Educational transitions in the UK are related to social background characteristics such as social class and, to a lesser extent, ethnicity and gender. This thesis presents a case study of admission to the University of Oxford to understand why, conditional on application, admissions patterns into selective higher eduction in Britain show an advantage for already privileged strata of society. Specifically, net of attainment, the professional middle class, white, male and state school applicants fare particularly well in securing offers for undergraduate study at Oxford. With the exception of the state school effect, the admissions privilege advantages already privileged strata of society. In the first empirical section, the analysis of purposefully generated survey data on 1,929 applicants for admission to the University of Oxford finds that quantifiable measures of merit fail to fully explain differential admissions patterns. The logistic regression models also uncover that while applicants from the private sector initially have similar gross chances of gaining an offer to their state school educated peers, they actually face a penalty in the selection process when taking into account their higher levels of prior academic attainment. Furthermore, the analysis shows that while measures of cultural capital, motivation, aspiration and learning style are meaningfully related to selection decisions, they do not explain the lower transition rates for ethnic minority applicants, those from non-professional class backgrounds, female applicants and private school applicants. The second step in the empirical investigations then aims to understand the generative mechanisms behind these findings from the perspective of the decision makers in the selection process. This section draws on interviews with 25 admissions tutors and the observation of eight admissions meetings. The analysis here finds that selectors view the admissions exercise as involving risks and uncertainties. Also, many participating tutors routinely considered schooling in their selection decisions and discounted the performance of applicants who had come from very high achieving schools but who were not top achievers within this peer group. The mechanism of homo-social reproduction in decisions involving uncertainty is then put forward as a possible explanation for the unequal transition patterns. Finally, the third empirical analysis section investigates links between degree performance in final university examinations and admissions relevant factors. This section includes the degree performance of Oxford students as well as those who subsequently embarked on their degree course at universities other than Oxford. The most striking finding is that among the Oxford graduates, female and private school students are less likely to achieve first class degrees than their male and state school educated peers. One interpretation of this finding is that the discounting that selectors apply in the admissions process for these applicants is not only justified but may not even go far enough. But it is also possible, in particular with regard to the female effect, that the Oxford study environment or the examination system, or both are more conducive to male achievements. This thesis contributes to sociological theory by showing that existing models of educational transition have paid insufficient attention to the role of gatekeepers and their individual preferences in generating aggregate selection patterns. Incorporating selectors as actors in transition models increases our understanding of unequal access to educational institutions and the challenges faced in striving towards equal opportunities in an education based meritocracy. The findings presented here have implications for other fields of sociological inquiry that need to account for the role of individual decision makers such as labour market research. The work presented here has implications for policy making regarding selection processes within the University of Oxford and British higher education more generally. It could also aid university systems such as Germany, that are moving towards selective admission, to think about the challenges of designing truly equitable selection processes.

