ABSTRACT
In an illuminating opening essay (‘Staying Ahead of the Game: The Globalising Practices of Elite Schools’) Jane Kenway and Johannah Fahey introduce the special issue’s major themes and their connection to the ethnographic research project that has been undertaken by our international collective studying elite schools in globalising circumstances. Kenway and Fahey note the key conceptual and working assumptions of mainstream and critical research on elite schooling to date and indicate the specific ground and point of departure of the theoretical and methodological approaches to elite schooling that contributors to this special issue propound. In this essay, they deepen the critique of methodological nationalism and its limitations with respect to understanding how elite class formation operates in twenty-first century school life defined as it is by the logics of globalisation and transnationalism. Drawing on examples culled from our ongoing multi-sited global ethnographic study, Kenway and Fahey offer illustrative instances of the globalising curriculum practices in all of the elite schools in the project. They provide a broad context for the essays that follow. In doing so, they redeploy Burawoy’s (2000) trichotomous model of global analysis – global ‘forces, connections and imaginations’ – to better situate these studies in a long arch of transformations and continuities that have characterised the mutation of the British metropolitan paradigm of elite schooling in its former colonies and outposts.
