Anglo-Western international school teachers as global middle class: portraits of three families

ABSTRACT

This exploratory study on the global middle class (GMC) examines three representative experiences of the tens of thousands of Anglo-Western international schoolteachers (ISTs), who teach in private, K-12, English-immersion international schools for extended periods of time. The notion of GMC provokes consideration of social class making and forms of belonging of professional and managerial service workers who are ‘middling actors’ in the flows of transnational migration. We ground our analysis by examining three IST families as a unique group within the GMC. We find that ISTs, oriented by pre-sojourn middle-class histories, differentially (re)fashion their social class locations in the more elite transnational milieu of the international schools. These families accumulate and exchange economic, cultural and social capital under their transnational routes, connections and returns. Their children’s access to an elite international education as a condition of their international employment represents a unique form of school choice.     

Struggling with capital: a Bourdieusian analysis of educational strategies among internationally mobile middle class families in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Drawing on empirical data regarding educational strategies among internationally mobile families in the Stockholm-Uppsala region, this study questions the notion of a global middle class. First, a quantitative analysis shows that immigrating middle class professionals and their children are few, having marginal impact on the demand for international education. Furthermore, they far from constitute a homogeneous class, instead comprising of fractions opting for different types of schools. A second, qualitative study on capital conversion among mobile families illustrates that even well-educated international movers face serious challenges converting their existing knowledge, skills and contacts into well-informed social, professional and educational strategies in their new context. This suggests the limitations of concepts such as international capital. It is argued that the GMC concept overshadows the fact that social groups within the middle classes have varying degrees of international mobility that constitutes just one dimension of what separates them from each other.     

高中历史探究活动课教学探析

高中历史教学中,如何有效地发展学生的创新精神和实践探究能力,开展创造性教学,关键在于转变教师的教学方式和学生的学习方式,探究活动课教学具有其独到的优势。     

Choosing schools: explorations in post-primary school choice in an urban Irish working class community

This paper examines post-primary school choice processes in the urban Irish working-class community of Portown. Here, there is an awareness of hegemonic neoliberal ideals and how school choice becomes a significantly classed space characterised by market ideologies and structural inequality. This critical ethnography explored the world through participant observation, semi-structured interviews over a 3-year period. The data examined here are drawn specifically from investigations into school choice processes. It deploys identity theories as thinking tools to examine the classed nature of engagement with school choice markets. The findings delineate three distinct groups of choosers in this school community: passive transitioners, active choosers and second-schoolers. The findings of the study reveal the entwined and co-constructed nature of identity and social class as well as examining the role played by school choices and differential access to economic, cultural and social resources in these processes.     

Parental preferences in school choice: comparing reputational hierarchies of schools in Chile and Finland

Parents evaluate the reputations of the schools when making judgements about their desirability. They try to approximate the quality of schools and the social environment and contrast those with their hopes and fears concerning their child’s education. We aim to clarify how the reputations of schools are constructed in Finland and Chile and what sorts of reputational categories, hierarchies and preferences of schools and classes families form when making a choice. Bernstein’s instrumental and expressive orders are applied as tools to analyse these reputations from qualitative interview data. The amount and type of expressive order turned out to be the crucial factor when comparing schools’ reputations and in the making of choices. While in Chile the expressive-social order in terms of contributing to habitus was seen as the most important factor in constructing school reputations and shaping preferences, in Finland the expressive-personal order in the form of school contentment was highlighted.     

Religion and the global middle class: towards a new research agenda

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses the role of religion as a central facet when researching the emerging social group – the global middle class (GMC). It is argued here that religion is a particularly relevant feature for the constitution of this social group because of the GMC’s transnational and cosmopolitan character. In this essay, I will draw on several examples focused on Islamic education provision in Western, pre-dominantly Christian societies to illustrate why and how religion should become critical to our study of the GMC. The essay’s central argument is that there remains a gap in research related to the role of religion in the making and practising of the GMC as a social group. I conclude by proposing a future research agenda that addresses the intersections of religion, education, and the GMC on an individual, national, and global level.     

Every school a school of choice: school choice in Ireland as viewed through American eyes

‘Choice’ and ‘freedom’ as measured by the ability of parents to select their children's schools are deeply embedded in the national ethos of the United States of America. Wealthy American parents have always exercised school choice but minority and lowincome students are often trapped in failing schools. This paper is based on research conducted in a purposive sample of Irish primary schools into the nature of school choice. The authors examine five aspects of the Irish national primary school system that could provide models for American educators, whose vision often stops at the boundaries of the United States: education law, school choice for all, a national curriculum framework, the role of assessment, and the role of parents and educators in the creation of new schools. While arguably the five relate directly to school choice of different degrees, they collectively weave a web whereby school systems in the Republic of Ireland and the USA may productively be compared to the benefit of both.     

