MUNICIPIOS QUE REPORTARON BROTES EN EL 2007
3.10 FIEBRE TIFOIDEA - BOLIVAR 2007
The driving idea behind this thesis is to seek to understand the commonalities in school marketing that exist in schools with similar social profiles in terms of social class, gender and ethnicity have and how these characteristics might differ from schools with different profiles. As such, this thesis is less interested in the marketing of individual schools per se, than with groups of schools that are asserted to hold common features given their ICSEA scores, proportions of girls or proportions of students with language backgrounds other than English.
This thesis, therefore, relies heavily on aggregated data. And such aggregated data is de-identified by its nature.
Nevertheless, to substantiate many of its claims, it has been necessary to provide text and images from individual schools, not least in providing the discourse and visual analysis in the final chapters of this thesis. Quotes and images, self-evidently, can only come from individual schools. While these marketing materials are public documents and their intent is to promote their various schools, nonetheless, the decision has been made to de-identify the schools throughout.
This was not an easy decision to make. While it could be argued that such de- identification is virtually a reflex response in education (te Riele & Baker 2016) particularly when researching visual materials (Rowe & Margolis 2016) – this alone does not justify the decision in this case. The researcher has a duty of care to make some effort to protect the identity of research subjects, however, in this case these materials are publicly available and are intended to be appraised, if for the purpose of assisting parents in choosing a school for their children.
There is a strong ethical argument against the de-identification of these materials, in that by making it impossible for the reader to know which schools compose the sample it is subsequently impossible for them to check the findings of this research by accessing what would otherwise be readily available materials. However, while it would be a relatively easy matter for someone so minded to track-down these schools, there are reasons for de-identifying the schools anyway. If only because it reinforces the point of this thesis that it is not the individual schools themselves that are of interest, but the schools grouped according to ICSEA scores, or the proportions of LBOTE and boys to girls in these schools.
Aaron Koh (2016, p.196), facing a similar problem in his research, points to the difficulties associated with finding theory relevant to the ethical considerations of one’s own topic of research. He quotes Emmison et al (2012) that one needs to, “justify your decisions (in regard to the ethical use of visual materials) based on your context (Emmison et al 2012, p.10).”
There are, rightly, ethical concerns about the use of student images within research. However, if one of the key reasons for de-identifying images is to “enhance
confidentiality” (te Riele & Baker 2016, p. 234) it would seem the onus for
addressing this concern must lie with the schools that produced and published these images and documents in the first place, rather than with the researcher.
That said, researchers are under an obligation to behave ethically, and this demand for research ethics cannot be ‘outsourced’ by reference to the prior unethical behaviour of another group. te Riele and Baker (2016) make it clear that it is the researcher’s duty to show their research creates benefits while preventing harm.
The argument justifying this thesis is that school marketing, and marketing more generally, is structured to make use of social stereotypes (Goffman 1979; O’Barr 1994; Williamson 1978), in fact, reinforces social stereotypes (Schoeder 2002). It does so often unconsciously by merely responding to the social doxa (Bourdieu 1990a) – the ‘taken for granted’. Therefore, this thesis, in seeking to highlighting how consistently schools in all social locations reinforce such social stereotypes, hopes to increase awareness of the harm being done by much school marketing.
It is certainly not the intent of this thesis to diminish the privacy of the students whose images appear in these documents, nor to expose them to ridicule (te Riele & Baker 2016). The author does not believe that this thesis does either of these things. Appendix 2 provides a copy of the ethics application for this thesis.
Although it would have been possible to modify images to make the identities of students impossible to identify, the decision has been made not to systematically distort or cover the faces of students. Firstly, this would have added yet another layer of meaning to these images, as de-identification methods are often associated with the presumption of criminal behaviour (te Riele & Baker 2016) or at least “change the visual narrative and as a result decrease the validity of the research” (Pitt 2014, p.320).
De-identification at the school level also appeared to be the only option available as, with Koh (2016), the researcher felt uncomfortable with the idea that identifying schools might imply an endorsement of schools from the researcher in terms of the education they provide. In no sense has this research sought to test the worthiness of the education offered in any of the sample schools, de-identification is intended to nullify this concern.
4. Commonalities – School Mottos, Curriculum and Buildings
This chapter and the subsequent six chapters present the data and analysis of the thesis. This chapter and chapter 5 are concerned with the commonalities that all 31 schools sampled for this study share. The categories developed here to interrogate these materials has been, as discussed in chapter 3, iterative and developed with reference to key ideas stemming from the sociology of education. For instance, all schools have buildings and those buildings have classrooms and teaching and learning equipment, they frequently have school mottos, logos or value statements, theyprovide their students with curricula and pedagogical practices, and they are
mandated to participate in various testing regimes, such as, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) or the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE). If school marketing materials are intended to assist parents to choose one school over another, it might be expected that these common features (and how schools do them differently, perhaps) would form an important part of such a discussion.
It might be also expected that the schools with the best facilities would be the most likely to discuss these, just as the schools with the best results in high stakes tests would promote these achievements to attract students. However, this chapter shows that the patterns associated with how schools discuss these common features are related to where the school fits within the hierarchy of all schools, particularly in terms of the school’s ICSEA score.
The chapter begins by considering school branding used on both school prospectuses (19) and school promotional videos (14): school mottos, mission statements, value statements and logos. It then considers how schools discuss their curriculum and pedagogical practices. The chapter ends by considering which schools are most likely to discuss their buildings and facilities and how they discuss this.