Analysis of Practice I: The Other Who Validates Our Superiority

Abstract

This telling case study examines an award-winning school linking project between a school in England and one in Ghana. The data analyzed involved news articles published in the media and online, research notes on a public presentation, and a government report. I decided to focus my analysis on information available to the wider public and not on the perceptions of staff, teachers, and pupils, which would require interviews and could raise problematic methodological and ethical issues. Therefore, this analysis does not look into what is actually going on in the classrooms in this school, but into the representations that are available to the public and that often aim to encourage other schools to follow the U.K. school example. Before I proceed to describe the background of the link, it is necessary to contextualize school linking in the U.K. context.