[pt] O presente trabalho, de cunho sociológico, efetua um mapeamento do perfil dos professores de escolas consideradas de excelência no município do Rio de Janeiro. Parte da hipótese de que, para além da situação sócio-econômica da clientela e das condições institucionais, o corpo docente é um dos principais aspectos que contribui para a qualidade do ensino escolar e para a construção da imagem de prestígio das instituições investigadas. Esta pesquisa é um recorte de outra mais ampla, intitulada Processos de Produção de Qualidade de Ensino: Escola, família e cultura que o SOCED/PUC-Rio - Grupo de Pesquisa em Sociologia da Educação - vem desenvolvendo há alguns anos. Utilizou o material empírico derivado do survey composto por três questionários (professores, alunos, pais) e aplicados em nove escolas anualmente apontadas pela imprensa como as melhores do Rio de Janeiro. Visando a articulação das dimensões macro e micro e a ampliação do corpus da pesquisa, utilizou, num segundo momento, dados qualitativos do trabalho de campo realizado em três das nove escolas da amostra. A partir da análise de dados como o nível socioeconômico, condições de trabalho, trajetórias escolares e profissionais e práticas pedagógicas, foi possível traçar as características do corpo docente que atende a clientela dessas escolas e levantar algumas hipóteses sobre o efeito-professor na produção de trajetórias escolares de sucesso. / [en] This paper, trough a sociological perspective, builds a map of teachers profiles of schools perceived as excellence institutions in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Our hypothesis is that, in the institutions investigated, beyond socialeconomic situation of customers and institutional conditions, teachers qualities are one of the main contributors to the quality of school education and the construction of the prestigious image detained by then. This research is a cutting from a broader research called: Procedures for Producing Quality in Education: School, family and culture developed by SOCED / PUC-Rio - Group Research in Sociology of Education - some years ago. It uses material derived from an empirical survey, composed of three questionnaires (teachers, students, parents) and applied annually in nine schools identified by the press as the best educational institutions in the city of Rio de Janeiro. To articulate macro and micro dimensions and also to expand the corpus of research, this investigation uses, in a second time, qualitative data acquired in fieldwork activities centralized in three of the nine schools of the sample. From the analysis of data such as socialeconomic level, working conditions, school and professional trajectories and teaching practices were possible to trace some characteristics of the teachers that serves the customers of these schools and raise some assumptions about the teachers effect in the production of well succeed school trajectories.

Submitted by Geyciane Santos (geyciane_thamires@hotmail.com) on 2015-05-14T14:09:41Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Marcello Mazzaro de Mello.pdf: 939836 bytes, checksum: cd150ba21ce304a066fd46bcc785eee9 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-14T14:09:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Marcello Mazzaro de Mello.pdf: 939836 bytes, checksum: cd150ba21ce304a066fd46bcc785eee9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-05-29 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This study aims to understand the divergent positions between the theory of social reproduction of Pierre Bourdieu and the theory of rational choices of Raymond Boudon. Theories involving the sociology of education are often placed at opposite poles in relation individual / society. On one side, the field of action subjectively motivated, rational individual choices, represented by Raymond Boudon, became known as methodological individualism. On the other hand, the inverse perspective, holistic, derived from macrosociological contexts related to the size of the collective structures represented by Bourdieu, known as structuring. In trying to understand the differences of these two theories, research is supported in methodologies related to bibliographic studies, as well as those pertaining to comparative studies of works and authors. To understand the theories of sociology of education, the approaches are preceded by a summary of the general history of western education, contextualized, where relevant, with the history of education in Brazil. Moreover, an itinerary is done in the history of sociology of education to a better understanding of its various currents. With this purpose is focused on the following: a) Identify and analyze the characteristics and contributions of each approach in the construction of modern conceptions of education; b) describe the most relevant findings of the traditions of social science research in education and c) understand the various currents of the field of sociology of education with its various aspects, in seeking to understand the "crisis" of educational paradigms. / O presente trabalho tem por objetivo compreender as posições divergentes entre a teoria da reprodução social de Pierre Bourdieu e a teoria das escolhas racionais de Raymond Boudon. As teorias que envolvem a sociologia da educação são colocadas frequentemente em polos opostos na relação indivíduo/sociedade. De um lado, o campo da ação subjetivamente motivada, das escolhas individuais racionais, representado por Raymond Boudon, tornou-se conhecido como individualismo metodológico. Por outro lado, a perspectiva inversa, holista, oriunda de contextos macrossociológicos relacionada à dimensão das estruturas coletivas, representada por Pierre Bourdieu, conhecida como estruturalismo. Na tentativa de compreender as divergências dessas duas teorias, a investigação está apoiada em metodologias relacionadas aos estudos bibliográficos, assim como àqueles concernentes aos estudos comparativos de obras e autores. Para o entendimento das teorias da sociologia da educação, as abordagens são antecedidas por uma síntese da história geral da educação ocidental, contextualizadas, quando pertinente, com a história da educação no Brasil. Ademais, é feito um itinerário pela história da sociologia da educação para uma melhor percepção de suas diversas correntes. Com esta finalidade é focalizado o seguinte: a) Identificar e analisar as características e contribuições de cada uma das abordagens na construção das concepções modernas sobre educação; b) descrever as descobertas mais relevantes das tradições de pesquisa em ciências sociais na área educacional e c) compreender as diversas correntes do campo da sociologia da educação com suas várias vertentes, na busca do entendimento das “crises” dos paradigmas educacionais.

