Culture and Education: The Narrative Reconstruction from “Cultural Capital” to “Cultural Resources”

Abstract

Educational equity is one of the crucial issues of educational development and one of the core theses of sociology of education. For now, cultural capital theory is still the most prevailing narrative, which became an obstacle to exploring the problem "how to be more equitable". It’s necessary to reflect on the limitations of cultural capital narrative and to discover a new type of research narrative. This paper firstly deconstructs the cultural capital narrative through theoretical reflection and practical discussion, and then demonstrate the cultural resource narrative’s manifestation and transcendence. Based on the above viewpoints, we propose that it’s critical for the sociology of education to realize narrative reconstruction—from “cultural capital narrative” to “cultural resource narrative”, which could be beneficial to the practice of “high quality education equity”.