Small Group Questions to Accompany Privilege Exercise

Small Group Questions to Accompany Privilege Exercise

Personal Assessment (share what you’re comfortable with!)

1)  Was your score high or low? Was it close to zero? (For context, scores may range from 0 to 24.) Were you surprised about your score, or is it where you expected to be?

2)  If you were surprised, did you end higher or lower than you expected? What do you think accounts for the difference between your expectations and the actual outcome?

If you were not surprised, what did you take into account or recognize beforehand that helped you successfully estimate your ending position?

3)  Did any part of this exercise make you uncomfortable or did you find any part of it to be difficult? Be specific.

Forms of Capital (uh-oh, theory…)

4)  You might notice that some questions in the activity get directly at the amount of money your family had or did not have. Other questions get at your social network, others at your cultural experiences. These are different forms of capital (we’ve included short definitions of each below). Take a moment to reread the questions in the exercise and review your answers. Which types of capital were you strong in? Lacking in?

5)  If we make these distinctions between social, cultural, and economic capital, what does that say about social class as a privilege or deficit?

Advising (because we’re a group of advisors and we can’t just talk about ourselves all day)

6)  When we re-gather as a large group, we’ll shift the focus of our conversation from the personal to the professional. So, to begin the transition: as an advisor, how does your own understanding of and situation within “social class” shape your assumptions when a student walks into your office?

What happens when those assumptions prove correct? (e.g. stereotype reinforcement, ease of empathy) What happens when they prove incorrect? (e.g. a change in thinking, resistance, confusion)

Pierre Bourdieu, The Forms of Capital (1986) (summaries pulled from Wikipedia)

·  Economic capital: command over economic resources (cash, assets).

·  Social capital: resources based on group membership, relationships, networks of influence and support. Bourdieu defines social capital as "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition."

·  Cultural capital: forms of knowledge, skills, education, and advantages that a person has, which give them a higher status in society. Parents provide their children with cultural capital by transmitting the attitudes and knowledge needed to succeed in the current educational system.