Demanding Relations: Sociological Imagination, Education, the Usefulness of Concepts and the World Around Us

Abstract

The present paper draws on fostering sociological imagination (Wright Mills, 2000) and contemporary possibilities in teaching and learning sociological concepts in relation to education. The authors present a method of reading films as a didactic tool in connection to selected sociological texts in order to better understand theory and praxis in the educational field and beyond. The film Billy Elliot was chosen as a didactic tool for presenting how Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and forms of capital, as well as Bernstein’s conceptualisations of language codes, can be used in the pedagogical process. Emphasis is placed on education and the ways in which it contributes to shifting or reproducing social inequalities, class inequalities and gender.

Keywords

• habitus
• forms of capital
• language
• codes
• teaching and learning
• sociology