Working-Class Students in Higher Education: Playing on an Uneven Field‪.‬

INTRODUCTION According to James Berlin, who draws on Kinneavy's communication triangle (Kinneavy 1971), we constitute reality through language. "Language does not correspond to the 'real world.' It creates the 'real world' by organizing it," he says, "by determining what will be perceived and not perceived, by indicating what has meaning and what is meaningless" (Berlin 1997, 243-44). We all use language as a sort of lens through which we constitute our worlds or realties. The linguistic structures we use determine how and what we perceive and how we "add-up" our perceptions of reality. We might say, to borrow a way of speaking from Freire, that we narrate a story of our perceived worlds in language, thereby "creating" individual reality. Language itself, however, does not come to us as a neutral lens, for we name our realities in collaboration with our cohorts, those with whom we converse about our perceptions of reality, which again are never static. Thus, our languages, arising in our particular social systems with the ir underlying ideologies, form the basis for our constitutions of reality.