What Brazilian middle-class students write in personal diaries about school: Entitlement, anxiety and social distinction in the high school routine

• In Event: Inequality, Assessment and Critical Approaches to Learning

Proposal

This paper proposal presents research concerning schools' relationship to social reproduction in Brazil. Specifically, the study interrogates how young students from a second-year high school class at a middle-class school in Brazil experience social distinction practices in their school routine.

Considering the theme of power and protest in education of CIES 2024, it is understood that students worldwide are a strong but often neglected voice of protest. That has been the case in Brazil recently, as demonstrated by the Schools Occupation Movement in 2016 (GROPPO, 2017), when students led a countrywide occupation in public schools against cuts in education investments, reinventing schools management, routine and curriculum. By exploring students’ narratives of life in school from their own personal diaries, this proposal engages with young Brazilian students and to account their perspectives in the debate of social classification in education – high school students, in this sense, are taken here as agents of school practice, and also as agents of reflection about that practice (FREIRE, 1988).

Students are considered active subjects of the educational process: together with other school members, students produce knowledge and, in fact, constitute what everyday school life is (GIMENO, 2003). The option for investigating young students specifically derives of the fact that they are interpellated by many social representations of youth identity during their high school years. (DAYRELL, 2007). Youngsters, in this sense, do not regularly find significance in the school structure (DAYRELL, 2007). This paper, therefore, centers the experiences and perspectives of Brazilian High School students, learning from their perspectives.

The setting of this investigation is a private school that predominantly serves the Brazilian urban middle-class. Examining a middle-class school is relevant since it occupies a unique position concerning the promise of academic success (BALL, 2011). Because of its intermediate social position, the middle-class interacts with the constant possibility of both social ascension and decline. This societal positioning compels middle-class families to “take advantage of the (cultural and economic) resources they have in favor of their children's schooling” (NOGUEIRA, 2013, p. 283), integrating education as a central element of social reproduction strategy. Considering the singularity of the relationship of this “petty bourgeoisie” (BOURDIEU, 2013) with education, new theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding middle-class schooling could bring contributions to the debate of social reproduction in Brazilian education. This is especially the case given the lack of studies of the private, middle-class school in Brazil due to fieldwork access difficulties (NOGUEIRA, 2013), as Brazilian middle-class schools configure a sociological “closed box” (DALE, 1988).

Blank notebooks were delivered to all 27 students in the class and students were asked to report their routine in school in the notebooks. 11 real diaries were returned, covering the most diverse issues of school life and presenting insight on the feelings and values associated with it. I used thematic coding as a qualitative analysis strategy to analyze students' personal diaries. Aligned to the focus of this study, two conceptual frames were used in the analysis of the diaries. Lareau (2003)’s notion of Orchestrated Cultivation, which argues that middle class families continuously encourage their heirs to acquire cultural capital in their everyday practices, was used to examine the distinctive educational strategies revealed in the diaries. Skeggs (2002)’s concept of Entitlement, which argues that the structure of feelings (WILLIAMS, 1989) of the middle classes is saturated by the tacit certainty that a variety of privileges are ensured, as if they were guaranteed rights, was also mobilized, in the sense of denaturalizing the privilege that is assumed as “universal” in some diaries’ excerpts.

The diary pieces will present the many dilemmas regarding relationships and the sanctions imposed by the urgency of “orchestrated instrumentalizations” (LAREAU, 2003): students feel they have to make constant medical follow-up appointments, to optimize their time for studies at a maximum level, or even to move to another city to study. Reading them, one has clues of how being a middle-class student demands sacrifice. At the same time, however, the privilege of having school as a priority, or having an apartment in another city, for example, are assumed, in the diaries, as if they were guaranteed rights, in a country where these are distinctive strategies that are accessible for a minority of families. Privileged education, in this sense, even though is a powerful asset for social classification, is experienced with anxiety and nervousness (NOGUEIRA, 2013).

Self-confidence, therefore, as the concept of Entitlement allows us to visualize, is present in the diaries in a structural level. In opposition to what studies reveal of the lack of funding for working class education in Brazil (PINTO, 2019), these middle-class students know they have access to books (and to the time for reading them), to English courses, as well as they know they are serious contenders for the very competitive test that leads to elite universities (ENEM), among other certainties. Privilege, than, is experienced as objectified subjectivity (BOURDIEU, 2013): it is taken for granted, as if it was the “norm”. Inequality, in the diaries, is not experienced by those who benefit from it as an exploitative relationship (which in fact takes place in the unfair distribution of material and symbolic resources), but is felt as “normal life”. Privilege is constituted from attitudes that appear to students as the only or most reasonable possible.

This paper advances the conversation about social reproduction in education by showing how educational inequality is experienced from the point of view of privilege in Brazilian education. Considering students’ perspectives as a primary resource of data is a form of bringing new insight to the complex relations of Brazilian schooling and social reproduction. Also, it reveals the importance of prioritizing young students’ voices in times when protest and student agency are considerably neglected in education policies and practices in Brazil and across the Americas.

Author

• Ricardo Boklis Golbspan, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul