DSpace Angular :: Browsing by Author "Webb, Andrew"

Browsing by Author "Webb, Andrew"

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A figurational approach to understanding school climate and peer harassment: Possibilities from Norbert Elias's work
(2021) Webb, Andrew
Although psychological approaches have been the mainstay of scholarly research on school climate, offering state-of-the-art measurements and methodologies, sociological perspectives remain essential perspectives because violence is essentially a social phenomenon. This paper offers a theoretical consideration of contributions to this field, focusing specifically on those that provide a critical historical lens. I suggest that while Foucault's approach to the disciplining of docile bodies and self-restraint offers crucial conceptual tools, Norbert Elias's work-which is scarce in scholarly research on school climate-provides a complementary but necessary framework for understanding emotional and relational aspects of peer harassment.
Becoming neoliberal policy subjects: Staff members' discursive practices about school climate in Chile
(2023) Webb, Andrew; Becerra, Sandra; Sepulveda, Macarena
Reforms to school climate policies in Chile have led to a marked shift away from punitive approaches for dealing with bullying behaviours, toward more educationally formative processes. Schools in this national context have also been given greater responsibilities for designing anti-bullying practices relevant to their own educational communities. Based on qualitative interviews with staff members in six inner-city schools in the Chilean capital we query whether these policies really enable staff to create positive school climates. We suggest instead that, from a Foucauldian perspective of governance, staff become self-regulated subjects caught between a celebration of administrative autonomy and the pressure to meet national standards of anti-bullying in underfunded and under-resourced schools in socially deprived areas. Rather than solve bullying, staff become more occupied with the doing of new public management. We conclude by suggesting ways in which the current policies could be adapted to better support schools working in these contexts.
Educational Achievement of Indigenous Students in Chile: School Composition and Peer Effects
(2018) Canales, Andrea; Webb, Andrew
This article focuses on observed achievement differentials between indigenous and non-indigenous students in Chile. Using national test score data, it confirms the findings from previous literature that ethnic gaps in educational achievement exist, though they are small and to a large extent explained by family socioeconomic status. The results indicate that school composition with respect to the socioeconomic background and indigenous status of students matters for academic achievement. Controlling for the student's socioeconomic background, the ethnic composition of the school attended is associated with student achievement. In schools where the ethnic composition is higher than the national average, the test score disadvantage of indigenous students is larger, especially for those students whose parents both identify as indigenous. The implications of the research underscore the complexities surrounding the creation of equal educational opportunities for indigenous populations in segregated contexts.
Getting there and staying in: first-generation indigenous students' educational pathways into Chilean higher education
(2019) Webb, Andrew
Drawing on a total of 26 life history interviews with indigenous students in higher education, the article examines the role of activating valued resources and personal strategies to navigate unequal pathways into higher education. In Chile, the historical inequalities for indigenous people's access to higher education are beginning to be reverted, but these changes misrecognize ongoing disadvantages in regard to experiencing university life. Selection choices regarding the institution and course are based on restricted information sources and prior knowledge, whilst the capital required to succeed is heavily biased toward higher socioeconomic backgrounds. This notwithstanding, students' transitions into higher education are marked by spontaneous adaptations to work routines, managing crises, and the activation of other resources for 'staying in'. Emphasis is placed on the resilience expressed by these young people, as the first-generation from their families to access higher education, to negotiate cumulative disadvantages from low-quality educational establishments and poverty.
'He's actually very kind': bullying figurations and the call of capital
(2024) Horton, Paul; Webb, Andrew; Forsberg, Camilla; Thornberg, Robert
In this paper, we draw on the concepts of figurations, capital, and hegemonic masculinity to analyse a bullying relation involving two fifth-grade boys at a Swedish comprehensive school. The findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork, which included participant observations and group interviews with eight teachers and fourteen students (seven girls and seven boys) from the same class. Our findings demonstrate the complexity of the relation between the boys and suggest that rather than constituting a straight-forward bullying situation involving a problematically aggressive 'bully' targeting a less powerful 'victim', it is part of a more complex figuration involving interdependent social relations that are tenuously balanced in terms of power dynamics and where the boys position themselves and are positioned in relation to the long-term symbolic norms of status dominant within their specific school field.
