Assignment 1 Finished!

Wrote the final draft, checked it, checked it again and checked it again..and sent it. 5 days early but I wanted it out there so I could concentrate on my next assignment for Cultural Politics of Education. This involves interviewing 3 people and finding out about their highschool experiences. I just sent this message off to 5 friends who I identified as being possible candidates;

I have this assignment for university - detailed below:

1. Select one of the substantive issues addressed within the course. Appropriate issues are social class, gender, indigeneity, ethnicity or rurality.

2. Interview a minimum of three adults (must be over 18 years of age for ethical reasons) about how this issue impacted upon their own schooling.

In other words, you are asking your interviewees to reflect upon their own schooling and to explain to you how the specific issue of interest influenced the nature of the schooling which they (or their peers) experienced. For example, you could ask them about how the physical lay-out of the class, the curriculum taught, the nature of the teaching employed, or the relationships between teachers and students, the way different groups of students were treated in the playground, or any other practices which occur within schools, were all influenced by students' class or gender or ethnicity etc

I would like to focus on the issue of social class in reference to this.

What I would like to know is if I could have an hour of your time to ask some questions, have a loose discussion about this issue of social class and your own highschool experience. Perhaps you felt that class was very evident and was an issue at your school, maybe not. Maybe because of your class background or perceived class background you felt that you were pushed in certain directions in school or maybe not. Were you aware of inequalities - directed from the teacher to the students or within the student body? Were these explicit or implicit? How was your parent's attitude toward education? Were they aware of social class in determining how you were to be educated - private school, public school, work ethic etc?

These are just some ideas to get your minds going.

I only need three interviews but would like to talk to more people so that when I do work with the literature I have a lot of scope for choosing which best works for the essay at the time. If you would be interested in doing this I will obviously need to set up a time - this can be over coffee (or wine ; ) but I will be bringing my tape recorder ; ) I need for you to sign a document after I have written a summary of the interview to say that it is a true representation of our discussion but apart from talking to me, it would be great if I can perhaps see (if it is possible and it certainly might not be) to see a school report, a teacher comment, maybe a website link for your school, or some other artefact that could be included in the project if you feel comfortable with that. I of course respect your right to say NO WAY to that.

Anyway, let me know and we can set up a time very soon if you would like to participate.

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We'll see what they say. I have already begun collecting material for this and have watched some good documentaries. More on this later as I plan to be reading furiously for background this long weekend thanks to APEC.

Adieu