on all these clocks!”), Ms. Janwari commended CJ’s observation and invited her to say more about how she knew what time the clock said. This is a comparatively more effusive response that may empower CJ to take the floor again. Carlos, on the other hand, may not feel so empowered. It is possible that this occurred over the academic year. According to Table 4, Carlos, the lone higher-SES Latino student, attempted to secure academic rewards in middle-class ways 28 times over my observation period, whereas the average White higher-SES student attempted to secure academic rewards 33.5 times.
Sometimes, effusive or empowering praise led to public constructions of exceptionalism for higher-SES White and Asian students. One day, as students were completing vocabulary worksheets, Eric (higher SES, White) exhibited a common form of “by any means” cultural capital (Calarco 2014a) by interrupting Ms. Jennifer’s conversation with another student to seek an advantage. He asked if he could “go down” to home base (where large group instruction happens) “and look at a word.” By this, Eric meant that he wanted to look at the record of ideas Ms. Jennifer wrote on a flip chart during large group discussion. At the sound of his question, Ms. Jennifer halted her other conversation. With an animated face and loud, excited voice, she said to Eric, “Now that’s the way to use your noggin!” Here, Ms. Jennifer immediately rewarded Eric with attention and an answer and constructed a public reward for Eric by invoking his intelligence through her praise. Ms. Jennifer’s message to Eric and everyone else (because she praised him so loudly) was that Eric was smart and strategic.
Lower-SES Black and Latinx Rewards: Cold Acquiescence
When teachers rewarded Black and Latinx students—especially those of lower SES—they were more likely to acquiesce coldly. One type of cold response was to undermine students when they sought extra attention, validation, feedback, or accommodations, as Mrs. Diaz did with Deon (lower SES, Black) one day. Mrs. Diaz had asked students to work at their tables and “write their own [subtraction] word problems. . . . Like, 16 birds were on a fence. How many flew away, and what’s the answer?” Her intention was for students to write their own problem resembling this: “16 birds were on a fence. Eight flew away. How many are left? 8.” Deon finishes his word problem. . . . He has written, “Ten dogs were runing [sic] in the sun. Ten ran away. Ton [sic]-ten = 0.” . . . He turns around to look for Mrs. Diaz [who soon turns her attention to him]. . . . She reads his problem and says, “10 minus 10 equals zero. You took the easy way out.”
Deon completed the math problem exactly as instructed. When he proactively sought validation and feedback from Mrs. Diaz, she could have praised him for his creative story problem. Instead, she told him he “took the easy way out,” presumably because 10 minus 10 is an easier math problem than her example, 16 minus 8. However, in telling Deon he took “the easy way out,” she invokes laziness, a racial stereotype often projected onto African Americans like Deon. Mrs. Diaz provided no commentary to Deon’s two, higher-SES White table-mates when they sought similar validation and feedback even though the White, higher-SES boy’s problem was incorrect. He had written 11-22 = 13, which is numerically incorrect and not written in “story” form as instructed.
Other times, teachers were less interested in the extra facts, trivia, or experiences lower-SES Black and Latinx students tried to add during group instruction. This occurred one day in Mrs. Miller’s class as she was trying to explain a game for the students to play during “morning meeting.” While detailing the game’s rules, Treasure (lower SES, Black) raised her hand and shared, “I played it [the same game] on the school bus.” Instead of thanking Treasure or validating her experience, Mrs. Miller replied “Ok” flatly and then continued quickly with the rest of the game’s instructions. Yet on a different day, when Mrs. Miller was explaining instructions for reading time, Sam (higher SES, White) interrupted to say, “Once I saw a book with all words and no pictures.” Mrs. Miller paused her instructions to ask Sam more about it rather than cutting him off as she had done with Treasure.
Some teachers seemed hesitant to trust lower-SES students of color when they sought (and ultimately received) accommodations, feedback, or other rewards from teachers. This was evident in a moment between Maricella (lower SES, Latina) and Mrs. Stevenson. Students were working independently at their tables on an activity, and As Mrs. Stevenson was passing by Maricella’s table . . . Maricella mentioned that she couldn’t see the board very well and wondered if she could take her paper to the front of the room instead. Mrs. Stevenson seemed hesitant to believe her [she frowned at Maricella and did not answer her right away] but eventually relented.
When teachers rewarded White lower-SES students, their tone was different. When Hailey or Hannah (lower-SES, White) asked to use the bathroom outside of sanctioned times, to get personal belongings during large group instruction, asked for help with materials, or ignored teacher directions to do what they wanted, Cumberland teachers usually responded without hesitation or annoyance. Sometimes, they even sweetened their voices and in the case of Hannah, referred to her with affectionate (gendered) pet names, such as “babe.”
White Punishments: Explanation and (Male) Validation
Tone of voice and nonverbal signals also mattered for how teachers punished students when they attempted to secure academic rewards. Often, teachers softened the penalty for White students by giving them attention, validation, or opportunity to take the floor almost immediately after rebuking them. Ms. Janwari did this one day when Emory (lower-middle SES, White) tried to share tangential trivia during instruction. Ms. Janwari asked the class what happens to the weather when the Earth moves around the sun. She called on Emory, who said, “I know something else.” “Let’s answer the question,” Ms. Janwari replied to Emory, calling on another student instead. However, once the other student answered, Ms. Janwari invited Emory to share what she was going to say, a validation of Emory and her idea.
Teachers also softened the penalty by providing a detailed explanation to White students when their attempts were not rewarded. For instance, one day, Ms. Jennifer provided alternatives to Harper (higher SES, White) in a moment she could not accommodate Harper’s needs: Harper comes up to Ms. Jennifer to ask her something, and Ms. Jennifer tells her that she has five people at her table that she could talk to in order to get an answer to her question. Harper protests, saying that she is trying to ask . . . about getting something from [another teacher’s classroom] to work on her project. “Instead of going all the way over to the other [teacher’s] side of the room, can we think about a resource that is in our own room you can use?”
Here, Harper tried to solicit an accommodation that Ms. Jennifer perceived to be unnecessary. Ms. Jennifer could have curtly told Harper “no” or to “sit down and get to work,” but instead, she provided detailed alternatives in a gentle, indirect way, as if Harper were owed them. This contrasts with how Ms. Jennifer interacted with Nia (higher SES, Black) during reading time. Nia got up from her reading spot for reasons that never became clear because Ms. Jennifer quickly said to her, “Sit down and read. Don’t get up again” (even though I had not seen Nia get up a first time). It is possible that Nia also needed help or an accommodation, but Ms. Jennifer’s comparatively colder response suggests that she was not “owed” the same kinds of explanations, alternatives, or chance to explain herself as Harper.
Higher-SES White boys sometimes received additional validation when their entitlement behaviors were unrewarded. One day when Eric (higher SES, White) tried to blurt out unsolicited observations, Ms. Jennifer said, “I know you are saying smart things, but raise your hand.” Here, Ms. Jennifer validated Eric by praising his intelligence even while reprimanding him. The school counselor, a guest reader in Mrs. Miller’s class, went so far as to apologize to a White boy when she reprimanded him. Wanting to know what they learned from their lesson that day, the counselor called on Travis (higher SES, White). Instead of answering her question, he said, “One time I was a little scared at Disney World—.” However, she cut him off, saying, “Travis, I’m sorry to interrupt, but could you answer the question?” In this moment, a counselor undermines her own authority in two ways. First, she apologizes to Travis, as if he is owed the opportunity to tell his story, and second, she frames her own apology as an interruption—again, suggesting his words take precedence over hers. This is a subtle way white privilege—white male privilege in particular—becomes constructed through interactions between teachers and students.
Black and Latinx Punishments: Resentful Reproach
When students of color were punished, it was often reproachful. For instance, one day, Tyrone (lower-middle SES, Black) came up to me during a writer’s workshop and asked me if dinosaurs have sharp teeth. After I responded, Mrs. Stevenson called over to me, “Did he just ask you about dinosaurs?” I nodded. Mrs. Stevenson then turned to Tyrone and snapped at him with a disdainful tone, “You have now asked three people the same question, and all three people have given you the same answer. It is time to start writing.” This contrasts with how she treated Amelia (higher SES, White) when she started wandering around the room during a different writer’s workshop. In that moment, Mrs. Stevenson gently redirected her: “Amelia, have a seat sweetheart, and take out your writing.”
