Ally Wehrle

As my involvement in this research project comes a close, I keep asking myself “What next?” How can I use my experiences and increased understandings of the tangled nature of privilege and privileging dynamics to take action in the future? What does that look like? What problems and contradictions would future steps incur? These questions are very related to the focus of the readings and discussion for our last class of the semester: dilemmas regarding social justice efforts by privileged individuals. Acknowledging one’s privilege and its relational contingency on others’ oppression is an important step, but when this self-reflexivity is used to position oneself as better than privileged individuals, one may just be shifting the metrics of elite status to look more progressive.

Is self-reflecting then a deflection the problem of privilege away from the self and onto others? I think this can be an unintended side-effect, but not a necessary one. On the other side, for example, while I recognize the importance of the language we use and its symbolic power on social relations, I don’t think that calling community service “civic engagement” really changes anything if the types of activities and that constitute civic engagement have stayed the same. For a word to have an impact, those being asked to change their terminology need to understand why it matters to do so and how word choice affects lived experiences. Then they also need to adopt those changed meanings in how they approach the topic. This example is a little tangential, but I think it serves as an important parallel to my point that changing an individual’s disposition doesn’t always change their actions. The question then is how do we better connect or dually promote thought and action together, specifically in an educational sphere.

Sometimes academic work can feel very limited in the scope of its importance, particularly when its audience is limited to members of specific course taken during a specific semester with a specific group of people. Even though the question of “So what?” is central to writing a research paper and coming up with a rationale, its answer can still feel unreachable on a practical level that is removed from an academic sphere.

And the desire for there to be some way to apply research and “do good” in the world has implications in the reproduction of privilege, as many of our readings this semester have touched upon. This impulse relates back to the sense of “moral responsibility” that elite individuals embody and sub/consciously employ to consecrate their elite status. Even knowing this, and how social justice efforts undertaken by privileged individuals may even serve to fortify instead of dissolve social inequities, doing nothing still feels wrong to me.

Locating the mechanisms that allow for genuine social change—not just a change in the outward presentation of status groups—is hard to do because no action seems sufficient unless it is overthrowing the entire structure. There’s this worry in me that by highlighting large-scale upheaval as being the only means of alleviating social inequities completely than therefore the end goal will feel too unreachable to ever do anything towards. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t work towards a more equitable structure, but that there are concrete things we can do on a local/individual level that can help. Of course, now I’m cycling back to my previous concern that I only think this way because I feel a moral responsibility to use (and thus validate) my privilege.

When I started off writing this post, I meant to think a lot more concretely about types of social justice efforts and their intended and unintended consequences, but I’ve ended up writing an abstract call to be less abstract and more grounded in discussions of social justice. To be cyclical one final time, it’s hard to practice what you preach, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t practice anything at all—nor does it mean that we shouldn’t think critically about how our attempts to enact social justice might be subversive to that very goal.

The next big step of our research project after data analysis and coding was creating an outline for the final paper. This meant we needed to settle on the wording for our two overarching narrative findings (‘Glocal’ Tensions and Elite Western Identification); plan out our introduction, methods, and discussion sections; and find relevant literature to apply to our findings. Because we had just finished reading State Nobility, Bourdieu’s theories regarding how elite schools cultivate and reproduce elite groups felt the easiest (or, at least, the most accessible) to apply. While Olive Grove Academy is still a fairly new school, the administration puts a lot of effort into maintaining an alumni network, and the alum who were interviewed typically noted that Olive Grove helped prepare them for the transition into an elite U.S. college. Looking at these findings through a Bourdieusian framework seemed logical, as the accumulation of social and cultural capital is at the forefront of the institution’s mission and in shaping students’ future successes.

What was more difficult, however, was locating sources that we hadn’t read in class. For me, in-class sources were easier to apply because we had to read and respond to them so I felt more confident about interpreting their content and employing any theory they used. In addition, the amount of relevant sources available through large databases like JSTOR is extensive, so I feel more inclined to keep searching until the perfect study comes up. Even with fairly specific keywords and filters, the amount of results far outnumbers those we read in class, making the stakes of choosing which ones to read feel higher. As a result, I usually end up with a superfluous amount of tabs open with potentially helpful articles up, which I keep open until either my browser crashes or I give in and bookmark them to read later.

One study that I found while on a quest to fill the literature review section of our research outline was about the IB vs. local curriculum in Australia (Doherty, Mu & Shield, 2009). When I found this source I went through stages of being convinced it was ideal for our paper, and then being unsure if a study about the IB curriculum would be completely relevant when the school we’re researching uses the AP curriculum. At the same time, this study was looking at how these two different tracks linked up to whether students pursued global or local tertiary education—a question which is central to our research about Olive Groves’ students imagined global futures and the tensions arising from some of their local ties to Jordan.

