The Best and the Rest: A discussion about art, education and class
Dr. Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández, author of The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School and Dr Eleonora Belfiore, discuss the class divide in arts education in the UK and the US. Chaired by Patricia Thomson, University of Nottingham.
For two years, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández shared the life of what he calls the “Weston School,” an elite New England boarding school. He sat in on classes, ate meals in the dining halls, cheered at sporting events, hung out in dorms while students baked cookies or celebrated birthdays. And through it all, observing the experiences of a diverse group of students, conducting interviews and focus groups, he developed a nuanced portrait of how these students make sense of their extraordinary good fortune in attending the school.
Vividly describing the pastoral landscape and graceful buildings, the rich variety of classes and activities, and the official and unofficial rules that define the school, The Best of the Best reveals a small world of deeply ambitious, intensely pressured students. Some are on scholarship, others have never met a public school student, but all feel they have earned their place as a “Westonian” by being smart and working hard. Weston is a family, they declare, with a niche for everyone, but the hierarchy of coolness―the way in which class, race, sexism, and good looks can determine one’s place―is well known.
Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández is Associate Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. His research and scholarship are concerned with questions of symbolic boundaries and the dynamics of cultural production and processes of identification in educational contexts. He draws on cultural studies, postcolonial and feminist theory, and critical sociology to inform his understanding of curriculum and pedagogy as encounters with difference. His current research focuses on the experiences of students attending specialized arts program in public high schools in cities across Canada and the United States. He is also Principal Investigator of the Youth Solidarities Across Boundaries, a participatory action research project with Latino/a immigrants and Indigenous youth in the city of Toronto. His theoretical work focuses on the relationship between creativity, decolonization, and solidarity. His book The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School (2009, Harvard University Press) is based on two years of ethnographic research at an elite boarding school in the United States. He is co-editor with Adam Howard of Educating Elites: Class Privilege and Educational Advantage (2010, Rowman & Littlefield).
Eleonora Belfiore is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Loughborough University. She has published extensively on cultural politics and policy, and particularly the place that notions of the ‘social impacts’ of the arts have had in British cultural policy discourses. With Palgrave she has published, with Oliver Bennett, The Social Impact of the Arts: An intellectual history (2008) and co-edited with Anna Upchurch a volume entitled Humanities in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Utility and Markets (2013). More recently, her research has focused on researching the politics of cultural value, and she was Director of Studies of the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value (2013-5), and co-author of its final report, Enriching Britain: Culture, creativity and growth, published in February 2015. Eleonora is currently developing new research on the cultural value of everyday forms of cultural participation in her role as co-investigator on the AHRC funded Connected Communities project ‘Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Values’.
Event:
The Best and the Rest: A discussion about art, education and classDates:
1 Nov 2016, 6.30pm–8.30pmSupported by:
