Cultural capital.

Bourdieu does not specifically address literacy. However, his theoretical ideas have guided research on cultural reproduction for three decades (Bottomore, 1977) and may offer an alternate model for identifying factors that influence the value and limits of school literacy (Luke, 1995b). School literacy assumes that students must learn prescribed reading, writing, and language skills within a specified timeframe, with little attention or valuing of their life experiences (Fagan, 1998).

In 1977, Bourdieu and Passeron addressed the relationship between power and culture in a text¹² about reproduction in society. They used the term, "cultural capital", to describe the values, forms of communication and organizational patterns of the dominant class, claiming that the less privileged low-income class lack these cultural privileges or

the cultural goods transmitted by the different family pedagogic authorities (PA), whose value qua cultural capital varies with the distance between the cultural arbitrary imposed by the dominant PA and the cultural arbitrary inculcated by the family PA within the different groups or classes. (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 30)

In other words, the cultural capital is the difference between the value of the goods passed on as cultural capital by the family (family pedagogic authority) compared to the standard value (cultural arbitrary) assigned by the dominant class (or dominant pedagogic authority). Willms (1997b) offers a more straightforward definition of cultural capital as simply having a "familiarity and knowledge of high culture" (p. 6), while Hourigan (1994) refers to a system of meanings, taste, dispositions, attitudes and norms defined by the dominant class as socially legitimate. In a more recent work by Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), they argue that what they call cultural capital should really be called informational capital. In the embodied form of cultural capital, they include the various dispositions that have been internalized by individuals through their socialization, while in the objectified form, they refer to writings, fine art, scientific instruments, and other objects that require specialized cultural abilities to use.