Although reproachful interactions were more common with Black and Latinx students, teachers rarely punished White students with disdainful directives, although extreme punishments, such as being removed from the group, did occasionally occur for lower-SES White students. This juxtaposition is evident in a moment in Ms. Janwari’s class, when she asked students to draw comparisons between two books they had recently read. Leah (higher SES, White) blurted out, “Can we do the circle thing? [a Venn diagram, to compare two stories’ similarities and differences]” “Oh yes, we did that in [my kindergarten] class!” Aaliyah (lower SES, Black) added. Ms. Janwari swiftly responded to Aaliyah but not Leah, “Aaliyah, hands in laps.” Instead of commending Aaliyah’s connection to something she had done in kindergarten, Ms. Janwari rebuked her, even imposing more control over her body. She also got no explanation for why she needed to put her hands in her lap, as might have been provided to White or Asian students. Leah received no chiding at all for her unsolicited suggestion, though.
Explanations
I considered whether teachers conditionally rewarded White and Asian students—most of whom were higher SES—because of racialized and classed perceptions of their parents (Dumais, Kessinger, and Ghosh 2012). Teachers may have felt pressure from privileged helicopter parents to acquiesce to their children (Calarco 2020) more so than lower-SES students of color. Cultural capital is field-dependent, and in schools like Cumberland and Foxcroft, a reliance on privileged parents to volunteer, raise money, or build a school’s reputation can lead teachers to make exceptions for their children when proactive engagement turns into entitlement and excuses for violations (Calarco 2020). I do not suspect that these dynamics dictated patterns I observed; only one teacher—Ms. Jennifer—ever complained about an overbearing (higher SES White) parent, and Ms. Jennifer prided herself on being able to “handle” her and other such parents in past years. No other teachers reported feeling threatened or pressured to change their policies by overly demanding parents. 8
I also considered whether students’ academic skills played a role. Because race and achievement are associated and because teachers tend to favor higher-achieving students (Gaztambide-Fernández 2009; Khan 2011; Musto 2019; Oakes 2005), academic skills could be driving teachers’ reactions to students instead of race/ethnicity. Many of the excessively rewarded students were identified by teachers as having high grades on class assignments and evaluations, and many of the excessively reprimanded students did not. However, within high achievers, White and Asian students were more disproportionately rewarded compared to punished than high-achieving Black students. Among low achievers, White and lower-middle SES students were more rewarded than almost all low-achieving students of color. Combined with dis/advantages in voice tone and warmth, I argue that student race/ethnicity—Whiteness and closer proximity to it, in particular—did shape whether teachers interpreted student skills as profitable cultural capital.
Because unequal returns to cultural capital was not my project’s original focus (or obvious to me during data collection), I did not ask teachers about moments or patterns illustrated here. I did ask about their general perceptions of students, though, and in some cases, teachers’ perceptions of students mattered for who they rewarded and how. Ms. Jennifer, for instance, identified Marcus (higher SES, Black) as her “hardest kid” because of “behavioral issues,” which likely led her to construct moments of matched expectations as objectionable and led to intolerance when he attempted to negotiate advantages. At the same time, she “love[d]” Eric’s (higher SES, White) “mischievousness” even though Eric’s mischief—at least, during first semester—was often similar to Marcus’s. Noncoincidentally, Ms. Jennifer celebrated Eric’s behavior more frequently and effusively. These characterizations align with racial schemas that allow Whiteness to become a credential (Ray 2019) that protects against being labeled a “problem.”
This pattern was less pronounced for other teachers. Although Ms. Janwari identified four students with “inconsistent” or “unsafe” behavior, the students Ms. Janwari most frequently punished were three lower-SES girls of color (two Black, one Latina) she did not identify as challenging or difficult. This pattern coincides with findings from other studies of racialized discipline (Morris and Perry 2017; Wallace 2023), where intersectional identities lead to multiplicative marginalization for girls of color.
