Buber's Discourse

Buber’s writings on peoples’ relationships to one another and to God greatly affected Freire’s conceptions of humanization, dialogue, and the teacher-student relationship. Buber’s philosophy is prescient of the dialogical and spiritual nature of Freirean conscientization in which authentic dialogical experiences allow students to acquire a sense of the relatedness between self and others. For Buber, dialogical relations reside in the experience and acknowledgment of an “other” by which the self is defined through inclusion of the other in the self (125). Buber’s I can be the individual as part of the connected whole, or the I as the isolated autonomous individual. He makes it clear that the isolated, non-dialectical individual owns the status …show more content…
Fairclough (1992) points out that “Discourses do not just reflect or represent social entities and relations, they construct or ‘constitute’ them; different discourses constitute key entities . . . in different ways, and position people in different ways as social subjects” (3-4). Discourses are inherent in institutions, and the community college is an institution that creates its own narratives of education as the academic literacies that students encounter and are expected to acquire as a measure of success, an expectation that highlights the connection between knowledge and power (Foucault 1977, Gee 1996, Usher and Edwards …show more content…
According to Coleman, “Social capital is defined by its function. Like other forms of capital, social capital is productive, making possible the achievement of certain ends that in its absence would not be possible. Unlike other forms of capital, social capital inheres in the structure of relations between actors and among actors” (S98). Social capital also refers to the networks of people who can provide other forms of capital, including economic and cultural capital (Stanton-Salazar 2001). The difficulties of acquiring social capital in the academic setting is depicted by Victor Villanueva in Bootstraps, a descriptive autobiographical account of his struggle through the academic gauntlet, and the persistent sense of “other” that lingered even after he earned his PhD Closely related to the concept of social capital is cultural capital. As conceived by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (1990), cultural capital is the power an individual or social/ethnic group accumulates through its ability to impose an arbitrary set of values upon other individuals within the group, or on other groups