Is context enough to suppress intellectual snobbery?

Imperial College, along with Oxbridge and another member or two of the Russell group, is frequently described as elitist and its students and staff as intellectual snobs.  I cannot see that, though that might be because such comments are from the sort of people who probably did media studies at the University of the-arse-end-of-nowhere.  On a more serious note, I cannot really say I mind terribly being called an elitist, though only if it is my meaning of elitist that is used.  I do not think the view of the world for my version of elitism is unique to me; I certainly hope it is not.  Yes I like nice things, and I want the best and there are standards I am not prepared to drop.  However, in teaching at least, that has to work both ways. 

            Having done my PhD, I am currently enrolled on a PGCE course that is also at Imperial.  In order to complete this course successfully I must be teaching in schools for a certain number of days and so I have been doing a lot of teaching practice across two London comprehensives.  In order to gain experience of teaching, I am given classes that span a range of ages (11-18 years) and abilities: ‘least clever’ sets up to (predicted) A grades at A level.  I enjoy teaching this range and I enjoy teaching the ‘least able’ pupils as much as the most able.  What I do not like are the pupils least able to shut up, sit down and face the front—but that is another story, mostly involving detentions in which I make them write out reasons why they should do as the teacher asks. 

A possible danger with calling myself an elitist is that it sounds awfully similar to an admission of snobbery on my part.  If Julian Fellowes is to be believed, we are all snobbish to more-or-less the same degree whether it be looking up, down, or sideways.  A recent happenstance from my teaching practice draws on these themes, as well as how we examine pupils’ understanding.  In order for it to be understandable it I should first explain context in teaching.  Context is basically a teaching tool that is used to bring scientific concepts within children’s grasp, and a number of teachers find it is particularly useful with lower-ability groups as it makes the concept easier to explain and leads to better understanding.  An example of context in a forces module in physics would be to use the movement of a car or aeroplane to explain friction, drag, weight &c.

My experience relates to teaching a unit on electrical circuits to a bottom-set year 7.  As part of this unit they are required to learn that electricity is a flow of electrons.  There are a variety of ways of describing this.  It did not occur to me to use a particular context so what I did instead was to teach it in terms of ‘look what happens when we disconnect the wire’ and ‘we know it is energy in the circuit because the bulb lights up’.  They seemed to understand, and the checking-of-learning mechanisms (called plenaries) I used pointed towards this.  However, in order to avoid the ethically unsound ‘teaching to the test’ I had not looked at their test paper before teaching this unit.  This was perhaps a good idea for two reasons, however one of the questions used an analogy of an electrical circuit to test the understanding, comprising of a circle of children as the flow of electrons, bananas as the ‘energy’, a banana stall as the cell and a monkey house as a bulb.  Although most of the pupils got the mark for understanding that the children in the picture represented the flow of electrons around the circuit, few got the mark for explaining why the picture/analogy was not a good model for a circuit.  Answers were typified by this one from a Sikh pupil “there are no wires or cells or bulbs, its [sic] just stupid”.  Although I agree with the pupils’ sentiment, this did lead me to wonder whether I had unwittingly allowed an ethnically-diverse group of ‘low-ability’ year 7 pupils to start to become intellectual snobs before they had so much as heard that phrase.