Mapuche youth between exclusion and the future: protest, civic society and participation in Chile
(2016) Radcliffe, Sarah; Webb, Andrew
In Chile, indigenous Mapuche teenagers are caught in a deadlock between, on the one hand, parental aspirations and neo-liberal educational processes, and on the other, affective and social ties to a racialized and often stigmatized indigenous population and landscapes. The paper draws on the concept of vital conjuncture [Johnson-Hanks, J. 2002. On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vital Conjunctures. American Anthropologist 104 (3): 865-880] to explore the contradictions facing youth in transitions to adulthood [Jeffrey, C. 2010. Geographies of children and youth I: eroding maps of Life. Progress in Human Geography 34 (4): 496-505.] and to consider the spatial-territorial dynamics through which these contractions are expressed [Smith, S. H. 2012. In the Heart, There's Nothing': Unruly Youth, Generational Vertigo and Territory. Transactions of the IBG 38 (4): 572-585]. The paper explores young indigenous rural secondary students' understandings of their life trajectories and socio-political conjunctures. The paper shows that although indigenous young people express aspirations and even hope regarding their futures [cf. Kraftl, P. 2008. Young People, Hope and Childhood-Hope. Space and Culture 11 (2): 81-92], these expressions are best analysed in the context of ongoing racial exclusions, and the emotionally freighted situation this places them in regarding ties to indigenous communities and family members. Drawing on one year's in-depth qualitative research, the paper outlines the beliefs, practices and identities of rural Mapuche youth subjects caught between parents' experiences, and the Chile they want to inhabit with jobs, status and opportunity. The paper argues that vital conjunctures are not singular moments of modern historical events', as they have tended to be construed in the previous literature. Rather, vital conjunctures arise from and directly engage longer-term histories, not least in contexts of the global South where postcolonial exclusion occurs.
Moving Beyond Racism? Tensions Between Interculturalism and Conviviality in Chilean Schools from a Figurational Perspective
(2023) Webb, Andrew; Becerra, Sandra; Sepulveda, Macarena
Efforts to overcome racism in Chilean school contexts have primarily been enacted through intercultural and conviviality policies. While indigenous people's participation in schooling is much more equitable than in the past, we discuss some of the implicit tensions in staff members' narratives about overcoming racism. We draw on a figurational perspective to underscore staff members' perceptions of progress, the diminishing presence of racial discrimination toward indigenous students, and how this creates a sense of exceptionality. This, we argue, creates certain dangers of colour-blindness in these school environments. A figurational approach provides a long-duree perspective on racism as a social process that allows us to critique simplistic notions of progress and anti-discrimination, while also providing some countermeasures rooted in the concept of interdependency.
Robert Park and Norbert Elias's contributions to ethnic and racial studies: A relational approach
(2024) Webb, Andrew
Since Weber's work on ethnic affinities, two centuries have passed in which scholars have drawn on sociological traditions in attempts to capture the characteristics and complexities of ethnic and racial phenomena. While some authors' works have been critically acclaimed and widely cited, others remain somewhat more peripheral, including two of sociology's more famous names from the classical cannon: Robert Park and Norbert Elias. In this paper I present these seminal thinkers' central ideas, discussing some of the crucial points of convergence, as well as limitations and divergences between them, and conclude with some of the contributions that might be applicable for studying ethnic and racial phenomena as intrinsically relational and processual. I suggest that this approach is valuable for avoiding dichotomising tendencies frequently found in ongoing debates between primordialist, constructivist, situationalist, and instrumental accounts of intergroup identities. I note that neither Elias nor Park's individual approaches are sufficient as self-contained theoretical frameworks for the task of advancing an understanding relational ethnicity, but it is precisely in their conceptual convergencies where there is potential for moving forwards.
