Blogging on the Blog: Methodological Reflection on Elites Studying Elites
In my final blog post of this semester and my current involvement with this project, I want to reflect on the reflection. I’m writing this blog on writing this blog. Meta. But I assure you, I’m not trying to be ostentatious in this reflection. I am at an elite school. I am analyzing elite schooling. My research has been informed by my everyday experience at Colby, and in return I have learned much about Colby as an institution and me as a person. There’s a unique level of utility to our research in this, but also a unique set of challenges. I have been forced to ask myself what biases I bring to my research subject, how I fit the narrative of research into my own narrative of what elite schooling should be like, and what I am doing at an elite school engaging in research on elite schooling. It has been challenging, disorienting, and above all else a learning experience.
Which appears to mean something is working. Doing research on the sociology of elite schools means reviewing literature that is sometimes as concerned with its findings as it is with its methodology. One unique aspect of this project is reading these reflections on methodology about the very project I am working on. Specifically, professor Howard, or as he’s known in the journals, “(Howard 20..)”, reflects on whether involving elite students in research on elite schools is an effective way to reconsider assumptions about privilege that keep it hidden, essentially by intentionally shining a light on them (Howard and Kenway, 2015; Howard, 2018). Engaging this question raises another challenge of this research, that the questions about the methodological challenges about our project are raised in enacting them. While Howard’s stated stance on the methodological question is that it allows for elite students to engage in conversations that complicate their understandings of social class (2018), discussions in class have revealed that this stance bears a lot of nuance and complication that is unable to be distilled onto a page.
The researchers who have utilized the method of engaging elites in the study of elites have their thoughts on the methodology clearly represented in the publication that bears their research. The elite students who are studied gain a voice through the analysis of the data they provide. The elite students engaged in this kind of research, however, are not provided a ready platform to express their individual (as opposed to the collective thoughts generated in conjunction with a lead researcher) reflections on their methodology.
That is where this blog comes in. Throughout the semester this has acted as a space for the question of methodology to be raised and grappled with. As a researcher, it has been an extremely valuable part of our project, not to be separated from the analysis of our subject. I think its primary utility in this is that it has allowed me to explore parts of doing this research that I would otherwise tackle only in my mind. Looking back through my previous blogs, I can see the progression not only of the research, but the way I’ve thought about the research throughout the term. When I look back to my first post exploring the tension I felt studying an elite school in a geographic context separate from mine, I am able to see that I am experiencing some of the same tensions I explore in my third post, where I point to the students in our research reconciling their own concerns about the global and local in a new way, the “glocal.” I am able to understand the commonality between the subject of my study and myself, and how our place in an elite institution of learning shapes our relation to the world. From this, I am able to extrapolate the complexities of privilege, studying elites who are coming to terms we these concepts through our research. The blog is an integral tool for research, a way to articulate findings in the process, rather than observing the finished product. In articulating these, it has been my experience that I am able to better understand myself within the field of power I am researching.
What I have learned from studying elites at an elite institution then, is to be deliberate. Deliberately question and re-question every line of your questioning as a researcher. Ask why you are asking how “Westernized Curriculum Effects Imagined Student Futures at Olive Grove Academy in Jordan,” why you are taking the steps you are taking, and, most importantly to the methodology, what knowledge you do and do not bring to the your job as a researcher. Through interaction with other elites, we are able to hold a mirror to ourselves and ask whether we, or our institution, are in their too. Blog on.
References:
Howard, A. (2018). Making it Political: Working Towards Transformation in the Study of
Internationalism in Elite Education. Elite Education and Internationalism, 331-345.
Howard, A., & Kenway, J. (2015). Canvassing Conversations: Obstinate issues in studies of
elites and elite education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.