Doctoral Dissertation Research: Negotiating social identities in an elite independent school

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This ethnographic study will focus on how students with different socio-cultural backgrounds at a New England preparatory boarding school construct identities as students of an elite educational institution, and how race, class, and gender influence how they construct these identities and negotiate cultural boundaries. Schools play a crucial role in drawing symbolic boundaries around specific identities. But students do not simply accept the definitions they encounter or behave strictly along established boundaries. Research into this dynamic interaction has focused primarily on public schools and on students from underprivileged backgrounds. Scholars have rarely considered how students in elite educational settings-including students from privileged backgrounds-experience their schooling and in what ways they may reproduce, resist, and/or redefine the repertoires of identity available to them. To observe how students construct and enact identities in an elite school setting, four kinds of interactions will be observed: interactions in official school activities, in informal school contexts, one-on-one interviews, and among participants in a focus group. Several sampling strategies will be combined to identify a group of respondents that includes a wide range of experiences and backgrounds. Four complementary methods of data collection will be employed: participant observation, a student questionnaire, in-depth narrative interviews, and focus groups. The data will be analyzed through grounded theory and narrative analysis strategies. While the experiences of a small number of students at one school can hardly be generalized, this study will shed light into both macro and micro social and cultural processes. It will: 1) improve our understanding of the actual experiences of students who attend schools that have historically served elite groups; b) expand our view of the educational system beyond mainstream public school settings to include the experiences of this select group of students; and c) consider the influence of larger cultural relationships and social forces on student experiences of school in general. The broader impacts of this research include the following: This research will be of interest to scholars of education as well as a broader audience of policymakers and educators, including parents and teachers. Given the urgency to improve public schools, particularly for disadvantaged groups, the lack of interest in elite schooling is an understandable yet critical oversight in policy and theoretical debates; in the interest of leaving no child behind, we must pay attention to the experiences of those who are, presumably, "ahead."