Ben Theyerl

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.

Here is an odd way to start off a blog post, I’m going to ask you to read the following list of words and identify what they have in common—brunch, smog, glocal.  If you identified that they’re all examples of a portmanteau I commend you for being a force to reckoned with in English classes.  Nevertheless, I think a formal definition is in order. A portmanteau is two words made into one.  Breakfast and lunch equals “brunch”, “smoke” and “fog” equals smog, and global and local equals glocal.  All three of these portmanteaus are neologisms, words that are slowly becoming part of our everyday parlance.  They’ve all only recently taken hold in our language, as a graph of word use over time shows. Their incorporation into language is a messy process sometimes, because, well, sometimes portmanteaus just sound funny.  

In fact, my blog today has its impetus in a moment in class where we were sharing a narrative theme of our research and just what happend.  Our group shared that we’ve found that students, teachers, and administrators at Olive Grove in Jordan exhibit tensions between their want to excel in a globalized world and their want to improve their immediate local Jordanian context.  Adam’s offered the word “glocal” as a word that encapsulated this finding, and its mention drew a laugh from the entire class, including me. I shrugged the word off. I am doing formal academic research, I thought, not forming words in the same way that we name celebrity couples (e.g. Billary, Bradgelina).  When Adam presented the the Oxford Dictionaries definition of glocal (see below) and I looked back over our narrative theme, however, I was shocked to find that the term basically condensed our long, rambling, explanation of our findings into a single, potable word; glocal.

This anecdote provides two lessons.  One is to always keep an open-mind when doing research.  The other lesson, the one that is worth elaborating on, concerns the actual insight that the word glocal provides to my group’s research on Olive Grove in Jordan.   Language is a product of the social world it tries to describe. A close look at the use of the word “glocal” over time reveals that the rising usage of the word coincides with the recognition of the phenomena of globalization in the last half of the 20th century.  What the portmanteau “glocal” does is combine globalization and the local, two seemingly contradictory ideas, in order to show that social groups have had to confront the tension between the two. Glocal is a new type of relationship to the world, a social compromise made out of the necessities of the world in the age of globalization which necessitates a new word.

Which is why I feel justified in using it in our research concerning Olive Grove in Jordan.  In searching through our completed coding, “Glocal” is second only to the code “Western Influence”  in the number of times it is found in our data. This should come as no surprise when one of the most essential and interesting facts about the school is understood, that it is an attempt to import an elite New England boarding school into a Middle Eastern context.  Olive Grove is not defined by its immediate cultural surroundings but also is seen as a site for producing the future upper-classes of those same immediate surroundings, being founded and sponsored by the political powers of Jordan. The students, teachers, and administrators all seem to question what this means for their institution’s identity.  One explicit example of this comes from a administrator, who asks “Is Olive Grove Academy an international school in a Jordanian context or a Jordanian school with an international focus?”  This institutional identity question is especially pressing because of the school’s youth, only having been founded in 2007.  To what extent the school serves students locally, and what extent the school serves them as cosmopolitan global citizens is a balance that hasn’t been decided yet.  Olive Grove is in a flux of glocal tensions.

And how these tensions will be settled is heavily related to the outcomes of its alumni, which our research is addressing.  In his study on how elite schools founded in colonial India are adapting their schools to maintain eliteness in a postcolonial age, Fazal Rizvi (2014) identified that the outcomes of former students at an elite school are important in creating the social imaginary, the supposed shared set of practices, laws, and dispositions of a school.  Since Olive Grove is so young, a body of evidence concerning student outcomes is still relatively limited. As one Olive Grove teacher states, “So it would be interesting to see when we have a lot more data on alums about where are they, but I would like to think that we’re doing well.”  The speculative ideas about what the outcomes will say about Olive Grove’s institutional identity is interesting nevertheless because those part of the school seems to embrace the compromise of glocalization, rather than favoring one part of the portmanteaus components.  The same teacher speculates:

“One of the values that also keeps driving me personally to be at Olive Grove and give as much of my life here. But I think that as a school, we want to think that we’re having students who are graduating from here, having the best experiences in the world and that they will come back because they enjoyed it.”

The ideal relationship for the elite school to the world formulated in here is one that doesn’t try and solve glocal tensions but instead embraces the concept of glocal itself, promoting an institution in which students are prepared to partake in positions of leadership on a global scale which will shape their local context for the better.  

