Howard Prosser

Approaching methodology creatively: problematizing elite schools’ ‘best practice’ through a film about perfection and imperfection

Elite schools around the world aspire to produce perfect students and yet there are always obstacles to this perfection being achieved. In this paper, we suggest that this process of perfectionism and obstruction can best be understood using a methodology that looks to the creative arts, rather than the usual social science orthodoxies. Our focus in this paper is therefore not on methodology as a technique, but rather methodology as a resource for thought. Using Lars Von Trier’s film The Five Obstructions as a point of departure, we suggest that the quest for perfect students, or indeed perfect humans, is one that ignores the inherent obstacles that block pathways to perceived perfection. Our research draws on ethnographic fieldwork from six elite secondary schools in Argentina, Australia, Barbados, England, Hong Kong, and South Africa. We posit a creative methodology permits a coming to terms with the abstractions required when analyzing and interpreting large amounts of data from a multi-sited ethnographic study. This approach makes it feasible to draw some conclusions about a common characteristic – perfectionism – among elite schools around the globe.

Reach for the stars: a constellational approach to ethnographies of elite schools

This paper offers a method for examining elite schools in a global setting by appropriating Theodor Adornos constellational approach. I contend that arranging ideas and themes in a non-deterministic fashion can illuminate the social reality of elite schools. Drawing on my own fieldwork at an elite school in Argentina, I suggest that local and global determinants in the schools past contribute to its current, and relatively recent, elite status. Moreover, all of these factors can be arranged to elucidate the school in a history of global capitalism that coincides with Argentine nationalism, British ‘informal’ imperialism and Presbyterian educationalism.

Elites Go Public? International Baccalaureate’s Decolonising Paradox in Ecuador

This chapter explores the Ecuadorian government’s co-optation of the International Baccalaureate (IB)—a signifier of elite schooling and its internationalisation. Under President Rafael Correa, the government has implemented the IB in over 200 public secondary schools since 2007. This reform is paradoxical. On the one hand, the education system’s rejuvenation is part of an overall “citizens’ revolution” that is closely affiliated with the internationalism of Latin America’s post-neoliberal governments and activists. On the other hand, the government has turned to Ecuador’s elite schools for guidance in implementing an international curriculum with a global reputation for prestige. Drawing on decolonial theory, this tension is shown to reflect the ongoing colonial nature of elite education as well as the possibility for reducing its associated inequalities.

Young people’s perceptions of power and influence as a basis for understanding contemporary citizenship

ABSTRACT Persistent simplistic binary discourses of young people’s citizenship portray them either as civically deficit and disengaged citizens or the creators of new democratic modes and approaches. This paper draws on field research with two groups of young people in Australia to better recognise the nuance of young people’s experiences of citizenship, power and influence. The study investigated the extent to which different groups of young people believe that they have the power to influence society; the ways in which they seek this influence; the current barriers to their influence; and what would enable them to have greater influence. Our analysis in this paper draws on Lukes’ concepts of power [2005. Power: A Radical View. 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan] and Arvanitakis’ framework of citizenship engagement and empowerment [in Arvanitakis, J., and E. Sidoti. 2011. “The Politics of Change: Where to for Young People and Politics.” In Their Own Hands: Can Young People Change Australia?, edited by L. Walsh and R. Black, 11–20. Melbourne: ACER Press], but also builds on an emerging scholarship concerned with the geographic dimensions of young people’s citizenship engagement and action, as well as with the affective, relational and temporal dimensions of this engagement and action. Our findings suggest that power works in different ways to both constrain and liberate young people as citizens – sometimes at the same time. The paper concludes with an argument for the continuing need to understand young people’s lived and located experiences of engagement, power and influence in more nuanced and sophisticated ways. This includes reframing the discussion about young people’s experiences in terms of the nature of their democratic engagement and action rather than simply their citizenship.

