Globally Elite

Recently, our group finished the process of condensing codes into themes and writing our group paper outline. As we condensed codes into themes, our group chose “Glocal Tensions” and “Elite Western Identification” as our two central pillars within narrative findings. The majority of our codes for our collective analysis of student, teacher, and alumni interviews were “Western Influence” and “Glocal.” These two codes allowed us to quickly highlight findings that led us to our central ideas for our future research paper. However, our theme “Glocal Tensions” became increasingly more complex as we found contradictions within the data.

These contradictions manifested in the form of answers to various questions in the interviews that surrounded descriptions and analysis of individual’s identities at Olive Grove and the school’s identity as an institution of elite education in Jordan. When coding my student interview, the student stated that he is Jordanian and identifies with many of the Jordanian students at Olive Grove. He said that social circles are comprised of students with many different nationalities and interests; however, he described all of these identities as existing within a Jordanian context. The student argued that the school’s location in Jordan and the many Jordanian and Middle Eastern students affect much of the social and cultural interactions. I coded these descriptions as “Local Influence.” Addressing the global influence and impact of Olive Grove, the student retorted that the school’s identity as an institution within the Middle East is affected by the geography and cultural context rather than the mixed demographic and global self-identification. However, the teacher within another interview argued a different perspective. The teacher represented a Western background—hailing from a suburb in Massachusetts. He argued that the school’s identity in recent years has been cemented as “Global.”

Furthermore, the teacher justified this through the mixed student body and complex web of cultural identities at Olive Grove. He did not highlight the location within Jordan as a major factor within the school’s identity besides the geography’s relationship to student trajectories after Olive Grove. The student focused more on his personal identity as Jordanian and his history with the location surrounding Olive Grove while the teacher projected his own experience working abroad and chose to underline the cultural mixing as a sign of global and international identity.

Inevitably, I classified these contradictions as “Glocal Tensions.” These varied answers regarding the identity of Olive Grove and its student body represent an important paradox. On one hand, students who represent a local demographic analyze their experience at Olive Grove through that lens. Conversely, teachers and alumni who represent a background outside of Jordan or the Middle East project their own identity unto the potentially “global” identity of the school itself. It is difficult to discern which perspective determines the identity of Olive Grove. However, I believe these contradicting viewpoints serve as the real truth behind the institution’s self-identification—an identity struggling to combine their Middle Eastern geography and western influence.

Identify two major themes for your research–sounds like an easy task at first glance. That being said, it takes a lot more effort than expected. In order for my group to choose our two major themes for our project, it took a great deal of searching through our coding, and debatesabout what would best fit our research question, which focused on sports and the connection it has with Everdeen. With four members of our group coding the interviews, we were bound to all have different key-words that proved to be most prevalent.

We began with the idea that gender was going to be a major theme within our research–therefore, going into coding, I was hyper-aware of anything that had to do with gender within the interviews. Much to my dismay, I came out of the coding process with very little findings of the role gender playedin athletics at Everdeen. I was under the impression that maybe I just did not read into the dialogue as deeply as I should have. After meeting with our group, it was soon realized that all of us were not as successful when trying to find ways in which gender injects itself within athletics at the school as we originally had hoped.

We were all slightly at a loss, how do we move forward with our research when there is not much information that can answer our research question? We quickly realized that we were going to have to find a different focus for the project. After discussing all of our codes, we realized that each interview incorporated the topic of global citizenship.

Our next task was to tie global citizenship and athletics together due to the fact that both popped up frequently in our coding. We reached the conclusion that one of our themes would focus on the promotion of global citizenship through sports, along with the other being the pressures that come hand and hand with it. Ultimately, these were the best fit themes for our groups research.

When creating the outline for our final paper, it was easy for us to identify outside sources from readings we had previously studied in class, such as Adam’s essay on sports in elite schools, along with some of Bourdieu’s theories in The State of Nobility.We are now faced with the task of picking apart the literature, and deciding what theories prove to be relevant to our research.

