Catching Up
Over the course of the last couple weeks, we’ve made a lot of progress on our project. When we began coding, we had a rough idea of what we wanted to focus on in our paper from our primary readings, but were still unsure which evidence we would pull from either the interviews or outside sources to form the basis for our discussion. Through finishing coding and moving into the outline phase of our project, we encountered fewer problems than I had expected in translating the data and the list of codes we had created into two themes. The themes we surfaced from our readings of data on the Croft School highlighted the differing definitions of community service presented by students and faculty in their interviews and the lack of personal connection on behalf of the students with respect to their initiatives in finding community service opportunities independently.
Surprisingly enough, the hardest part of this project in the last month was finding sources that fit with our data. Specifically, my task was to research the role of community service in elite schools, a topic about which I figured there would be a reasonable amount of literature given how prominent these practices are in elite schools. That said, when I began researching a couple weeks ago, I found myself struggling to find anything. I first searched databases, and although there were a few articles that touched on the topic, nothing stood out, so I decided to take a different approach and look at the mission statements of some of the elite schools that are a part of this study. There I found what I was looking for: a strong emphasis on community service as one of the most important, if not the most important, values on which the schools pride themselves. Additionally, I found a source which outlined some of the benefits of community service that schools give as reasons for this emphasis on service. These are social development, personal and moral development, vocational development, academic achievement, and political development (Raskoff and Sundeen, 78-80).
That said, I have found it hard to match up these reasons with specific data points. Although it seems that all we need is there, much of what we’ve talked about in class and read about has consisted mostly of theory (especially Bourdieu’s ideas in The State Nobility). It has been more difficult than I had anticipated to connect this theory, which is mostly abstract (although we have read a few studies), to the data. With all of this in mind, though, I think we are headed in the right direction, and I’m excited to see the final product.
https://goo.gl/images/rJTpyV
Raskoff, Sally A. and Sundeen, Richard A. “Community Service Programs in High Schools.” Duke Law, 2000. 78-80.