Abstract
Analysis of an outcome-based, self-paced high school in Western Canada demonstrates the difficulty of changing the grammar of schooling even through extensive reform. Aiming to be a school for everyone, the institution studied has ended up as an alternative high school for students who possess middle-class cultural capital: the very people who tend to succeed in conventional schools. Discussion shows how the frames of pedagogy at the school are interrelated, so that changing one produces a compensatory effect in the others; and how the need to be seen as a successful school ultimately undermines the motivation for reform.
Copyright © AJER, the Faculty of Education, and the University
of Alberta, 2001.
Last revised: November 12, 2001.
Designed by G.H. Buck