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Feature Story

Faculty Feature

Ellen Brantlinger, a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Indiana University Bloomington's School of Education, has been recognized for her book Dividing Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes School Advantage (Falmer Press, 2003). Her book was one of four American Educational Research Association Division B (Curriculum and Curriculum Studies) Outstanding Books for 2003. Brantlinger discussed her book last month during a special session at AERA's annual meeting.

In Dividing Classes, Brantlinger looks at the advantages enjoyed by school children of highly-educated professionals living in Hillsdale, a pseudonym for the town she has lived and worked in for more than 30 years. She said these advantages come at a cost to children from less-wealthy families. Her ethnography gives a glimpse of how middle-class mothers rationalize this imbalance and how biases among school staff perpetuate it.

Brantlinger, who is retiring this spring, has coordinated the Curriculum Studies Doctoral Program at IUB since 1998. Prior to this, she directed the Undergraduate Special Education Teacher Preparation Program for two decades. Most recently, she taught graduate courses in qualitative inquiry and seminars on "ethnographies of schooling" and "social class and schooling." She also taught undergraduate survey and methods courses in special education.

A representative sample of her publications includes: Sterilization of People with Mental Retardation: Cases, Issues and Perspectives (Auburn House, 1995); Fighting for Darla: A Case Study of a Pregnant Adolescent with Autism, Challenges for Family Care and Professional Responsibility (Auburn House, 1994, written with S. Klein and S.L. Guskin); The Politics of Social Class in Secondary School: Views of Affluent and Impoverished Youth (Teachers College Press, 1993); Inward Gaze and Activism: Moral Next Steps in Local Inquiry (Anthropology and Education, 1999); Progressive Educational Discourses, Conservative Pedagogical Preferences of College-educated, Middle-class Mothers (Journal of Curriculum Studies, 1998); and Using ideology: Cases of Non-recognition of the Politics of Research and Practice in Special Education (Review of Educational Research, 1997).

Brantlinger can be reached at brantlin@indiana.edu.

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