Cultural capital, standardised testing and East Asian education: The transposition of disposition of Taiwanese elite students

Abstract

Cultural capital has been an essential concept for educational stratification research. While several studies suggest that in East Asian educational contexts, cultural capital may exhibit less emphasis on aesthetics, there remains a need for in-depth exploration of such orientation. To fill this gap, this article examines non-aesthetic subspecies of cultural capital by exploring how standardised testing, a predominant educational institution in East Asia, shapes a distinct embodied cultural capital – a pragmatic learning disposition. We examine two cases where Taiwanese academically elite high school students adapt their standardised testing-driven dispositions to distinct contexts: a different activity domain and an alternative educational field. The first explores how elite students transpose the disposition shaped by standardised testing to their participation in rock music activities. Our research reveals that their academic learning experiences fostered a disposition for honing precise exam skills, which influenced the trajectory of their musical taste development, along with the accumulation of technical capital. The second case involves elite students experienced in open-ended mathematics competitions, who later enrol in French preparatory classes for admission to French grandes écoles. These students have difficulty shedding their pragmatic disposition, which is deeply rooted in standardised testing, but hardly suits the French preparatory class. Disposition transposition and its hysteresis effect across contexts can serve as a useful methodological tool for cultural capital studies, enabling an exploration of emerging technical subspecies of cultural capital and the associated pragmatic dispositions, thereby shedding light on the diverse relationships among students’ subspecies of embodied cultural capital.