Comparing “incomparable” schools? Extended case method and reflexive comparative study of teaching practices in Brussels and São Paulo

Abstract

Comparing dissimilar social realities inexorably raises the question of the way to establish a basis for comparison that respects the specificities of the cases studied while not at the same time considering the context as negligible. Seeking to highlight the contributions of Burawoy’s extended case method to addressing these challenges of comparative research, this article retraces the iterative design process of a multicase socio-ethnographic study of teaching practices carried out in Brussels and São Paulo public high schools. Revealing a sharp contrast between a teaching to transgress kind of critical pedagogy in the Brazilian case and a more conventional form of status quo education for democratic citizenship in the Belgian one, the research thus sheds light on the role of contextual dynamics in the emergence of these ideological divergences between two instances of public education. Unlike the inductive approach and its logic of generalization based on the search for lowest common denominators—relegating context and case specificities to the background—this article thus argues that the least intuitive comparisons are, in fact, the most likely to stimulate sociological imagination, questioning the obvious in the studied societies and opening up to a deeper understanding of each case.

Introduction

How can seemingly incomparable realities be compared? In what way could the foundations for comparisons be laid between social phenomena which, although similar, are rooted in profoundly different contexts? And how can this comparative practice contribute to challenging usually unquestioned dimensions of social life, stimulating the emergence of new research puzzles and insightful theoretical avenues?

These questions were at the very core of a socio-ethnographic study of the political dimension of teaching practices carried out in public high schools in Brussels and São Paulo. Revealing a highly contrasting picture between more critical or conventional pedagogical approaches, extracurricular activities more closely aligned with social movements or with institutional politics, and more transgressive or non-controversial forms of student activism, the comparison thus raised numerous questions such as how can social sciences and humanities teachers have come to teach very different content in very different ways; to what extent can public schools actually accommodate teaching practices and worldviews that either question or legitimize the status quo, making of them terrains of political struggle; or in which way can the origins of such differences—both between distinct school systems and inside each of them—be investigated by looking at the broader social processes that may have made them possible.

In so doing, the research sparked a myriad of methodological and epistemological issues, such as: how to conceive the comparison between cases spread across two very distinct national setups; in what way might theory contribute to the construction of a comparable research object; or how to account for the articulation between the field’s micro-sociological processes and the context’s macro-sociological dynamics.

These reflections converged with those of Michael Burawoy, a British-born sociologist and ethnographer teaching at the University of California: Berkeley since the mid-1970s. Spanning “four countries, four decades and four great transformations”—as emphasized by the subtitle of the book containing his main methodological contributions (Burawoy, 2009)—in a research career that has taken him from Zambia at the height of decolonization (Burawoy, 1972), to the shores of Lake Michigan at the dawn of its deindustrialization (Burawoy, 1979), then to Hungary and the USSR shaken by capitalist restoration (Burawoy and Lukács, 1992)—all marked by the tsunami of the “third wave of marketization” (Burawoy, 2021)—Burawoy gradually formulated a methodological approach capable of embracing a spatial and temporal diversity of cases, while at the same time enabling the construction of a sociological dialogue aimed at broadening the analysis to a wider context.

Inspired by the legacy of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology, the extended case method seeks to solve theoretical puzzles, placing the ethnographic immersion at the heart of the research process. It then proceeds to the progressive extension of the case study, with the ultimate goal of broadening the empirical reach of social theory by confronting it with new cases—each of which constituted as “anomalies” with regard to the preexisting theoretical accumulation. By seeking out divergences between expressions of the same sociological object, the extended case method lends itself particularly well to the construction of a comparative approach, preserving the particularities of each case, while seeking to reconstruct the way in which they are shaped by singular social, historical, political, economic or cultural dynamics.

Guided by these reflexive principles, this article retraces a case of practical application of this methodological approach in comparative research, reflexively reconstructing its iterative journey through the successive moments (see Table 1) of multicase ethnographic research. By so doing, it intends to answer Michael Burawoy’s (2009: 170) call not to leave the concrete path followed by the elaboration of the research “to preface, introductory remarks and autobiographical statement,” but to reintegrate these successive approximations at the heart of comparative ethnography as an integral part of its internal history.

Table 1.

Four moments of the multicase method (Burawoy, 2009: 205).

Starting (1) by a look back at the way the very prospect of this comparative research was born out of my positionality as a global ethnographer drawn between Belgium and Brazil, this article then focuses on the research sites selection process, (2) coming up against the positivist imperative of representativeness and (3) ultimately leading to the ethnographic reconstruction of teaching practices as social and political processes spanning across time and space, in no less than five public schools in Brussels and São Paulo. This article then grapples (4) with the challenge of comparing schools located in contexts so distinct that they may, at first, appear incomparable, (5) focusing on the necessity of theoretically building up the basis for comparison and ending up (6) narrowing the case study to the two most ideologically contrasted cases. This article then concludes by underlying how this methodological journey eventually makes it possible (7) to actually compare the prevailing pedagogical approaches in these two schools, (8) opening up to the extension of the case study to the social context shaping the distinctiveness of each case, as a way to solve the emerging research puzzle.