Mrs. Miller actually exhibited preferential treatment for her most challenging student, Tyrone (lower-middle SES, Black), who was prone to physical anger outbursts such as throwing chairs and slamming doors. Because, as Mrs. Miller confided to me, Tyrone was mistreated by his kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Miller spent an extraordinary amount of time thinking about, talking to me about, and charting her experimental interventions for Tyrone. I suspect that this extra care and attention led Mrs. Miller to reward him regularly for attempting to secure academic rewards. Indeed, Tyone was the most rewarded student I observed, a testament to the power of conscious interactional choices.
Aside from the few students about whom teachers had strong opinions, I do not think teachers realized they were treating groups of students differently. Most teachers espoused anti-racist ideas freely with me. Ms. Janwari and Mrs. Miller, as teachers in a multicultural magnet school, both expressed concerns about safety and racial inclusion in their classrooms, which shaped classroom practices, such as whom they assigned students to sit with at tables. Perhaps because I believed in their good intentions and empathized with the difficult and emotional work of managing students, I did not “see” systematic racial inequality in how teachers rewarded cultural capital until I started coding the data. This leads me to believe that like teachers who look for more misbehavior from (Gilliam et al. 2016), hold lower academic expectations of (McKown and Weinstein 2008), and differentially treat Black and Latinx students (Ferguson 2000), teachers at Cumberland and Foxcroft likely succumbed to unconscious implicit biases rooted in larger cultural and social stereotypes (Staats 2014).
Individuals are particularly susceptible to unconscious biases when they are preoccupied, multiple things are happening, and time is constrained (Bertrand, Chugh, and Mullainathan 2005). Managing the attention, help, accommodation, and validation seeking of 20 seven-year-olds, especially during differentiated activities, amid increasing administrative demands, leaves first-grade teachers particularly vulnerable to these biases. This may have been particularly true for novice teacher Ms. Janwari, who struggled to create order and stability in her classroom, leaving it feeling rather chaotic. She experimented with at least three different behavior management structures, none of which worked particularly well. Students yelled, wandered, left the room, manhandled furniture, and played at their whims. To reclaim her authority, Ms. Janwari regularly reprimanded students. Because in the United States, racialized schemas shape understanding of who needs or deserves to be disciplined in school and elsewhere (Ferguson 2000; Ray 2019), I suspect that Ms. Janwari unconsciously drew on these racialized schemas in her attempt to mitigate chaos. Of all teachers, Ms. Janwari’s propensity to reward or punish students for securing academic rewards, even in ways she said she expected, was most consistently and starkly racialized.
Relatedly, pedagogical choices might have created or lessened need for students to secure academic rewards, thus affecting opportunity to conditionally reward students for it. Mrs. Miller was most clear and explicit in her teaching, so students had less reason to ask for individual assistance or request clarification. Mrs. Miller also conditionally rewarded fewer individual students and did so less frequently than other teachers. (Incidentally, the grade distribution in Mrs. Miller’s class was also least variable.) Ms. Jennifer and Ms. Janwari often obscured the point of a lesson, activity, or exercise in their instructional delivery. This vagueness invited more individual student questions, requests, and unsolicited information sharing. When these demands reached a critical mass, Ms. Jennifer and Ms. Janwari seemed to become overwhelmed and likely susceptible to implicit biases in their attempt to regain control. Because of erroneous yet pervasive cultural ideologies and schemas of Blackness and Latinness as dangerous, dysfunctional, or undeserving (Cartwright 2022; Perez and Ballinas 2023), teachers may draw on such abstractions under heightened stress without even realizing it.
Importantly, teachers seemed susceptible to implicit biases regardless of their own racial or class background. TAs, student teachers, and teachers of color were as disproportionate in their rewards compared to reprimands as White teachers. This suggests that teachers of color did not have uniquely different assumptions or evaluations of their students based on their own socially marginalized positionality or life experience. This reinforces how powerful social stereotypes and racialized ideologies in the larger culture can be.