Eventually I realized that there is no perfect study that will connect 100% to our research focus because that would mean the study was on the same Jordanian school and had the same research question and findings. If that were the case, then our research wouldn’t really have a point. With this in mind, I am learning to think about how research findings might apply across different regional contexts and to recognize that sometimes it is better to find and read just one or two studies at a time instead of skimming through a whole queue of articles and having them all blur together.

References

Doherty, C., Mu, L., & Shield, P. (2009). Planning Mobile Futures: The Border Artistry of International Baccalaureate Diploma Choosers. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 30(6), 757-771. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40375458

For me, the coding process was initially difficult because I was extremely hesitant to assign codes to segments of texts for fear of inaccurately grouping the data. There’s a power to dissecting other’s words and mining them for useful information. Especially as I started to code along with the rest of my group, I was worried that the codes that I was creating wouldn’t fit the data right, and I wasn’t sure how specific or general the initial round of coding was supposed to be in practice. At first the requirement of creating 30-40 codes seemed like more than enough, but once I really conceptualized the amount of data that those 30-40 codes needed to cover, my opinion definitely changed.

When I started to think of coding data as a type of close reading (a process that I am more familiar with and sometimes even enjoy) instead of a new and complex system of qualitative analysis (which it also is, of course), I was able to get a better sense of what I was doing and then actually code the data I needed to code.

And as I have coded more and more, I have found that coding really helps to visualize the interconnectedness of the data from different students, teachers, and alumni. Through a unified color coding system, trends jump off the page without one needing to draw the connection based only on what they remember having read before.

Coding also can reveal the underlying meaning of the data. For example, my research group is focusing on students’ imagined futures and post-graduation outcomes within the Westernized school model of Olive Grove Academy. So by coding teachers’ perception of student futures and students’/alumni’s perception of their own futures, the contrasts between the three viewpoints and the motivations behind them come to light. I can look at what a teacher’s goals were for shaping global citizens or community engagement and then look at how those goals translate into the life paths students want to take or are taking after graduating from the school.

Over the time I’ve been coding, our class has started to read Pierre Bourdieu’s State Nobility. As a result, I’ve found that the insights I’m able to take away from the data have deepened—or at least become heavily influenced by this influx of theory. When the term “esprit de corps” came up in one of the interviews I was reading, I coincidentally recalled reading that same phrase not even a hour earlier in State Nobility in a section about preparatory schools’ cultivation of an exclusive common culture that serves to shape and maintain elite culture. This very happenstance connection helped me to think deeply about the meaning of the data, and it  also helped me to  understand Bourdieu’s theories better because I could apply them to a context with which I am more familiar than the French system on which Bourdieu grounds his theories.

I am currently in the beginning phases of making sense of and analyzing the research material on Olive Grove Academy in Jordan, having completed an initial read through of the data available. My research experience is limited at best, and I have definitely never been a part of a research project that has spanned over the course of years. When I first received access to the research materials, I was overwhelmed at the scale of data collected. I didn’t know where to start and I found myself jumping between different transcripts trying get a feel for what I was about to dive into. After getting a feel for the scope of the data, I was able to establish a starting point and stick to it, for the most part.

What I realized as I read through the transcripts and documents on Jordan is that working with data that other researchers already collected is a very different experience than working with data that I had personally collected. For example, the context of an observation might be obvious to the researcher who recorded the moment, and when rereading their notes they may easily recall that information, but for someone who has just the written record to work with, filling in the blanks becomes a lot harder.

Because this research material is the main source shaping my understanding of the school, I need to trust that the data available is constructing an accurate and thorough portrait of the school as possible. I don’t have my memory or familiarity with the research to rely on if the information I am reading through becomes confusing or unclear, which means I need to form my understanding of the school around these uncertainties. Occasionally the audio files for interviews cleared up some of the confusion because the audio revealed changes in tone of voice or emphasis that an interviewee might put on certain words which helps inform how they are positioning the meaning of their words.

In addition, I have learned that I need to be critical of the selection of data I have available. This means taking into account how similar and different the positions of students, past or present, are in regards to their social class identification, nationality, gender, and other concerns. From these comparisons, I can get a better sense of how the experiences of these specific students relate to the experiences of other students and whether the range of students interviewed adequately represents the school population.

While analyzing unfamiliar research materials is on one hand more difficult, I think there is also some value in this position. I don’t have any past experiences with the project that could skew my understandings and conclusions about the data. Especially as I first read through the transcripts and notes, this meant that I wasn’t looking for particular findings at the expense of skimming over seemingly unrelated material; instead, I could view the information more holistically. Of course, as I continued my initial read through of the data set for Jordan, common threads and focuses started to construct my expectations for what I would read next. So this maybe means that I’m now officially part of this very overwhelming but very exciting research project.