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We are in the final stretch of the research project. It is all about synthesizing and cohesion as we write our paper sections separately and start to put it together. Our focuses are how athletics promote global citizenship and the athletic pressures in elite schools. The discussion we had in class on Tuesday regarding elites and social justice, in combination with our themes, sparked this question: Is it possible for someone of privilege to truly be a global citizenship? More broadly, can anyone truly be a global citizen? Social justice is essentially a requirement for being a truly global citizen. To be an active and impactful member in the world community, you must be aware of your privilege and how it affects your position in the global setting. In addition, many of the interactions with the greater community is through service work/civic engagement. For instance, Everdeen (the school we are researching) sends athletics teams to play against international teams and while they are abroad, they engage in a project to help a local disadvantaged community.

The biggest problem with privileged elites helping people with less than them is that they are being required to do so. How effective/meaningful can your work be if you are simply doing it meet a quota or it’s a requirement to be an athlete? The work can easily just be seen as an annoyance. In addition, every interaction regarding social justice becomes a transaction.

These transactions add up to, and you move towards, being a “global citizen”, a concept pushed and rarely defined in elite schools. When I say transactions I mean that when a privileged person (anyone with even the slightest bit more privilege than the person they are helping) helps a “disadvantaged person”, the privileged person gets a sense of fulfillment such that they are on their way to becoming an ill-defined “global citizen” and the disadvantaged person is meant to feel grateful for the help and use the privileged person as someone to model themselves after. How is this not problematic at all? It is even possible for a person of privilege or elite status to truly be global citizens if global citizenship is treated as a system of brownie points? This is my biggest question as my group finishes our research paper.

At elite institutions, like Colby, we have deep and intellectual conversations in the classroom. We are debating philosophical and theoretical questions, while expanding and transforming our view of the world. However, once that discussion is over, we are done. Our brains are fried. We continue on with our daily life. Often times, we do not apply what we discuss or learn to our own life. This is for one of two reasons. First: We do not want to realize we are part of the problem, either individually or systemically.

It is easier for us to remain ignorant rather than deal with the problem and create change. Second: We do not want to change. Why would we want to change a system that we, or the people close to us, have benefitted from? That would be ridiculous.

This was my revelation as my group completed our paper outline. Our topic is the role/importance of athletics in elite institutions. While synthesizing our research and the data, our major takeaway is that: athletics allow elites (people and institutions) to perpetuate and reaffirm their elite status.

In the past months of research and discussion regarding this topic, I did not realize until now, my place in this system. I was student at an elite secondary school, primed to be a recruited college athlete. Out of my graduating high school class of 60 girls, ~20 of us pursued college athletics. It was a norm, something we never thought twice about. If you were athletically inclined and/or the school could get your scouted, you were set for college. You had all of the choices in the world. Our research, also, taps into the pressures (social, familial, academic, athletic) that come with athletics. Needless to say, of those 20 girls, about half stopped playing sports or changed divisions because the pressure didn’t stop after secondary school. They continued into our respective higher education institutions. However, athletics did their job. They acted as a gateway from our elite secondary school to an elite higher education institution. I am disappointed that it took me months to realize that this system I have been writing about and critiquing is one I was complicit in. Now as I move forward with research in the future, I will put myself into context. I will refrain from looking at it as some far-fetched theoretical system/situation.

In the time since I last blogged, I felt that I have truly embodied a researcher. The instance was when I switched from researching Ghana to Australia, due to logistics. This change left me mildly disoriented because I was forced to abandon the work that I had become so invested in over the past few weeks.

This must be a common problem in the field of research. The cause of my change was simple: someone in my research group dropped the class, leaving the project up to two of us, was not doable. However, for professional who research as a part of their job, there are many logistical changes that can interfere with their work, forcing them to abandon their work at much more developed stages. This could include: ethics, immeasurability of data, the emergence of new research contradicting or affecting the research, and much more! Just like that, the field of research got much more frightening. However, I am very excited to begin researching the role sports in elite institutions with Everdeen as the case study. Sports have been a large part of my life, starting from when I began at an elite private school for high school, The Agnes Irwin School. The trend of sports culture in elite schools definitely did not skip Colby. It will be interesting to see the parallels between Everdeen, Agnes Irwin and Colby as research begins.

There has been a lot of adjusting since switching research groups. I had to do a brief reading of all of the Australia data, get caught up with all of the group members and navigate integrating while not stepping on anyone’s toes. The initial research question was analyzing the gender divide in elite institutions, specifically Everdeen. My group divided up the data evenly and began coding. Once we came back together after coding, we ran into a problem. The initial, brief reading of the data supported the 

initial research question. However, after an in-depth reading, this was not the case. There was not enough evidence in the interviews and other data to support what we wanted to research. We felt defeated and like we were back at square one. However, there was not much time to complain and sulk. We needed to adjust our research topic. This, also, meant we needed to change our codes and do another reading of the data. While it is frustrating, I can not imagine having research as part of my profession and finding out information that invalidates my initial claim, leaving me to either adjust my research and abandon it. I admire anyone that does research regularly. They are actively navigating the unknown, in the hopes of discovering new and meaningful information. This is brave.

“How does a school promote western-style education and sending students to The United States when there a very clear divide between Africans and Americans, specifically African-Americans?” This is the first question that came to mind when learning more about the elite school in Ghana. While all of the elite schools had the same mission of preparing students to move, receive and education and work in the western world, Ghana was different. The Ghanaian school promotes Pan-Africanism and “Knowledge in Service of Africa”. How does giving into globalization service Africa and its nationalism, when most of its students do not go back? It is not just the school was promotes Pan-Africanism and Africa before all else: the society does as well. Historically, this has led to a major divide between Americans and African-Americans. There is no clear or direct reason for this division. It is rooted in false perceptions based on stereotypes and historical inaccuracies passed on from generation to generation, masked under the false pretenses of nationalism.

It is like if your parents or siblings say they don’t like broccoli, you will, in turn, not like broccoli. This is because you inherit the perception and dislike of the world, not just broccoli, with no rationale or reasoning. In American schools, we do not learn a history of Africa that serves them justice. Africans are portrayed as half-clothed barbarians living in a poor, jungle-like, under-developed country. In African schools, Americans are typically portrayed as lazy and colonizers who took slaves from Africa. From this, Africans see African Americans as assimilators, shunning us for a history we can not control. Neither party (Africans or African Americans) are free of blame. 

As I began to read the data, my question was answered. The school promotes western-style education because of the opportunities America has to offer. The people do not matter, it is about the benefits. In their eyes, sending students to renowned American universities allows them to capitalize on the “American Dream” so they can help Africa, indirectly or directly.

Thinking back to the cultural divide and its relation to faux-nationalism, I started to wonder about the nationalistic intentions of the Ghanaian school. Was the school truly nationalist/Pan-Africanist or simply a facade? The data shows mixed signals. The mission of the school is “Knowledge in Service of Africa”. The school is meant to be self-serving. However, the national African curriculum is not infused into the elite school. In addition, many of the students never return to Ghana post-graduation. This is not to say that the school never had to intentions of promoting true Pan-African ideologies. However, just promoting those ideologies would not make them a leading force in the world. To the un-globalized world, The United States is the perceived standard of greatness. From this, my question becomes how does Pan-Africanism compete with globalization? How is it affected, shaped and/or undermined. Therein lies the research question: How has western globalization affected Sankofa’s work towards nationalism and pan-Africanism?