高校思想政治理论课与中学政治课新课改衔接的思考

大学生思想政治理论课和中学思想品德课、思想政治课有内在的密切联系和递进关系。中学政治课新课改对高校思想政治理论课教学有积极的推动作用,高校思想政治理论课在教学理念、教学内容、教学方法、能力培养上和中学新课改相衔接并且有所创新,才能让大学生思想政治理论课成为大学生"真心喜欢、终身受益"的课程。     

初中生物学教学中合作学习的探讨

基础教育课程改革要求学生的学习方式发生根本的转变。在初中生物学教学中采用小组学习的合作学习方式,有利于提高学生学习的主动性,培养良好的交往技能和集体竞争等社会意识,从而实现学习主体的自主性、互助性、互补性和互动性,因而小组学习是一种适合初中生物学教学的合作学习组织形式。     

Parental involvement in education during middle school: Perspectives of ethnically diverse parents,teachers, and students

Maintaining productive partnerships between families and schools is more complex when youth enter middle school. A systematic and inclusive understanding of the strategies parents use, youth want and need, and teachers' desire is needed to broaden our conceptualization and deepen our understanding of parental involvement in education. The authors captured the voices of 3 primary stakeholders in education (i.e., parents, teachers, and students) to identify the goals for parental involvement in education, identify consistencies across stakeholders in the conceptualizations of parental involvement in education, and deepen our understanding of the types of involvement that matter for adolescents. The study used grounded-theory analysis of 20 focus groups, with ethnically diverse parents, youth, and teachers (N = 150), along with quantitative indicators of involvement and interactions with schools. From these analyses scaffolding independence, linking education to future success, and communication emerged as the most consistent strategies for promoting achievement. Conceptualizations of home-based involvement were broadened. Ethnic variations in the general experiences of families at school were highlighted.     

Parental choice without parents: families,education and class in a South African township

From the 1980s and 1990s, governments around the world began to champion ‘parental choice’ over schooling. Much of the existing scholarship has been based on examples taken from the global North. In such settings, where nuclear families are common, a major theme has been the privileged educational strategies and outcomes of middle-class families. Yet this South African study gives attention to gender and family dynamics in helping to explain and understand the large number of schoolchildren travelling to attend historically better-funded schools. It argues that in a setting where the nuclear family accounts for a minority of households, it is necessary to distinguish between the financing of a child’s education and the social organization of schooling, including the caring of the child. It contributes to two literatures. First, to Western-centred educational choice literature that has tended to overemphasise nuclear families; second, to South African literature, which is yet to adequately bring into the same analytical frame the marketisation of education and gendered family dynamics.     

How does mobility shape parental strategies – a case of the Israeli global middle class and their ‘immobile’ peers in Tel Aviv

We examined the parental strategies of global middle class (GMC) parents currently living in Israel, and compared these to their local middle class (LMC) peers. Both groups of parents were focused on securing advantages for their children through education choices and practices of cultivation. The central difference between these two groups of middle class parents was the ways in which ‘mobile-mindedness’ was conceived of, and in turn shaped the future aspirations they held for their children. A second critical finding was that this group of GMC actively fostered strong relations to belonging to their ‘home’ nation, challenging the suggestion of rootless nomads found in the literature. We argue that the GMCs in our sample think locally in each place they settle in order to secure the educational advantage, but act globally with respect to their children’s prospective futures. Meanwhile, the LMCs think globally in terms of cultivating forms of capital to secure advantages for their children, but do so with a locally-informed frame of reference for their imagined futures. These conceptual insights into the lived narratives of the GMC have implications for the ways we come to understand this emerging middle class fraction, and should shape further research in this area.     

Reputation and parental logics of action in local school choice space in Finland

Differences in reputation between schools and in classes within schools shape parental choice in the Finnish urban context, even if the differences in school performance and the risks of making a ‘bad’ choice are relatively small. This study analyses the instrumental and expressive orders of schools in a specific educational context. Two overlapping local school choice spaces emerge: the local space of school catchment areas, and the selective space of the city in interaction with neighbouring cities. Entry into the selective space requires different forms of parental capital, and may reproduce educational and social distinctions. Institutions that provide less future exchange value according to the parental conceptions, with socially and ethnically mixed student populations and low expectations of pupils’ contentment are seen to be worth avoiding. The discussion on the choice between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools seems to be superficial and to conceal certain educational reproduction processes, which do not officially exist in the Finnish education system. Choosing between classes (general and classes with special emphasis) within a school also works as a distinction strategy.     

