Social Justice in the Halls of Privilege: An Ethnographic Study of a New England Country Day School

Educators who care about social justice argue that our schools need to develop students who can think critically about inequality, challenge assumptions, consider multiple perspectives, and take social action. Importantly, they state that this type of education is necessary not only for those who are marginalized, but also for members of privileged groups who benefit from inequality. Although there is literature that focuses on the pedagogies teachers use to help marginalized students gain a sense of critical consciousness, there is much less focus on how to help privileged, predominately white students gain that same awareness.;To address this challenge, I conducted an ethnographic study of Beaver Country Day School, a private middle and upper school outside of Boston with a mission to equip its students with the tools to work effectively within changing global demographics by integrating discussions of social justice throughout the curriculum and learning culture. Using both interviews and observations, I explored how the students, teachers, and school leaders made sense of the school's social justice mission and what sorts of norms, values, identities, and tensions were produced through the language and actions of those school actors. To analyze the data, I used thematic analysis to distill the ways that school actors described the culture and mission; I then used discourse analysis to unpack the perspectives from which those actors spoke and how those perspectives shaped and reflected the school's social norms.;Through this research I found that Beaver was attempting to produce a different sort of student than most traditional private schools by creating a caring culture that encouraged students to cooperate, take multiple perspectives, and make mistakes instead of focusing on competition and the promotion of self. Student responses to Beaver's mission varied by identity group. Groups that connected with Beaver's progressive philosophy tended to support social justice; those who believed in an academic achievement schooling model tended to think social justice was an imposition. Overall, I argue that Beaver's caring environment made social justice education possible while simultaneously constraining the teachers from challenging students' privileged ways of knowing and developing the curriculum to its fullest.