Education plays a vital role in shaping social structures and influencing social mobility in a society, and thus educational equality is a concern for many societies. Considering the compulsory status of English from basic to higher education in China and its symbolic meaning in Chinese society, this study regards it as a window to explore educational inequality and its association with social structures. This study investigates the roles played by family, geographic divide, and institution, and the way in which the three interplay in structuring the educational pathways of individuals and shaping educational inequality. This study describes a qualitative case study of 36 students of different social milieus in an elite university. Data from the case interviews is complemented by classroom observation of three secondary schools within the educational system hierarchy, classroom observation of the elite university, teacher interviews from the four educational institutions, and collected documents. I draw on Bourdieu's conceptual tools of different types of capital, field, and habitus in order to understand the complexity of educational inequality in China. The data present striking differences in the educational trajectories between social groups. The success of higher-SES students is partly ascribed to the richer volume and types of their families' cultural capital, and the inclination for their families to transfer abundant economic capital to their children's embodied cultural capital. The interview data suggest that disadvantaged students rely heavily on formal education and are inscribed with institutional habitus due to the scarcity of educational resources obtained from family. More importantly, for advantaged students, their family, secondary schools (previous field) and the elite university (current field) work together in a consistent way, resulting in a positive momentum that contributes to a sense of belonging and fitting-in to the elite university. On the contrary, for marginalised students, contradictions and disconnections are found between secondary schools and the current elite field in terms of institutional habitus and practices, which to a large extent can be ascribed to the stratified school system and geographic divides. This situation leads to a negative momentum for them, which causes feelings of alienation and a sense of disorientation when encountering the elite field. This academic disorientation is evident in their transitional period. Their habitus is identified by a transformative tendency with easier access to dominant cultural capital and habitus. However, the transformation is circumscribed by their huge efforts made in overcoming the initial difficulties and their families' lack of capital. Some special cases in my study suggest a more equal admission policy and the critical role that institutions play in compensating for a family's lack of capital. This thesis concludes with suggestions for more inclusive practices for institutions and policy makers in China to achieve a more equal educational context.

