2024 Theses Doctoral

Class in Class: Exploring the Development of the Transformative Potential between Socio-economically Privileged Students in Egypt

Elbendary, Bassem

As future holders of power, nurturing a critical consciousness among economically privileged populations is urgently needed as it could encourage them to actively challenge class oppression around them. Egyptian international school students typically belong to this population as they serve as vehicles that push for the interests of global capital in the Global South. Given that they tend to be isolated from the lived realities of most Egyptians, it is important to understand how to craft pedagogies that expose the privileged to the lived and structural realities that maintain class oppression.

Given the limited research on this topic, this qualitative study explores means of employing Critical Pedagogical ethos and practices through a collaboratively designed curriculum that attempts to nurture their awareness, accountability, and efficacy. Utilizing interviews, photo elicitation tasks, ethnographic observations and teacher reflections, this study investigates the processes, pushback, and transformations of nine economically privileged high school students in two international schools in Cairo, as their teachers implement a curriculum on the intersection between social class and education in Egypt.

Findings suggest that students went through transformations in their awareness of the other, their structural awareness, and imaginaries of action. However, their sense of accountability and recognition of the intertwine between their own positionalities and economic inequality, served as an obstacle against cultivating an analysis of systemic class oppression, causing a state of dissonance.

Moreover, teachers’ findings demonstrate a tension between strong content knowledge and real-life interaction due to administrative constraints, and push for rethinking the potential of a critical curriculum by teachers who don’t identify as critical. The findings suggest using the international school as a microcosm of oppressive class dynamics, to help interrogate the self in relation to the other and the structural (both locally and globally), as well as a space to imagine and implementaction. It also has implications on how critical subject matter can be developed to help teachers address class inequality.