School climate from a figurational perspective: a case study of Chilean education policies and laws
(2024) Webb, Andrew
School climate policies have, broadly speaking, been analysed in terms of their effectiveness against violence in schools, or from critical perspectives that question the normative nature of their discursive 'truths'. In this paper I propose a complementary approach, inspired by Norbert Elias's processual sociology to address the long-term and unintended directions that school climate policies and laws have taken. Drawing on historical secondary sources from the nineteenth century up the present I demonstrate the spurts of civilizing tendencies that have brought about greater sensitivity to dialogue-based approaches to conflict in schools. I propose that although these policy turns do not occur outside power relations and specific interests (what Elias calls power ratios), the complexity of how they have developed over time cannot be reduced to disciplining or regulatory governance. In this regard, figurational perspectives have a lot to contribute to analyses of school climate specifically, and education policies in general.
Staff perspectives on victimisation in multi-ethnic Chilean elementary schools
(2019) Webb, Andrew
This paper draws on qualitative interviews conducted with school staff in four multi-ethnic urban public schools in Santiago, Chile, to provide a sociological analysis of common-sense constructs surrounding victimisation. The questions guiding the study were to what extent school staff share similar perspectives toward victimisation (as demonstrative of a school culture), and how this impacts the capacity to generate positive school climates in multi-ethnic elementary urban schools in Santiago. Drawing on theories of school culture, I propose that staff members' abilities and willingness to identify and implement preventive measures in schools are collectively defined and legitimated. I demonstrate that this has important repercussions in contexts of higher-than-average ethnic compositions where assimilation is encouraged, and victimisation is denied or attributed to other causes. Symbolic and superficial celebrations of multiculturalism are common, but cultural discourses of difference maintain ethnic youth in marginalised positions and prevent more inclusive educational practices. Some staff perspectives adhere to colour-blind liberal forms of racism in these contexts, and these are most common in school cultures where victimisation is downplayed or thought to be an issue cultivated in the home. Recommendations are made to incorporate culturally-sensitive pedagogies and cultural mediators to confront these narratives among school climate committees.
Teacher's social desirability bias and Migrant students: A study on explicit and implicit prejudices with a list experiment
(2024) Ayala, M. Constanza; Webb, Andrew; Maldonado, Luis; Canales, Andrea; Cascallar, Eduardo
Scholarly research has consistently shown that teachers present negative assessments of and attitudes toward migrant students. However, previous studies have not clearly addressed the distinction between implicit and explicit prejudices, or identified their underlying sources. This study identifies the explicit and implicit prejudices held by elementary and middle school teachers regarding the learning abilities of an ethnic minority group: Haitian students within the Chilean educational system. We use a list experiment to assess how social desirability and intergroup attitudes toward minority students influence teachers' prejudices. The findings reveal that teachers harbor implicit prejudices towards Haitian students and are truthful in reporting their attitudes, thereby contradicting the desirability bias hypothesis. We suggest that teachers rely on stereotypes associated with the students' nationality when assessing Haitian students' learning abilities. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to theories grounded in stereotypes and intergroup attitudes.
The how's and how often's of school harassment: How do they influence the academic achievement of adolescents over time?
(2024) Canales, Andrea; Webb, Andrew
A vast body of literature shows that school harassment is negatively associated with academic achievement, particularly in elementary and middle schools. Few studies have examined the influence of forms and frequencies of harassment-whether relational, verbal, cyber, or physical-on academic performance in high schools. We investigate how the how's and when's of harassment are associated with the academic achievement of adolescents over time in Chile, using standardized test scores of a sample of schoolchildren (n = 80,117) and fixed effect models. We find that being physically bullied and cyberbullied are linked to poor academic performance, whereas verbal and social abuse are not. These results underline the significance of working with disaggregated measures of harassment in school interventions at different stages.

Browsing by Author "Webb, Andrew"

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