[pt] Essa pesquisa se insere na investigação Contextos Institucionais e a Construção da Qualidade do Ensino na Educação Básica do SOCED – Grupo Pesquisas em Sociologia da Educação da PUC-Rio. Desenvolveu um estudo comparativo entre duas escolas públicas da rede municipal de educação do Município do Rio de Janeiro, uma que apresentou resultados acima da média municipal na nota padronizada da Prova Brasil de 2005 e 2007 de alunos de 9º ano e outra com resultados abaixo dessa média. A análise do material empírico (survey SOCED constituído por questionários aplicados para pais, alunos e professores das duas escolas; registro de campo e entrevistas com membros das direções) nos permitiu identificar características organizacionais e sociopedagógicas das escolas que poderiam indicar elementos importantes para a compreensão da diferença de desempenho dos alunos das duas escolas nas avaliações oficiais. Para entender as possíveis razões dessa diferença, a investigação procurou traçar perfil de cada unidade de ensino, considerando a estrutura organizacional da escola em termos de pessoal e de gestão; delinear os perfis socioeconômicos e sociodemográficos dos agentes educacionais; além de situar as unidades de ensino dentro da estrutura organizacional da Rede Municipal de Educação do Rio de Janeiro. As práticas pedagógicas de cada escola, a relação família-escola e a relação estabelecida com o poder público também foram elementos que surgiram na análise, considerando a localização geográfica das duas escolas, ambas situadas em uma mesma área da Zona Norte da cidade do Rio de Janeiro, porém uma dentro de uma área favelizada, o complexo de favelas da Maré, e outra em Bonsucesso, importante área comercial dessa região da cidade. / [en] The research is part of the investigation Institutional Contexts and the Construction of Quality Teaching in Basic Education organized by SOCED – Group Research in Sociology Sociology of Education of PUC - Rio that aims at making a comparative study between two public schools in the city of Rio de Janeiro, one of them showed results above the Municipal average of the standard grade on the Prova Brasil of 2005 and 2007, done by 9th-grade students and the other showed results below that average. The analysis of the empirical material (SOCED Survey) made up of questionaires answered by students’ parents, students and teachers from both schools; field records and interviews with members of the school administrations enabled us to observe some organizational and sociopedagogical features of the two schools which could point out pertinent elements for the understanding of the difference in the students’ performances on their official evaluations in both schools. In order to understand the possible causes of that difference, the investigation could draw up each school’s profile, considering the organizational structure of the school regarding the teachers and the school’s administration; draw up the socialdemographic profiles of the educational agents; besides locating the schools in the organizational structure of public schools in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The pedagogical practice of each school, the family-school relationship and the relationship established with the political power were also elements that arose from the analysis, considering the geographical location of the two schools, both located in northern zone of Rio de Janeiro; however, one located in a slum area, Complexo da Maré, and the other located in Bonsucesso, an important commercial borough of the city.

The purpose of this dissertation is critically to illustrate discursive recontextualization between sociocultural production and reproduction, with respect to both relations within and relations to music education in Swedish upper-secondary school. The starting point for the study is the Swedish upper-secondary school reform, Gy 2011, which has involved a marked reformulation of the agenda for music education in upper-secondary school. The general Artistic Activities disappeared, at the same time as the significance of a specialising education in the field was strengthened. This dissertation is driven by the desire to understand the results of the upper-secondary school reform by explaining the processes and principles involved. But, in a wider perspective, the dissertation deals not only with a single reform, but encompasses a search for the underlying principles that have had, and are having, a regulating effect on the design and positioning of music in publicly regulated education. The results show that structuring of the subject of music takes place primarily through the classification and framing of social relationships in general, and of interactional relationships in particular. The focus of these relationships has shifted from time to time, and varies from context to context, but has always been in relation to something that has been regarded as sacred. In recent times, the framing within music-oriented knowledge practices has become weaker. At the same time, such knowledge practices have shown an increasing need for the drawing of boundaries in relation to other knowledge practices. The latter also has a value in explaining why general music content was removed from the upper-secondary school curriculum, whereas a special and specialising educational programme was able to gain legitimacy.

Through an analysis of Social Studies textbooks of the government primary school curriculum of Bangladesh, this thesis highlights the role of the education system in pushing poor and ethnic minority children out of school. The texts and graphics are analyzed in order to examine the ways in which they oppress and exclude these children by perpetuating dominant ideologies of nationhood, constructing a notion of the “ideal citizen,” and criminalizing those who do not fit this category. Using an anti-colonial and post-colonial theoretical framework, the study situates the education system of Bangladesh within its histories of colonial domination and argues that the discourses present in these textbooks reflect colonial forms of racism and oppression, and reproduce class and ethnic hierarchies characteristic of the larger Bangladeshi society. Most importantly, this study advocates the need for a just and equitable education system that respects all children of Bangladesh as citizens of the country.

This thesis explores the ways in which the legacy of colonialism continues to shape the material and non-material conditions of rural indigenous communities in Bangladesh. This research examines the complex confluence of power, politics, economics, and identities in rural Bangladesh; it explores the web of local, national, and global mechanisms that (re)create and maintain oppressive systems and structures. Adopting an anti-colonial discursive framework and a case study approach, this research incorporates data from semi-structured and informal, in-depth individual interviews, focus-group interviews, an observational journal, and a review of relevant literature to study a remote Santal village in the Rajshahi division of Bangladesh. This study focuses on the voices of the local people, their experiences and narratives, and analyzes the data within the wider contexts of history, politics, and culture. The anti-colonial discursive framework that guides this study acknowledges the material and intellectual agency of local people and the value of their knowledge and lived experiences; it contributes to understanding local history and culture and the saliency of local resistance to oppressive practices. The research findings reveal that colonial structures of oppression are perpetuated by the devaluation of indigenous peoples’ mother tongue, education, culture, and religion and by distancing them from the land that has belonged to them for centuries. The findings present a shift from the ritual-based, cultural matrix of the rural indigenous community and its tradition-oriented socio-political and education systems. Exclusionary policies and practices of the nation state and Christian aggression have fragmented the Santal community, devalued their collectivist mode of living, and alienated them from their traditional ways of life. The process of land alienation has perpetuated the colonial legacy of terra nullius and displaced the indigenous Santal community’s sense of belonging and its inherent connection to Mother Earth, the bongas , and the spirits of their ancestors. This dissertation suggests that there is urgent need for activism to resist colonial structures of oppression that continue to this day. This study contributes to literature on anti-colonial struggles across the globe and offers a framework for understanding other colonial and indigenous contexts.

Through an analysis of Social Studies textbooks of the government primary school curriculum of Bangladesh, this thesis highlights the role of the education system in pushing poor and ethnic minority children out of school. The texts and graphics are analyzed in order to examine the ways in which they oppress and exclude these children by perpetuating dominant ideologies of nationhood, constructing a notion of the “ideal citizen,” and criminalizing those who do not fit this category. Using an anti-colonial and post-colonial theoretical framework, the study situates the education system of Bangladesh within its histories of colonial domination and argues that the discourses present in these textbooks reflect colonial forms of racism and oppression, and reproduce class and ethnic hierarchies characteristic of the larger Bangladeshi society. Most importantly, this study advocates the need for a just and equitable education system that respects all children of Bangladesh as citizens of the country.

This thesis explores the ways in which the legacy of colonialism continues to shape the material and non-material conditions of rural indigenous communities in Bangladesh. This research examines the complex confluence of power, politics, economics, and identities in rural Bangladesh; it explores the web of local, national, and global mechanisms that (re)create and maintain oppressive systems and structures. Adopting an anti-colonial discursive framework and a case study approach, this research incorporates data from semi-structured and informal, in-depth individual interviews, focus-group interviews, an observational journal, and a review of relevant literature to study a remote Santal village in the Rajshahi division of Bangladesh. This study focuses on the voices of the local people, their experiences and narratives, and analyzes the data within the wider contexts of history, politics, and culture. The anti-colonial discursive framework that guides this study acknowledges the material and intellectual agency of local people and the value of their knowledge and lived experiences; it contributes to understanding local history and culture and the saliency of local resistance to oppressive practices. The research findings reveal that colonial structures of oppression are perpetuated by the devaluation of indigenous peoples’ mother tongue, education, culture, and religion and by distancing them from the land that has belonged to them for centuries. The findings present a shift from the ritual-based, cultural matrix of the rural indigenous community and its tradition-oriented socio-political and education systems. Exclusionary policies and practices of the nation state and Christian aggression have fragmented the Santal community, devalued their collectivist mode of living, and alienated them from their traditional ways of life. The process of land alienation has perpetuated the colonial legacy of terra nullius and displaced the indigenous Santal community’s sense of belonging and its inherent connection to Mother Earth, the bongas , and the spirits of their ancestors. This dissertation suggests that there is urgent need for activism to resist colonial structures of oppression that continue to this day. This study contributes to literature on anti-colonial struggles across the globe and offers a framework for understanding other colonial and indigenous contexts.