The Power of Privilege Students become collaborators in study of affluence and education Stephen Collins ’74 story
JEFF POULAND pHOTOS
Last February, at the first meeting of the course Social Class and Schooling, Associate Professor of Education Adam Howard unveiled his plan. All 23 students were going to be his collaborators on a book about privilege and educational achievement. Publication all but guaranteed. The opportunity? Each student would get coauthor credit on a research-based social science book. The cost? A boatload more work than anyone signed up for when they registered for Education 322. Howard made his expectations clear and suggested that those not up to the challenge should drop the course then and there. Nobody bailed. Four months later, with results of the semester’s work in hand, Howard was getting up early to work on the book, more excited about the project than ever. Students said they worked harder, learned more, and got far more out of the course than they had anticipated. Howard, who studies the role of social class in education, has taken a different tack than most scholars in that field. Instead of focusing on the challenges faced by underprivileged students, he researches and writes about affluent youth. He goes beyond the dominant narrative— that privilege is only about the advantages that one group has over another—to research privilege as a part of someone’s identity. Privilege isn’t a commodity, it’s a way of understanding oneself and others and it affects how we act, he maintains. Howard’s previous books are Learning Privilege: Lessons of Power and Identity in Affluent Schooling, which he published in 2008, and Educating Elites: Class Privilege and Educational Advantage, published in 2010, which he coedited. This year he got his class to help research the next book by conducting interviews with high school students from affluent families around the country. Their goal was to tease out how social inequalities are created and maintained—how a privileged teenager’s identity development results in advantages in school and in life. One of the themes the student researchers found is a correlation between the subjects’
In his course on the role of social class in education, Associate Professor of Education Adam Howard asked students to become coauthors for a book about how privilege works in schooling.
“It gave you a different sort of motivation because it was no longer just for a grade. It was for distributing research in the real educational literature stream.” —Anna Caron ’13 economic status and their confidence, and Howard says that link may become the focus of the book. Along the way, Colby students learned how high the standards are for social science research, how hard an editor (Howard, in this case) will push a writer, and how important it is
to get it right when what you’re writing is going to end up in a book. “It gave you a different sort of motivation because it was no longer just for a grade,” said Anna Caron ’13. “It was for distributing research in the real educational literature stream.” As he planned the research, Howard recognized that his students at Colby could play a critical role in helping to formulate and ask questions. Unlike their professor, who grew up poor in rural Kentucky, many of his students came from privileged circumstances. They had the social and cultural capital to know the world they were about to study, how to frame the questions and interpret the results. The Colby students’ understanding of the topic and the literature on social class and educational achievement was the primary goal of the course. “We spend a significant amount of time trying to wrap our minds around this notion of social class, because you want to make
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