This paper details findings from a multi-site doctoral study conducted in three elite boys’ private schools in Australia. The goal of this study was to discover the agentic potential of the teacher subject to transform practices from within a social space more commonly demarcated by antagonisms between the haves and have-nots. Notwithstanding the substantive work of Connell, Kessler, Dowsett, & Ashenden (1982) and Kenway (1988) some three decades ago, the sociological literature on elite private schooling in Australia has been relatively silent on teacher subjectivity (Variyan, 2018). While there have been glimpses of teachers in more contemporary research conducted in Australian elite private schools, their appearance comes mostly through pedagogical dimensions of practice and in the reflections of their students (see, for example, Wang, 2016; Yeo, 2016). Kenway’s (2018) more recent portrait of teachers is typical of the findings in this field, seeing teachers as “thoroughly enlisted, by the school” (p. 98). What is largely missing from these depictions are the tensions, resistances and accommodations, or the “sacred, secret, and cover stories at the level of the school” (Cole, 2008, p. 343). Studies of this kind, I will argue, could move understandings of teacher’s roles in elite private schools beyond the visions of a “willing, even joyful, servitude” (Kenway, 2018, p. 100). This paper makes a break with these more routine renderings by exploring powerful data, emergent in interviews and observations, about young female teachers’ experiences of sexual harassment by their students.

The findings from this study, around the sexual harassment of female teachers by boys in elite private schools is found to be enabled by elite private schooling practices, discourses and material investments that are both historical and contemporary. By this I mean that the historical practices and discourses for elite private schools Australia who trace their values, traditions and modern practices to the English Public Schools of England, have contemporary value where “such airs and graces are a marketing dream for educational consumerism” (Prosser, 2018, p. 2). And as such, the anachronisms of the past continue to intimately linked with the constitution of elite private school communities in the present day. Yet there are also modern-day impingements on these schools’ projects such as the marketisation of schooling provision and the rapid onset of digital communication technologies. These imperatives and infrastructure produce market disciplines that the elite private schools are vulnerable to, and suggest that this is a crucial element of why sexual harassment is by and large disappeared. Teachers are also found to participate in their own oppression in actively participating in disavowals and erasures of these transgressive behaviours, which compound the effects of sexual harassment that are experienced by young female teachers. This study also evidences how boys in elite private schools are agentic in their own right, displaying an ability to enact their agency over spatialities both real and the virtual. The sexual harassment by boys in elite private schools that is reported by young female teachers is found to be energised by digital technologies and social-media in particular. These practices of transgression and visibility are made possible by the preponderance of digital technology that these elite private schools also invest in as a point of difference. Yet, it is clear that these same technologies have a dark side, increasing the reach of boys into the private lives of teachers and suggest that serious questions need to be asked about digital practices in elite private school today in regard to these issues.

This data discussed in this paper is drawn from my doctoral study, which was a two-year qualitative study of teachers in three Australian elite private schools. The data gathered included interviews, observations and site-level documents. This study utilised Foucauldian ideas on agency within a socio-material context combined with contemporary socio-ecological understandings (Biesta & Tedder, 2007; Kemmis et al, 2014) and theorisations on gender violence (Robinson, 2000; Robinson, 2005; Sue, 2010). This theorisation makes comprehensible how sexual harassment links to elite private school norms of masculine authority and valorised forms of hypermasculinity, which in part is made possible by the practices of male tribalism and a ‘compulsory disempathy’ (Quinn, 2002) developed through in-group socialisation. The use of ecological metaphors in this study offers insights into how Foucault’s thinking on power and knowledge, his ideas on space and social assemblages can be thought anew and utilised in sociological work. The concept of ecologies of truths and practices enacted over social spatialities offers a way of linking up the complexities of a research space intersected by a myriad of socio-theoretical and political imperatives. This ecological model thus makes intelligible the irreducible complexity of social institutions and how theorisations must account for the minutiae of how real actors go about harvesting, mediating, meshing and ignoring various imperatives to produce sedimentations as well as ‘contexts-for-action’ (Biesta & Tedder, 2007).

Although this is a small qualitative study, the fact that these incidents of sexual harassment were visible on all three sites suggest a range of implications for both advocates and critics of gender-segregated elite private schooling. Its findings implicate the elite private school in gender oppression, but aims for a further purpose: considering the rising awareness regarding gender violence felt globally at the present juncture, it is hoped that confronting evidence can be an animus to constructively dealing with this important issue. For school leaders who may promote their elite private schools as actively comported towards issues around social and gender justice, these findings raise thorny questions that are intimately tied to foundational aspects of their schools’ histories and practices. Moreover, considering how sexual harassment is now enacted in third-spaces such as social media platforms, the findings suggest that there is an urgent need to engage the wider community in conversation, because these modes of transgression now extend into virtual spaces beyond school life. These findings also raise questions about how these experiences might shape boys’ gendered understandings at formative stages of their adolescence and how these understandings might shape gender relations past their schooling years. Finally, the provocative nature of the findings suggests that courage in particular is needed by educators and school leaders for an authentic engagement and commitment to change, particularly if critique becomes politicised, because to do less is to let down those teachers who have been brave enough to share these challenging experiences.

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