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How can teachers bridge the gap between their commitments to social justice and their day to day practice? This is the question author Adam Howard asked as he began teaching at an elite private school and the question that led him to conduct a six-year study on affluent schooling. Unfamiliar with the educational landscape of privilege and abundance, he began exploring the burning questions he had as a teacher on the lessons affluent students are taught in schooling about their place in the world, their relationships with others, and who they are. Grounded in an extensive ethnographic account, Learning Privilege examines the concept of privilege itself and the cultural and social processes in schooling that reinforce and regenerate privilege. Howard explores what educators, students and families at elite schools value most in education and how these values guide ways of knowing and doing that both create high standards for their educational programs and reinforce privilege as a collective identity. This book illustrates the ways that affluent students construct their own privilege,not, fundamentally, as what they have, but, rather, as who they are.

Recent efforts emphasize the roles that privilege and elite education play in shaping affluent youths’ identities. Despite various backgrounds, the common qualities shared among the eight adolescents showcased in this book lead them to form particular understandings of self, others, and the world around them that serve as means for them to negotiate their privilege. These self-understandings are crucial for them to feel more at ease with being privileged, foster a positive sense of self, and reduce the negative feelings associated with their advantages – thus managing expectations for future success. Offering an intimate and comprehensive view of affluent adolescents’ inner lives and understandings, Negotiating Privilege and Identity in Educational Contexts explores these qualities and provides an important alternative perspective on privilege and how privilege works. The case studies in this volume explore different settings and lived experiences of eight privileged adolescents who, influenced by various sources, actively construct and cultivate their own privilege. Their stories address a wide range of issues relevant to the study of adolescence and the various social class factors that mediate adolescents’ educational experiences and identities.

"This book is a collection of essays that can easily be used for professional development purposes. It has multiple perspectives in term of author identities and positions within "elite" schools and blend of research and experience made accessible for practitioners"--

This volume contains an Open Access chapter. The present volume of Comparative Social Research offers a broad set of comparative studies of elites, stretching from the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt to women's political leadership in Brazil and Germany, via attainment of elite positions among minorities in France and the US.

This book is the first significant sociological study of Ireland’s elite private schools. It takes the reader behind the gates of these secretive institutions, and offers a compelling analysis of their role in the reproduction of social inequality in Ireland. From the selection process to past pupils’ union events, from the dorms to the rugby pitch, the book unravels how these schools gradually reinforce exclusionary practices and socialize their students to power and privilege. It tackles the myths of meritocracy and classlessness in Ireland, while also providing keys to understanding the social practices and legitimacy of elites. By bringing out the voices of past pupils, parents and school staff and incorporating vivid ethnographic descriptions, the book provides a rare snapshot into a privileged world largely hidden from view. It offers a unique contribution to research on elite education as well as to the broader fields of sociology of education and inequality. As such, it will appeal to researchers, practitioners and the general public alike, in Ireland and beyond.

This book offers both a theoretical and empirical examination of elite education, at all stages from the early years to university level. The book explores the various manifestations of internationalisation of education; the implications of these for national education systems; the formation and re-articulation of elite forms of education locally and globally; and how these facilitate the reproduction or disruption of processes of inequality. The collection critically considers these questions by drawing on contributions from around the world, and focuses on how internationalisation processes shape the various stages of the education system – from early years settings to higher education – in oftentimes quite different ways. At the same time, by engaging with the issues through a range of theoretical lenses, the book invites readers to consider in greater depth the various ways we can come to understand how processes of internationalisation are both embedding but also at times destabilising the formation and purpose of elite education provision and potentially the configuration of elite groups themselves. The book will be relevant to academics, researchers, students, policymakers and educators working in or on the field of ‘education’ across the world.

This collection of groundbreaking studies breaks with the tradition of gauging inequality by looking 'down' at at-risk or poverty-disadvantaged schools and shifts the gaze of inquiry 'up' toward the experiences of privilege in educational environments characterized by wealth and the abundance of material resources.

This latest volume in the World Yearbook of Education Series focuses on educational elites and inequality, focusing particularly on the ways in which established and emergent groups located at the top of the social hierarchy and power structure reproduce, establish or redefine their position. The volume is organized around three main issues: analyzing the way in which parents, students and graduates in positions of social advantage use their assets and capitals in relation to educational strategies, and how these are different for old and new and cultural and economic elites; studying how elite institutions have adapted their strategies to take into account changes in the social structure, in policy and in their institutional environment and exploring the impact of these strategies on educational systems at the national and global levels; mapping the new global dynamics in elite education and how new forms of 'international education' and 'transnational cultural capital' as well as new global educational elite pathways shape elite students’ identities, status and trajectories. Making use of a social and an institutional approach as well as a focus on practices and policies, the volume draws on research conducted on secondary schools and on higher education. In addition, the global contributions within the book allow for a comparison and contrast of situations in different countries. This results in a comprehensive picture of common processes and national differences concerning advantage and excellence and a thorough examination of the impact of globalization on the strategies, identities and trajectories of elite groups and individuals alongside more general cultural and economic processes.

In an era when many young people feel marginalized and excluded, this is the first comprehensive, critical account to shed new light on the trouble of ‘belonging’ and how young people in schools understand, enact and experience ‘belonging’ (and non-belonging). It traverses diverse dimensions of identity, including gender and sexuality; race, class, nation and citizenship; and place and space. Each section includes a provocative discussion by an eminent and international youth scholar of youth, and is essential reading for anyone involved with young people and schools. This book is a crucial resource and reference for sociology of education courses at all levels as well as courses in student inclusion, equity and student well-being.

Elite schools have an intriguing capacity to endure and adapt in the face of social, cultural and political change. They help both to reproduce power, privilege and status and also to regularly produce them afresh. The intricacies involved, over time and place, have attracted the abiding empirical, methodological and conceptual interest of sociologists and historians; recently, anthropologists and geographers have also responded to their allure. Collectively, the focus of such studies is usually on class making and the manner in which gender and race/ethnicity, place and mobility overlap and are part of the mix. This edited collection is framed around the notion of a ‘new sociology of elite education’, but it speaks into this wider space of inquiry in which studies of such schools are becoming more interdisciplinary. In so doing it brings together a new array of conceptual and theoretical tools while also deepening those that already exist. The contributions examine various configurations of contemporary class making and their attendant politics. These explorations are situated in the specificities of geographical locales where the complex dynamics of both national/local educational priorities and global/transnational forces are played out. In addition to showing how these dynamics put pressure on elite schools to redefine them, the book’s diverse international focus shines a light on new and emerging global patterns. This book was originally published as a special issue of British Journal of Sociology of Education.