Dinner table social construction

This year I had a kōrero with my students about how we are socially constructed within our family environments, potentially providing us benefits - or barriers - in our chosen fields. Social conditioning can be defined as "the process by which people of a certain society are trained to think, believe, feel, want, and react in a way that is approved by the society or the groups within it. There are many causes, dimensions, beliefs, programming, and barriers that are interwoven within social conditioning" (Maxwell, 2022, p. 8), while social construction is about the knowledge we create "via communication and interactions with others [… in our community]. Through socialization, interaction, and communication (particularly language), [we] collectively construct the realities in which [we] live” (Sanner et al., 2020, p. 2).

An example to illustrate my point was for us to consider migrants who arrive in Aotearoa New Zealand from places which have superb public transport infrastructure: those migrants may not may not have driven in their origin nations nor have a family driving culture. They had no need to. Whereas we Kiwis have to drive. We are a long, thin country, 29 times smaller than Australia, with the population the size of Sydney. To get places, we need a drivers licence, because running comprehensive public transport like Singapore or London would tax us out of existence.

We Kiwis learn to drive at the dinner table, in the stories we tell, in movies we see, in watching other drivers, and as we travel in vehicles with our whānau. Most New Zealanders can ride a bike, horse, skateboard or scooter long before we get a drivers licence. Rural children also learn to drive tractors, quad bikes, and the farm ute before they get near any formal driver training. Driving is rehearsed in front of us in a myriad of ways. And that immersion in a driving culture gives us a head start over migrants arriving here from a non-driving culture.

So I was very interested to read a blog post from Professor Inger Mewburn from ANU, the Thesis Whisperer, in the same week that I had that chat with my students about social construction (2025):

"During my own PhD about how hand gestures work in architecture classrooms, I threw away a lot of my video data. I also couldn't film everything, so I had to make on the fly decisions about when to start and stop the camera. (In my defense, it was 2007 and disc space was expensive). I only filmed 'good' interactions, where the gesture was clearly participating in creating shared understanding.

"Later I found out that I had unwittingly only filmed, or kept footage of, the top performing students. I asked some of these students about their family background: of course, they had architects as parents. My theory is they learned to 'talk architecture' (which includes ways of gesturing 'properly') at the kitchen table.

"These people had an invisible advantage, one that possibly would last all the way through their career" (Thesis Whisperer, 2025).

Pretty much exactly what I had been explaining to my students: we are given a professional leg-up in our family environments (Maxwell, 2022). while this was only a partial illustrator of what Inger was talking about (she was talking about finding what we are looking for in research; rather than what we are blind to - but more about that another time).

Fascinating how sometimes one thing reinforces another. 

Sam

References:

Maxwell, C. D. (Ed.). (2022). Shatter the System: Equity Leadership and Social Justice Advocacy in Education. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Sanner, C., Ganong, L., & Coleman, M. (2021). Families are socially constructed: Pragmatic implications for researchers. Journal of Family Issues, 42(2), 422-444. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X20905334

Thesis Whisperer. (2025 , May 1). The Power of No: Learning to Refuse in Difficult Times. https://thesiswhisperer.com/2025/05/01/the-power-of-no-learning-to-refuse-in-difficult-times/