Affect in Learning Relationships: Unravelling the Taste for Learning Among Young Students at School

Sociology of education has emphasized the significance of school in the construction of young people's subjectivities, educational aspirations and life trajectories (Archer et al., 2010; Reay, 2010; Tarabini, 2023). Indeed, the literature suggests that young people’s relationship with learning and school is not neutral in terms of their social and cultural profile (Tarabini, 2021). Hence, a better understanding of this learner-learning relationship remains imperative to unravel processes of social (re)production, especially in today's meritocratic, individualistic and neoliberal society.

This paper focuses on Bourdieu's (1987) notion of taste as a mediating factor to understand the unequal emotional relationship that young people develop with learning at school. Specifically, it analyses how taste for learning at school is constructed across different social and school contexts. As taste is still linked to the ideology of 'natural gifts (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), uncovering the social mechanisms involved in its construction remains an important sociological task.

In this sense, taste is understood as a manifestation of the most personal and emotional experience of young people's relationship with learning. Placing taste as a central element opens up the black box of this concept and brings the affective dimension of learning processes to the centre of analysis. Besides, taste is conceived as a mechanism that allows us to understand the processes of classification and symbolic distinction that place individuals in a hierarchy within the school field (Bourdieu, 1987; Skeggs, 2004).

This paper presents findings from 12 semi-structured interviews with young people from two school contexts with different social and cultural profiles. In doing so, it delves into the emotional experiences of these young people and shows how the (dis)taste for learning varies greatly between school and cultural settings. It also explores how the taste for learning interacts and relates to the construction of young people's identities as learners.