Bringing underprivileged middle-school students to the opera: cultural mobility or cultural compliance?

Philippe Coulangeon & Denis Fougère

British Journal of Sociology of Education

First published: 12 August 2022 - https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2022.2109593

This article assesses the impact of a two-year long project-based learning program conducted by the National Opera of Paris in a large number of middle schools located in underprivileged areas, aiming at preventing school dropout and tackling educational inequalities by providing disadvantaged students with the opportunity to discover the world of opera. This program is not exclusively concerned with democratizing access to the opera. Rather, it focuses on improving students’ self-confidence, motivation and school involvement.

Taking a counterfactual statistical approach (propensity score matching), we measure the impact of participation in the program on final exam and continuous assessment grades.
The analysis displays mixed results: a significant and positive impact for the students who participate in the program for its whole duration (two years), at least for continuous assessment scores, but a negative impact for those who leave the program after only one year.

The contrast between the effects of full and partial participation in the program suggests that these may be primarily due to a selection effect in favor of the most culturally and socially compliant students, in line with Bourdieu’s and Passeron’s reproduction theory rather than a mobility effect resulting from the transfer of cultural capital to disadvantaged students.

Failure at school has often been attributed to the cultural gap that may exist between the resources students inherit from their families and school culture. In this paper, we focus on two strategies aimed at reducing this cultural gap: arts and culture education, and project-based learning. Arts education includes all didactic action directed towards the dissemination of artistic and cultural knowledge. Project-based learning refers to a didactic approach based on interdisciplinary and collaborative educational activities. Advocates of this approach assume that it has a propensity to reduce the distance between students with working-class backgrounds and the school environment, as it involves real, practical objects. Project-based learning may interact with arts education to the extent that this pedagogical orientation often entails the production of artifacts such as creative writing, visual art, drawings, videos, photography, and on-stage performances.

In order to assess the impact of the National Opera of Paris' program on participating students’ educational achievements, we interpret the underlying mechanism of this impact in relation with the cultural capital theory. We show that the socially redistributive impact of the program is questionable depending on whether the program help students from disadvantaged background to compensate for their lack of cultural resources or favor their ability to conform to the middle-class cultural norms and repertoires.

We start this paper by linking the issues raised by the evaluation of the impact of this program with the broader question of the role of cultural capital in educational inequalities. Second, we review the existing literature on arts education and project-based learning. We then describe in more detail the program implemented at the National Opera of Paris since 1991. We finally present our data, our methods, our hypotheses and our results, followed by a discussion on their implications and significance.