Elite Secondary Schools Research Articles

Supplementary tutoring in Trinidad and Tobago: Some implications for policy making

Globally, private supplementary tutoring is a huge business and the practice is expanding rapidly in many regions of the world where it never existed before. In some of these regions it is posing a novel set of challenges for education planners and policy makers. The aim of this study was to examine the extent to which supplementary tutoring is impacting on the goals of the formal education system in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T). The participation rate in supplementary tutoring at primary school level in T&T was found to be high (88.2 per cent at Standard Five level), with the majority of the students being privately tutored by their regular school teachers. Their main motivation for taking private tutoring lessons was to try to secure a place in one of the few elite secondary schools in the country. The authors of this paper admit that there is no quick solution to the problem, especially if it is understood as a part of the process of cultural change. They contend that the key to breaking the elitist tradition lies in modifying public understanding about education and convincing parents and citizens at large that a wide range of options and opportunities exists outside the narrow confines of the old colonial economy and the old colonial schools.

Parental strategies in supporting Chinese children’s learning of English vocabulary

This paper reports on parental involvement as experienced by a group of elite secondary school pupils in learning English vocabulary on the Chinese mainland. It highlights the variety of strategies that Chinese parents adopted to support, sustain and enhance these pupils’ efforts to learn English vocabulary. They functioned as critical agents regulating and controlling their children’s learning process and provided social opportunities for them to deepen/widen their engagements with English. These parents also mediated the pupils’ motivational discourses, beliefs and knowledge. In addition, they supported their learning with enormous material investment. Further research into parental involvement in children’s learning of additional languages is believed to generate important findings for the development of teacher–parent collaboration that can help equalise the effects of unequal familial resources that different learners can access in respect of their achievements in learning languages.

Digital media and ‘girling’ at an elite girls' school

In this article, I draw on Judith Butler's notion of performativity to investigate the role of digital technologies in processes of gendered subjectification (or ‘girling’) in elite girls' education. Elite girls' schooling is a site where the potential of digital technologies in mediating student‐led constructions and explorations of ‘femininity’ sits alongside school‐produced digital media in the form of promotional texts, in which young femininity is regulated by discourses of ‘girl power’. Whilst such schools are well equipped with digital resources that might be utilised towards students' interrogation of how ‘femininity’ is understood, thus politicising the girling process, school‐produced digital media inscribe a more prescriptive picture of ‘who’ an elite school‐girl can ‘be’. Lyla Girls' Grammar School (LGGS) is an elite secondary school in Melbourne, Australia. I report on research undertaken at two institutional levels of LGGS: the ‘school’ level in which digital media representations of young women are produced by the school and the ‘classroom’ level, in which media education pedagogy includes interactive web conferencing software. The use of digital technologies in media education appeared to support student‐led construction and interrogation of femininities to some extent. I argue that this kind of student‐led girling is important in the context of more prescriptive school‐level girling practices.

Cricket and the Moral Curriculum of the New Zealand Elite Secondary Schools C1860–C1920

Cricket and the Moral Curriculum of the New Zealand Elite Secondary Schools C1860–C1920

English and American Residential Secondary Schools: A Comparative Study of the Reproduction of Social Elites

A comparison of English and American secondary residential schools offfers a number of opportunities to assess the relationship between elite education and social structure. It also provides potential insights into the role that school processes play in cultural reproduction. The possibility that elite secondary residential schools create and maintain significant social class differences has intrigued scholars for several decades.' In England, there is a rather large body of literature indicating that elite public schools may well contribute to social class cleavages within English society,2 whereas in the United States there is little comparable research about elite boarding schools.3 The importance of studying these relatively few but socially significant schools has been well stated by Weinberg: Elite

Colleges Attended by Graduates of Elite Secondary Schools

Colleges Attended by Graduates of Elite Secondary Schools

Some Methodological and Field Problems of Social Research in Elite Secondary Schools

This paper stresses the importance of studying elite secondary schools in advanced as well as developing societies because of their role in primary group formation among elites. The three main problems in studying these schools are the general difficulty of studying elites, the omnipotence of the principal or headmaster, and the problem of data collection in a student subculture located in a total institutional setting. Suggestions are offered for surmounting these problems. Some of them are shared by all sociologists who study secondary and elementary schools, though they remain under-emphasized in the literature because of the heavy research investment in research at the college level. More attention needs to be given to the basic problem of adult researchers trying to communicate with the children and adolescents whom they are studying.