Following this step, we are soon going to start writing a draft of our paper. Quite honestly, this seems extremely daunting to me. I have never been a part of such a large research project before, and am a little bit nervous about what information to add into the paper–Is it relevant? Is it redundant? The latter question being my biggest concern. Within all of our research and coding, we all had very similar statements from the interviews, as expected. I am interested to see how all of the quotes will be incorporated due to the fact that majority of them are quite similar. Overall, I am sure once we get further into the writing process it will become easier, but for now it is proving to be a puzzle as to what and what not to include in the final paper.

Throughout my recent research, I have been mindful of the concept of bias and how it may influence my overall findings and analysis. I have been met with difficulty while coding, as I feel that I am not finding enough information to fit my group’s research question. Our research focus is meant to explore role of sports in an elite environment like Everdeen, and how the pressures of elite athletics promote global citizenship. However, the data available to our group is limited and often seems surface-level. Thus, it is essential to incorporate theory into my analysis in order to acquire in-depth findings. So, I am constantly wondering; am I forcing connections between the data and my analysis based off my own knowledge of how important sports are in elite fields? I fear that I may generalize themes and findings in order to fit my own preconceived perception of the data.

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3ukqzq

Even though Colby and Everdeen fall into the same Field of globally-elite institutions, I imagine Everdeen to be a completely different experience than Colby. At Colby, I would argue that athletes fit the “elite” mold in terms of maintaining and promoting not only physical capital, but cultural. Athletics at elite institutions are reflections of one’s physical, cultural, social capital. Physical capital– as elite athletes must know how to control their bodies or display a privileged habitus. Cultural capital– as these athletes have been exposed to sports as a result of their privilege. And social– as athletes at elite institutions are hierarchically dominant to their non-athlete peers. These variations of capital together demonstrate how well an individual can absorb and mimic the holistic view of elitism. In short, in order to be elite, you must look and act elite through the various forms of capital. To better compete for recognition and the expansive opportunities at Colby, you must be an athlete.

Yet, since the only understanding of Everdeen that I have is through transcript interviews and online research, I cannot apply these observations from Colby’s environment to that of Everdeen, although familiar narratives surface through the process of data analysis. Thus, I struggle to feel connected to my research. For now, my group must constantly reflect on any of our own personal bias that may affect our research.

Before starting this research project, I have to admit I was slightly unaware of my privilege in regard to English as my first language: a form of cultural capital highly valued throughout the world. Both of my parents are native speakers, so I grew up learning and speaking the language without fully processing what was happening. As I’ve written about before, I studied the Spanish language for years and struggled enough with that; I know that English is one of the hardest languages to learn because of all its nuances. I have taken my English language skills for granted, which I am now able to realize is problematic.

https://makeameme.org/meme/english-english-everywhere

Our current political climate and the increasing usage of the terms “nationalism” and “nationalist” along with my increased knowledge through Colby’s education department about Westernized ideologies shed light on the international implications of the United States’ culture, and all that goes along with that culture. Reading through our data I began to understand what a profound impact the English language and the Western world has on TES in Taiwan, specifically the United States’ influence. As an international “American” school, parents pay tuition for their children to be immersed in the English language in their schooling experience with an end goal of sending these elite students to Westernized countries, especially the United States. Students, parents, and teachers alike describe the idea of becoming globalized through this process – with one student defining what it means to be a global citizen as “Americanized.” The frequent repetition of American ideals makes me uncomfortable, as I grapple with this idea of students separating themselves from their native culture in order to join one that is viewed as superior and providing more opportunities for success. As I am American, I am part of a culture deemed successful, and I am now forced to question the benefits and complications that come along with it.

I have begun to wonder about Bourdieu’s idea of “outsiders within” in relation to this research – as these Taiwanese students begin to abandon their own culture to align themselves with the standards and expectations of Western culture, how do they hold onto their senses of self as they lose pieces of their identities? As they become “global” and begin to travel internationally to Westernized countries, do they feel like outsiders within a culture they have tried to become a part of? While I agree with beneficial qualities of being bilingual, I struggle to understand why English is becoming seemingly necessary to succeed in our modern world.

http://www.quotemaster.org/global+citizen

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.