Discussion
Socially disadvantaged students generally have worse educational experiences and outcomes compared to socially advantaged students. Cultural capital theory has been a popular explanation for why. What constitutes cultural capital is field-dependent, and in schools like Cumberland and Foxcroft—desirable, well-resourced schools attended primarily by middle-class and affluent families—middle-class cultural norms and expectations prevail (Anyon 1981; Bourdieu and Passeron [1977] 1990; Calarco 2014a, 2018; Lamont and Lareau 1988; Lareau 1987; Nelson and Schutz 2007). Cultural capital theory suggests that advantaged students perform profitable cultural capital and that socially disadvantaged students do not (Calarco 2018; Collier and Morgan 2008; Lareau 2011; Lareau and Weiniger 2003). Although much extant research on micro-interactional cultural capital focuses on what and how students perform classed skills, the primary contribution of this article is to illustrate inequality of cultural capital reception beyond students’ social class location. When students activate and perform middle-class cultural capital teachers expect and regularly reward (Calarco 2018), teachers conditionally reward those displays by race and ethnicity.
This is a striking finding because Cumberland and Foxcroft explicitly and implicitly focus on multiculturalism and equity. It would stand to reason that in these contexts, if students of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds demonstrate skills teachers say they expect, teachers would be fair in rewarding them. Yet in subtle ways, teachers at Foxcroft and Cumberland more tightly control their Black and Latin American students than White and Asian students. Although my findings are based on teacher treatment rather than characterization of students, my findings imply that cultural capital for Black and Latin American students may, as Cartwright (2022) suggests, hinge on being deemed nonthreatening or deserving by teachers. Why?
Racial ideologies are maintained through what Collins (1986) calls “controlling images,” externally defined stereotypes that justify, naturalize, and maintain inequality (Beauboeuf-Lafontant 2009). A long history of controlling images positions Blackness, among other things, as dangerous, ignorant, or dysfunctional (Mueller, Williams, and Dirks 2018), and a more recent history positions Latinness as criminal (Chavez 2013; Deckard et al. 2020). I argue that these controlling images likely lead to teachers’ implicit biases, which reflect racial ideologies favoring Whiteness (Golash-Boza 2015; Ray 2019) and closer social “approximation” to it. As larger racial ideologies filter down to organizations such as schools, Whiteness becomes a credential, thus expanding White students’ personal agency and ability to secure institutional rewards (Ray 2019). Similarly, colorism suggests that within races and ethnicities, those who are lighter skinned are treated more favorably and secure more of society’s profits, including education (Dixon and Telles 2017). This may explain why in Table 4, White Hispanic students had reward-to-punishment ratios comparable to non-Hispanic White students, whereas darker skinned Latin American students had lower ratios.
Closer social approximation to Whiteness, especially in academics, may also exist for some Asian Americans, who have model minority status compared to other minoritized U.S. groups (Lee 2009; Poon et al. 2016). Since the mid-twentieth century, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants have arrived in the United States with more economic resources, education, and professional skills than other immigrant groups (Zhou and Lee 2017). At the same time, Asian Americans have invested deeply in particular occupational pathways and educational strategies to attain them to buffer against discrimination (Zhou and Lee 2017). The combination of these things—hyper-selectivity, relative structural advantage, an exacting academic success frame, and the implicit elevation of Asians over African Americans via the model minority stereotype—has led to less systematic disadvantage compared to those who are Black and Latinx (Bonilla-Silva 2002). Perhaps this is why teachers treated White and Asian students’ attempts to secure academic rewards as cultural capital but Black and Latinx students’ similar behaviors as problematic.
