Carrie Xu

As the course is approaching the end, I think my view of this world has changed so much compared to that prior to this semester. Reading the literature we had for elite schools centered around internationalism and the reproduction of social class, I have embodied a different way of perceiving my education and been wondering if those students interviewed in our project ever had a chance to do so.

In my first blog entry, I mentioned that my high school experience shared some similar characteristics with KIS and TES. This experience as an insider in a parallel field made it much easier for me to read the KIS interviews and construct a virtual campus in my head. There was a moment that I felt as a member in that school and had a sketch of the social scenes students described. The consequences were double-edged. On one side, the process of filtering messages and drafting codes was smoothly done. On the other side, I couldn’t see “what was wrong” in such a system. Especially during classes when we criticize elite class schooling and the focus on global citizenship, I sometimes felt uncomfortable because my defensive mechanism functioned to prevent me from admitting that the field I belonged to was problematic in many ways. There were multiple facets that made me uncomfortable:

1. Realizing that my position in that high school and here in Colby College might have very little to do with my merits. How much does my privilege influence my life in the ways that I don’t notice?
2. The concepts like global citizenship and cosmopolitanism my high school promoted, are the products of westernization while I have been proud of my internationalism identity for a long time.
3. Recognizing means my high school uses to make themselves distinguishable and become more elite but we usually don’t admit it.

And the list goes on…

Source: https://hackernoon.com/the-network-effects-of-privilege-ba254d5385c0

Here I am, reading the quotes again to write down narrative findings. Following their lives does not feel the same anymore. I can’t help questioning if they have noticed their privileges and if they would have similar doubts as I do when having the chance to decode their schooling experience. Would they be more grateful to the economic, cultural and social capitals their families own?

For sure things we discussed in our senior seminar also influenced my thoughts in rethinking this project and thinking about improvements in conducting researches in elite schools. How can we integrate research on elites to a participatory action research project to awaken young people? Why was the reflection students are already tired of not powerful enough to urge them to think about their privilege? Does this research have any impacts on the interviewees’ life and on acknowledging their privilege? To what extent is our class a PAR on privilege if I’m not the only one who has deconstructed my outlooks of elite schooling? While studying schools like KIS, do we want to build any following action plans to the flawed elite school system? Writing the final research paper was a true struggle, but it was even more challenging to wrap my head around questions that I can’t answer.

No matter whether it was reading Bourdieu’s The State Nobility, coding data that were not collected by us or trying to understand elite schools across the world in the reading, I think there were always some of us experiencing confusion during the class. And no doubt I was like that too. It feels like walking in the dark and trying to find the exit of this darkness.

Fortunately, after accumulating background knowledge and gradually constructing different concepts in my mind, I started to have the ability to understand elite from the theoretical perspective. Although we read some articles from other researchers using Bourdieu’s concepts of field, cultural capital and habitus to help us get used to them, I had difficulty understanding the idea in a broader context. However, after I finished The State Nobility, I gained confidence in applying Bourdieu’s unique concept to cases we discussed in the class because the process of learning where he derived his theories from is enabling me to build a solid foundation of my understanding. I felt it was much easier to read the following articles when they reference Bourdieu’s work.

Resolving one problem does not mean that I have no more new obstacles. I had a tough time making sense of the structure of an education research paper, especially the part when you apply theories to your findings. This is not like any other papers that I have read. Besides scholarly work in the field of education, I have been reading articles in Psychology, Linguistics, and Sociology this semester. Most of them are way more quantitative in their methods compared to what we are going to write and what we have been reading in this class. It was apparent that in those papers’ structure that numbers are the evidence of findings. It was not the same when looking at the interview. We couldn’t and shouldn’t simply use a number to conclude any interviewee’s perspective. There are themes that students’ interviews do not correspond to each other since every individual has their unique experience in the school. Reading articles and exploring how researchers include different theories in their discussion is helpful. Maybe we still lack writing skills to present an argument and eloquently using theories, but we certainly learn how a qualitative research paper is. In another way, I think every time we connect what is happening at Colby with theories we are learning, we are practicing our ability to connect theories with findings we have in real life. Writing similar things down requires a clearer structure and a stronger argument, which we might ignore when we follow how our minds flow during classes. In some ways, I am still confused when thinking about how exactly we will lay out our points because social learning, school community, students’ experience, and IB all seem to be intertwined. But I am confident that we will sort out since we have an outline to build on already.

I learned a lot related to educational research in this class and my senior seminar this year. However, as someone who is only majoring in education, I sometimes feel regretful that I didn’t get a chance to take research methods classes like what Psychology and Economics department would offer, a foundation that is provided separately but not alongside when we learn theories and conduct actual researches.

