Accessing Privilege: Teachers’ Experiences in Elite Private Schools

Schools serve as a site of investigation for social reproduction, often with a lens on marginalized communities to elucidate how inequity and class disparities are actualized. Comparatively, there has been less access to private schools for researchers, and therefore, fewer studies that focus on the role of upper-class communities in maintaining these structures. This study explores the elite private school environment to come to an awareness of how privileged self-understandings are created in these institutions via educators’ perspectives. Privileged dispositions can be a barrier to building an equitable world as they are oriented toward self-fulfillment, often with little regard for one’s impact on others. Focusing on the experiences of teachers broadens existing research and creates space to think about the implicit and explicit ways educators relate to privilege for the purpose of critical reflection and change.

Two questions frame this endeavour: How do teachers working in elite private schools perceive and negotiate privilege in various spaces? Secondly, how might teachers’ experiences engender privilege or how might they challenge it in their everyday practices? This study explored these questions through a series of three in-depth interviews with eight middle and secondary educators in southern Ontario with varying degrees of experience in elite private schools. Using an iterative, thematic, and intersectional approach to data analysis, this study arrives at patterns of how privileged self-conceptions are formed, reinforced, and areas in which there are attempts to challenge them. Ultimately, this study finds that despite teachers’ attempts to confront privilege, they take part in reinforcing privileged self-understandings of their students. Educators feel they can teach about the topic but are limited in the extent they can challenge the privilege that pertains to students or parents. As well, teachers adopt their own privileged self-understanding and perpetuate exclusion based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and linguistic differences. These factors shape how they conceive of their responsibility and work as teachers in relation to students and colleagues. In making these distinctions, it becomes clearer what hidden discourses shape teachers’ experiences, who is most implicated by these narratives, and the power dynamics that exist in elite spaces.