Distinguished Spaces: Elite Schools as Cartographers of Privilege

In this chapter Kenway and Prosser examine the social aesthetics of two elite schools in the Global South. Focusing on the role of space within the creation of social aesthetics, they draw on Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘spatial triad’, particularly ‘spatial practices’, to describe the historical and social processes taking place inside and outside the school gates. This relationship between the school and its wider social context is crucial since an elite space is defined by those places beyond it. In South Africa and Argentina, elite schools signal the flavor of their preferred clientele through their location in expensive, expansive, fastidiously groomed, quiet suburbs. These are well away from the cramped and noisy quarters of the poor where no space can be wasted and which are often home to the schools’ manual workers. Largely unnoticed, their long days are devoted to indulging the senses of rich: cooking, cleaning, primping the grounds. Such social divisions—spatial and otherwise—remain in spite of the democratic transformations and social upheavals that have altered these nations in the past few decades. As such, elite schools have had to shift their character and try to become open to Others. But this is easier said than done. Some new students enter the school from previously abject groups; others are merely allowed in as part of open days for family workers. Such noble gestures are welcomed but often accentuate an exclusive social aesthetics experience by a select few.

Introduction: Local Classes, Global Influences—Considerations on the Social Aesthetics of Elite Schools

Drawing on MacDougall’s notion of social aesthetics, the Introduction explores the sensory dimensions of privilege through a global ethnography of elite schools. Within these elite schools, all of which are based on the British public school model, there is a relationship between their ‘complex sensory and aesthetic environments’ and the construction of privilege within and beyond the school gates. While ethnography has been a popular methodology within education research, the Introduction shows how another qualitative approach is developed by studying the social aesthetics of privilege through the extensive use of images. Understanding the importance of the visual to ethnography, the social aesthetics of these elite schools are captured through the inclusion of a series of visual essays that complement the written accounts of the aesthetics of privilege. The Introduction also discusses the inclusion of a series of vignettes that further examine the sensory dimension of these aesthetics: touch, taste—though metaphorically understood— sight and sound. These varying formats illustrate the aesthetic nature of social relations and the various ways in which class permeates the senses.

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employ care, or emotion work, which serves them well within the occupation. However, as with nursing and social work, it continues the perceived naturalisation of these characteristics as feminine. This is part of implicit justification for the under-valuing of these occupations as labour, and for under-valuing the technical aspects of the work. Exotic dancers and hairdressers exercise autonomy and are able to trade on their female and feminine capital, but within constraints that also limit their prospects for higher pay, occupational mobility, and social status. Huppatz manages to contribute to three research fields – gender, class, and occupation – by successfully linking them through the symbolic. Her analysis showcases the flexibility and capacity of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework to consider intersecting identities and inequalities, beyond his primary focus on class. Against longstanding critiques of Bourdieu as simply a theorist of social reproduction, recent scholarship convincingly argues for Bourdieu’s usefulness in understanding class mobility. Gender Capital at Work is a welcome addition to research that uses Bourdieu to analyse social mobility as well as stasis, as it is a study of careers, of trajectories, involving spatial and social mobility as well as immobility. Huppatz’s empirical focus on the way people inhabit workplaces and spaces, the occupation-based practices of gender and class, allows us to see what happens in the course of people’s mobility, the interstices, beyond the comparison of the point A where someone starts and B where they end up. Her analysis is enriched by comparing four occupations. This study opens new possibilities for, and implicitly calls for, consideration of how gender and class intersect in every occupation, while convincingly offering methods for doing so. Work, we know, is at the heart of class. Gender Capital at Work prompts and reminds us that gender, too, is at the heart of class.

Provoking elite schools’ defences: an antistrophon

ABSTRACT Elite schools, both private and public, consistently top metrics of success around the world. This article mobilises an antistrophon – turning an argument against itself – to expose elite schools’ rhetorical defences. As part of this device, four provocations are offered – knowledge, excellence, merit, values – that coincide with elite schools’ identity. These provocations are explored in light of a growing global corpus of scholarship on elite schools that consistently reveals how they reinforce their status and justify social inequality. Implicit to the argument is the idea that non-elite schools and school systems imitate such practices. It concludes by suggesting elite schools’ shrewdness in obscuring their unjust exclusivity must be continually illuminated, scrutinised, and challenged if social inequality is to be combatted.

Vignette: The Touch of Class

Can we feel class with our hands, our feet, our entire body? Is it soft or hard? How does privilege become apparent in things we touch, the way we touch them, or our reason for doing so?