Because teacher perception and treatment matter to students, conditional rewarding can directly shape student experiences and outcomes in school and beyond, thus constructing what Richards et al. (2023) refer to as the “racialized habitus,” or a racialized “feel” for the education “game.” White and Asian students who receive more affirmation, validation, and status may gain inflated confidence and sense of self, which leads to more engagement in the classroom and willingness to take academic risks (Yeager and Dweck 2012). They may one day seek placement into more advanced courses, where they are disproportionately overrepresented (Oakes 2005; Ochoa 2013); come to think of themselves as more capable learners; have higher educational aspirations; matriculate to college; more comfortably navigate unwritten higher education norms (Collier and Morgan 2008; Gaztambide-Fernández 2009; Jack 2016); and among higher-SES White boys, expect extra lenience from faculty (Ciani, Summers, and Easter 2008). Along with acknowledgment of their “brilliance” (Musto 2019), higher-SES White boys may develop enough confidence to take on leadership roles in school and later, in professional organizations, where they are disproportionately overrepresented among the business and political elite (Paxton, Kunovich, and Hughes 2007; Yang and Aldrich 2014).
Alternatively, Black and Latinx first graders who try to demonstrate their competence, negotiate with authority, or seek attention and accommodation—even if they are high achieving—may learn that the cultural capital that works for White and Asian students may not work for them. Instead, they may be forced to develop unique, creative forms of navigational and adaptive capital (Gorski 2020; Yosso 2005) that mobilize insular community resources to help them persist and circumvent educational barriers (Valenzuela 1999; Whiteside 2021). On the other hand, they may take fewer risks to avoid teacher reprimand (Calarco 2014b), question their capabilities (Steele and Aronson 1998), depress their educational or professional aspirations (Ochoa 2013), or resent, resist, and drop out of school altogether (Giroux 2001).
The process of conditional rewarding I identify supports the call to adopt an intersectional, “color-conscious” framework into cultural capital theory (Carter 2005; Richards 2020; Rollock et al. 2015; Wallace 2017). Society’s institutions (i.e., education, labor market, politics, etc.) are akin to what Bourdieu calls “fields” (Richards 2020), and intersectional scholars recognize that interlocking systems of oppression (classism, racism) pervade society’s institutions (Cho et al. 2013; Collins 2016). Evidence regularly suggests that those who are low-income and racially marginalized are least equitably treated and represented in these institutions (Beal 1970; Rosette et al. 2018). Because institutional outcomes are classed and racialized, it follows that cultural capital determining “success” in these fields is as racialized as it is classed.
Importantly, conditional rewarding applies specifically to how institutional gatekeepers reward standard, dominant, and institutionalized micro-interactional advantages. This differs theoretically from other forms of racial mistreatment in schools, which focuses on prejudices that impact expectations or opportunities (Cartwright 2022; Irizarry 2015; McKown and Weinstein 2008; Ochoa 2013) or unequal responses to student misconduct (real or imagined; Ferguson 2000; Gilliam et al. 2016; Lewis and Diamond 2015; Morris and Perry 2017; Musto 2019). Although, as evidenced by some of the examples in this research, the line between what Lareau (2011) or Calarco (2014b) might call “entitlement” and misconduct can sometimes be blurry (and teachers can come to resent students who attempt to negotiate advantages too much), some micro-interactions result in institutional advantages so often that they have come to be standard forms of dominant cultural capital in schools. Yet if students are conditionally rewarded on these standard, dominant behaviors, it calls into question what dominant cultural capital in school is.
I demonstrate conditional rewarding through an empirical case study of elementary school; however, I suspect that conditional rewarding may be experienced by individuals of marginalized statuses trying to navigate gatekeepers of other institutions, too. For instance, when workers receive a job offer, it is common and expected to negotiate for 10 percent to 15 percent higher salary. Knowing and activating this strategy is important cultural capital that signals a worker’s understanding of organizational/institutional operation and one’s value within it. Women, who have been argued to contribute to a gender wage gap by not negotiating enough for their own salaries, have been told to “lean in” and adopt behavior more commonly performed by male colleagues (Sandberg 2013). However, when women perform this “expected” behavior, they are disproportionately penalized (Amanatullah and Morris 2010; Bowles, Babcock, and Lai 2007). Employers conditionally reward wage negotiation for men. Similar experiences exist for Black men and women interacting with police; despite the expectation that drivers or passersby calmly and politely do as they are told, Black men and women’s calm and polite behaviors are often conditionally punished by police, sometimes to fatal ends (Fagan and Campbell 2020). Observations such as these call into question what constitutes real cultural capital in institutions beyond schools.