In recent weeks, we have been diving into different articles related to global interconnectivity, how the class is recreated in a global context that direct us to the concept of elite and social classes. Bourdieu’s text is really overwhelming since concepts are explained with five-line long sentences. However, after unpacking some of his theories in class, I realized that it was very helpful to the coding process and started to make sense of emerging themes in different ways.

When we first started to look into the data, we were drawn to the fact that a lot of the students in the school share the same quality, which is mobility. This mobility we are referring to is not social mobility but simply physical mobility that students and their family have, the ability to travel across the world relatively easily. Therefore, we identified a couple of codes like “move”, “travel”, and themes related to immigration. We knew that this list of codes is of great significance but we couldn’t find a category to define it. Then it came Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which provides a possible interpretation of traveling.

There are people in the world who have to leave their home due to various reasons like natural disasters, political instability or even loss of human rights in their home countries. Their travel is not derived from their own will, differentiating them from those whose physical mobility contributes to social mobility and resulted from their capital as the elite class. The elite class’s moving from one country to another one is a skill, is a way of solving problems with the freedom to choose the environment. The student’s family might have moved across borders for better-paid jobs, or for a higher quality of education. They even have the financial capital to gain access to multiple cultures by frequent traveling. By considering the theme of mobility as a habitus of the elite class, it was much easier to understand why it has been occurring repetitively.

Ragged University: Social Capital and Pierre Bourdieu: A Digest

Bourdieu’s theories of fields and boundary also helped me to gain knowledge of another list of codes especially the IB curriculum. To stand out in this Scandinavian country, the International Baccalaureate curriculum sets the boundary of the community that has more diversity and is different from the commonplace. Like many of the interviewees stated, they were aware of being exotic and not fitting in in the society due to this country’s homogeneity. The outside society has created a boundary that is actually strengthened in KIS with a variety of means, like using IB curriculum, assigning characteristics to this group (more respectful, better cultural understanding). Although the initial boundary is not set to benefit this group of people, they have successfully utilized it to create an international elite class in KIS.

Coding is very challenging because we are new to research. For those who are experienced, it might be manageable to identify codes and possible themes while we are hesitant if certain codes would be repeated and helpful for us to analyze the data. After learning Bourdieu’s theories, I think it started to make sense of how and why an elite class behaves in such ways. Therefore, it provides us with tools to code in the process. We are looking forward to finishing the coding and moving onto analysis in the next two weeks.

The beginning of our project was to choose one among the six listed countries that we were interested in. I didn’t find myself immediately dive into one but feeling uncertain between two choices.

https://gph.is/2BGlCbT

As someone who has experienced attending an international high school, I found the schools in Kaohsiung and Copenhagen very relatable to my own experience. In the recent decade, studying abroad has been a rising trend for high school students in China. I have witnessed several private schools that offer courses like AP, A-level and IB founded over the past ten years in my hometown, Suzhou. Students enter these schools aiming for a smoother transition to their undergraduate study abroad and hope to be immersed in an English-speaking environment. This is a road paved to higher institutions in the western world just like how TES functions. Therefore, a research in TES could help me take a peek at what the dynamics are in schools that act as the tube for transferring students from East Asian countries to the western world.

Although I took a similar path, I was lucky enough to be admitted by United World College and started my abroad experience at a younger age. Living on a campus that only has 20 percent of Canadians but 80 percent of students from elsewhere in the world differs from students’ experience in KAS. It is more similar compared to KIS which is also a more diverse international school focused on studying IB. Moreover, my study abroad experience in Denmark provides me background knowledge that Denmark is actually not very welcoming for immigrants and anyone who is not ethnically Danish. It would be really interested to explore the relationship between CIS, a much-isolated international community, and the bigger environment of Copenhagen or Denmark.

After a bit of struggle and hesitation, I decided to join the KIS group. It turned out to be quite interesting when we started to read the data. Due to their frequent immigrations, a lot of students in KIS don’t feel connected to Danish culture or society. They are often viewed as exotic, outsiders and can be recognized if speaking Danish with an accent. However, students in KIS have a strong sense of community and belonging within KIS. Therefore, Abbey, Katie and I decided to focus on this aspect: what has facilitated the sense of belonging in the community? We are aware of how Danish immigration policies could be one of the reasons why outsiders feel more connected to each other as the minority group. We are also intrigued by the fact that the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme could have included global citizenship and mutual respect to foster the sense of belonging on the KIS campus.

Although we are excited to dig into the question and conduct research project, we do feel a bit overwhelmed and confused because of the coding process. None of us has actually conducted one such in the past so we hope it would work out and be in line with our proposed timeline of work. I have already been to Denmark but one of my group members is going to Copenhagen for her study abroad experience next semester. Maybe this project could be a spoiler for her next semester in Denmark.