Olive Grove is a new school seeking a new type of relationship to the world defined by a new word, glocal.  As a researcher in the position of evaluating this phenomenon, it seems appropriate that I would utilize the mixing of words to describe a mixture of social practices forming a new type of institutional identity.  I can’t laugh at the glocal as I see its relevance and accuracy in the data I am analyzing. The portmanteau describes something new, made out of the conflict of the old. Breakfast or lunch? Brunch. Global or local? Glocal.

References:

Rizvi, F. (2014). Old Elite Schools, History and the Construction of a New Imaginary.

Globalisation, Societies, And Education, 12(2), 290-308.

I’m a creature of habit.  We all are. Routines, routines, routines.  Every morning I wake up, shower, brush my teeth, comb my hair, and set out for breakfast.  Every week I go to my classes at the same time, work my jobs at the same time, and relax at the same time. We live in a world of routines, of patterns.   And more than just governing our time in life, they govern our thoughts as well. The thought pattern.

I’m writing this blog to explore what happens when one of these thought patterns is disrupted.  I was in elementary school when I first learned about the “scientific method.” Observe, form a question, form a hypothesis, collect data, analyze the data, draw conclusions.  In that order. Later in my educational career, I’d learn that this thought pattern was a constituent member of a larger thought pattern, Empiricism, which wasn’t limited solely to the natural sciences.  Observe, induct to form a hypothesis, deduct through data collection, analyze, and draw conclusions, in that order, was a method of thought that could be applied to the study of human behavior and interaction as well.  This variety of Empiricism is what sociological research relies on. As a researcher of an elite school in Jordan then, I am engaging in the thought pattern of Empiricism.

But something wasn’t right when I started this research.  The pattern was off. I had the data already in front of me.  I’d skipped the observation and formulation of a hypothesis, and been asked to backtrack in the pattern of the empirical method in order to compensate. The instructions were to look at the data, then come up with a question for research, then go back to the data. This is where we are in the project now, going back to the qualitative data. We are doing this to identify how the Westernized curriculum at Olive Grove Academy in Jordan shapes student outcomes. In the process, I’ve had to reflect on the way in which our method has informed our view of the data. The big question is simply, are we making the data fit to what we thought we saw in it initially? Am I begging the question?

This anxiety is a product of not having been the researchers gathering the data.  As a consequence of the path we’ve taken in our research, I’ve been unable to directly pose the research question we formulated to our research subjects.  The closest I can come is relying on cues in the data. For instance, the question “What are your plans for after senior year, after graduating?” asked of a student bears a direct relationship to that students imagined future.  The problem of fitting data to a narrative is not an issue in cases like this, where the question asked and the response generated is almost synonymous with our research question. For example, I can code the response of the interviewee in this case, “mostly leaning toward liberal art schools,” as “Type of higher education.”  

Where the problem of retrofitting data comes into play is in analyzing the wide range of data that doesn’t have an easily identifiable correlation to our research question, but may hold important sociological themes.  I’ll take the Bourdieusian concept of capital as an example. In that it helps to identify what social groups and institutions a person are accepted into, it bears an outweighed relation to our research on where students end up going after their time at an elite preparatory school.  However, where student relationships to their cultural, economic, and social capital are apparent in the data on Olive Grove is oftentimes isolated from the data directly dealing with our research question. For example, in a response from an interviewee such as “Yeah I mean we can afford like two cars, but they can’t be two supercars or like we don’t have you know… yeah,” the amount of economic capital a student has is evident, but it bears no surface-level relationship with their imagined future.  Capital theory suggests, however, that the economic capital a student possesses has everything with where a student imagines their future, and so when I code I feel the need to try and make this perceived connection clear. Because of this bias, my code for this response inevitably works towards justifying my own analysis. I must be dynamic in my analysis, in order to determine where actual sociological phenomena is an explanation of what is illustrated in the data, and where I am attempting to explain unrelated data by borrowing sweeping concepts like Bourdieu’s capital.

I think the resolution for this issue is found in the disruption of the thought pattern that caused it.  Because we have not taken the traditional route through the empirical method, our approach must be a dynamic path.  Instead of collecting data based on a question in order to analyze it, I must use a preliminary analysis to gauge the usefulness of the data that we have been given based on its relevance to our hypothesis.  For this research project, I’m placing faith in the strength of the parts of the empirical method, not the path that those parts are ascribed to take. Still a thought pattern, still a routine, but in a different order.  For this project, I’m combing my hair before I brush my teeth, but the routine still will end with a finished product that, hopefully, is ready to take on the world (or at least breakfast in the dining hall).