Limitations and Future Directions
There are several directions future research, particularly with an intersectional lens, could take to study conditional rewarding in schools and other institutions, based on limitations of this study’s design. First, because Foxcroft and Cumberland are predominantly higher-SES schools with predominantly White, middle-class teachers, teachers likely interacted with students differently than they might have in majority-non-White or lower-SES schools. Teachers at such schools often use more directives and other working-class linguistic and pedagogical styles; they may also encourage students to be more submissive or otherwise in their “place” (Anyon 1981; Golann 2015; Nelson and Shutz 2007). It is therefore possible that students of any background seeking academic rewards could be more stifled there compared to Cumberland or Foxcroft. Additionally, given that the power and status hierarchies that comprise different contexts are not universal and that cultural capital derives value only in its relationship to the field, statuses that may be advantageous in schools like Foxcroft and Cumberland may not be in others. It is therefore important for future research in demographically diverse environments to identify which behaviors constitute institutionalized micro-interactional cultural capital and how those behaviors may be conditionally rewarded across intersections of race and class.
An intersectional perspective recognizes that patriarchy is another key interlocking system of oppression in society (Cho et al. 2013; Collins 2016). Therefore, a productive future direction could look at how these dynamics matter with respect to gender for students and teachers. For instance, all teachers I observed were women. Their deference to White boys may have been shaped by their own gender socialization. Male teachers—especially White men—may not have interacted with White boys as apologetically. Although space constraints prohibit a deeper analysis of these dynamics here, further intersectional research should explore how status characteristics of gatekeepers impact what behaviors are expected and whether/how conditional rewarding unfolds.
Practice Implications
This matters for practice as well. Because cultural capital is often thought of as a “‘how-to’ guide for educational success” (Tichavakunda 2019), it is popular to produce “how-to” workshops, programming, and curricula that provide people the “correct” cultural capital for institutional navigation (for examples, see Cucchiara, Cassar, and Clark 2019; Golann 2015). However, this approach may not translate to upward social mobility because the perspective that inspires it fails to consider how structures, including those that are racialized, create cultural capital in the first place (Cartwright 2022; Tichavakunda 2019). Given that conditional rewarding stems from institutional agents enacting racial ideologies or schemas, it follows that workshops or programming to teach students how to navigate schools in higher-class ways without recognizing how racism makes palatability to Whiteness a central feature of capital (Cartwright 2022) would fall flat.
My point is not that how-to programs for institutional navigation should become more attentive to teaching racialized cultural capital, although experiential knowledge about racism (Delgado and Stefancic 2012) and other forms of cultural wealth (Yosso 2005) from mentors of color might prove useful to students from marginalized racial and ethnic backgrounds. Instead, improvements to student success ought to spring from transformed institutions. It is certainly easier to produce how-to programming than coach complex, bureaucratic institutions to adequately identify and change unequal evaluation norms, standards, or processes; however, coaching students to adopt higher-class norms without coaching institutions to recognize how they conditionally reward those norms will continue to reproduce inequality along multiple status hierarchies. As such, future practice and research should fruitfully explore such efforts toward institutional transformation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the teachers and students of Cumberland and Foxcroft Elementary for inviting me into their communities; Karolyn Tyson, Jessica Calarco, Sarah Ovink, Joanne Golann, Tom O’Brien, Matt Ward, Holly Straut Eppsteiner, Sarah Gaby, Mario Marset Ehrle, members of the Sociology of Education Association, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and feedback on earlier versions of this article; and Jake Argent, Ann Barnett, Isabella Higgins, Olivia Perry, Allie Rella, George Smith, and Molly Williams for assistance transcribing and coding data.
Authors’ Note
This research was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All human subjects gave their informed consent prior to their participation in the research, and adequate steps were taken to protect participants’ confidentiality.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was generously supported by a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF Award No. 1435430)