Determinants of school choice: understanding how parents choose elementary schools in Alberta

Rational choice theory suggests that parents are utility maximizers who make decisions from clear value preferences, that they are able to demand effective action from local schools and teachers, and that they can be relied upon to pursue the best interests of their children. This paper presents a different perspective and argues that parents invest a mixture of rationalities when selecting schools. Based on the results of a survey of 1,500 parents of students in 11 private, eight public and 10 alternative elementary schools in Alberta, Canada, this paper explores the logic, values, and concerns that inform parental decision making in the selection of an elementary school for their children and discusses implication for policy and educational reform.     

The power of positional competition and market mechanism: a case study of recent parental choice development in China

This article draws on data collected during a pilot study conducted in two west London schools exploring young people’s understandings of success. It considers ways in which ‘discourses of success’, as part of New Labour’s project of re‐inventing schooling, may shape young people’s subjectivity. The article examines articulations between New Labour policy and aspects of social difference and how these structure new identifications with success. In particular, the article explores how class, gender and ethnicity shape discourses of success and how they are implicated in their distribution. In conclusion, the article indicates how current education policy (particularly in relation to educational success) articulates the ‘public’ domain with dimensions of the ‘private’ self and suggests that understanding this is vital in the pursuit of social justice.     

Choice and social class of medical school students in Greece

A growing body of literature focuses on choice of studies in the context of policies on widening participation in higher education and graduates' difficulties in the labour market. Drawing on research findings showing a relationship between social class and choice of studies, we conducted a qualitative study on first‐year medical students in a Greek university. The research aim was to examine the seemingly paradoxical choice of medical school, given the contradiction between the great investment in time, effort and money required, and inflation of medical graduates and high unemployment levels. Apart from the impact of social class, findings suggest that choice is also strongly influenced by the broader context of the social and financial relations, and the education system. We argue that any attempts to analyse choice processes need to accommodate the specific national characteristics and peculiarities.     

Markets in education: the impact of school choice policies in one market context in New Zealand

The publication of Trading in Futures and When Schools Compete helped give empirical support to the view that choice policies increased differences between schools. However, dispute about this research and changes in policy mean that our understanding of the impact of school choice policies in New Zealand remains partial. This paper aims to address continued uncertainty about the impact of school choice policies in New Zealand. It presents the results of a study that drew upon qualitative data gathered in interviews with school principals and on administrative data on the enrolment patterns in the same competition space explored by the Trading in Futures research. The data show that periods of greatest instability in enrolments occurred around the time of change in regulations.     

Determinants of Primary School Choice in Malaysia: School Proximity and Ethnicity-Related Reasons

The study examined determinants of primary school choice among parents in Malaysia, and the decision maker and social influences in the school choice. It draws on qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 43 middle-class parents from three ethnic groups (Chinese, Malay, and Indigenous). Results showed that school proximity and ethnicity-related reasons are leading factors influencing parental school choice. Medium of instruction, school academic reputation, and feeder to a preferred secondary school appear to be separate reasons but act as a proxy to ethnicity as the primary factor determining the choice of Chinese- or Malay-medium primary school by parents. The results also showed that mothers are more likely to make school choice decisions than fathers, but the reasons for school choice are similar. The primary social influences on their school choice come from friends and education personnel in preschools and schools. The Indigenous parents tend to be more subject to social pressure in making school choices than the Chinese and Malay parents, who mostly enroll their children in Chinese- and Malay-medium primary schools, respectively. However, these findings on school choice and ethnic segregation are limited to this sample and constrained by the socio-political context of the education system.     

Parental choice of childcare in England: Choosing in phases and the split market

This article explores how parents choose childcare settings for their pre-school children within a context of complex policy on eligibility for free provision and a developing market. Using data from interviews with 17 mainly middle-class parents in England, we explore in detail how parents go about choosing a childcare setting and the different phases of this process. This adds further nuance to the existing literature on choosing practices and the dysfunction and inequalities of a neoliberal childcare market, and also updates the discussion to include recent policy developments such as the provision of ‘30 hours free childcare’ for 3 and 4-year-olds. We conclude that parental choosing involves a series of decisions in two or three phases, which start from practical considerations, followed by quality comparison and then back to practical constraints if a decision has not been made. The options open to parents are split between not only those able to accommodate shorter ‘free’ provision and those that require longer periods of childcare to work, but also between those with children under three and above. Contrary to previous findings in this area, this split may work to the disadvantage of some middle-class families, whose children attend lower-quality settings as a result.     

《中文》（初中版）的编写理念和特色

本文阐述了<中文>(初中版)"引导式主动学习"的编写理念,总结了该套教材在总体框架、主教材(内容框架、体例、语言项目、文化内涵)、练习册、教师用书等方面的主要特色.