From global ethnography to comparative research

Despite the global scope that this comparative research eventually came to assume, I was initially only intending to carry out fieldwork in French-speaking Belgium. Starting this investigation at UCLouvain in the early 2010s, I was then deeply puzzled by the relative consensus around the socially conciliatory definition of the “education for democratic citizenship” project then championed by UNESCO (Delors et al., 1996) and the Council of Europe (Conseil de l’Europe, 2010) and by its enthusiastic adoption by policy-makers in my home country (Communauté française de Belgique, 1997, 2007)—despite the striking limitations of such a project (Antoine, 2011) tending to overlook a wide range of social tensions and political conflicts in a world yet increasingly unequal (Burawoy, 2014) both in a European setup and across the world system.

My aim was then to highlight the intrinsic inconsistencies of this project by documenting the contradictions of its empirical expressions in Belgian classrooms, studying the practices of humanities and social sciences teachers in socially differentiated high schools in Brussels, whose francophone school system—although entirely free and publicly funded—is notoriously characterized by educational inequality and social segregation between institutions (Devleeshouwer and Danhier, 2021; Dupriez et al., 2019). But, at the same time, my growing contacts with Brazilian universities—where I was simultaneously trying to find theoretical inspirations likely to contribute to a renewal of Marxist sociological research in the French-speaking world—led me to gradually shift the focus of my sociological questioning.

My discovery of São Paulo’s vast public schools network—as well as of the mere existence of a parallel private multi-tier fee-paying educational system (Akkari et al., 2011)—and the lack of resonance that this kind of uncritical pedagogic project in vogue in Europe seemed to have in the daily life of Brazilian public schools, led me indeed to go beyond simply criticizing its internal contradictions and to try to understand the reasons for its relative credibility in Belgium, a success that I had always taken for granted until then. In return, my prolonged experience in the French-speaking Belgian education system led me to question the intense precariousness of public secondary education in Brazil (Montoya et al., 2021; Venco and Rigolon, 2014), and to try to grasp its impact on the degree of credibility of alternative pedagogic projects among teachers who were often demoralized and resigned.

Starting this parallel fieldwork in Latin America—though without really knowing at the time how I would be able to integrate all these new data—thus made possible to question what could seem natural and obvious in Brussels from a Brazilian perspective, while what seemed immutable and insurmountable in São Paulo became conversely questionable thanks to the contrast with the Belgian reality. The new, more global, perspective that these comings and goings between such different social worlds provided me with thus considerably enriched my ethnography, thematizing so many new sociological puzzles regarding: the room for maneuver existing in public school systems when it comes to critical education, and the way in which its scope varies according to national and social contexts; the processes leading teachers to embrace or to question the ideological orientations of official curricula, and the connections between their teaching practices and their own trajectories and worldviews; the political role of teaching in opening students up to a variety of contrasting understandings of history and society, and the ways in which it contributes to fostering their imagination of their roles and positions within these.

Still, even if these puzzles did emerge from the confrontation with empirical data, they were not assembled without conceptual framing. Through the whole investigation process, the research was indeed theoretically informed by Antonio Gramsci’s (2011) analysis of the practical and ideological organization practices of “intellectuals” and by his assessment of civil society institutions as terrains of political struggle, as well as by Paulo Freire’s (2002) defense of critical pedagogy and his emphasis on questioning the status quo. These concepts thus turned out to be the “necessary lens[es] that we bring to our relationship to the world and thereby to make sense of its infinite manifold” (Burawoy, 2009: 13). But as any lens focusing on a moving reality, this theoretical framework has to be permanently calibrated and corrected. Through gradual confrontation with new cases and diverse social realities, the research thus contributed to the reconstruction and extension of theory, extending in the process its empirical grip on a constantly evolving social field.

Later, I discovered that this intuition of broadening the scope of ethnographic research—both empirically and theoretically—was, in fact, shared by other young researchers engaged in a global ethnographic approach; and in particular by a group of graduate students of Michael Burawoy’s participant observation seminar. In their preface to Global Ethnography (Burawoy et al., 2000)—a collective book published by the class of 1996 questioning and reconstructing conceptualizations of globalization across a wide variety of global research sites—Teresa Gowan and Seán Ó Riain (2000) indeed describe how their transhumance between their global research fields and the places where they lived and worked across the world helped shape their overall sociological perspective. In the same way as their co-author Zsuzsa Gille (2000) between Berkeley and Hungary, I would probably never have undertaken this comparative research if I had remained solely in Belgium, and if I had not had access to the theoretical and methodological resources I discovered in Brazil and the United States. And just like this heterogeneous group of young global ethnographers from California, India, Eastern Europe or Ireland, I would probably never have given so much importance to affinities between worldviews and teaching practices if I hadn’t traveled between places where political references contrasted to such an extent that they imposed themselves to me as a sociological puzzle to which I had to attempt to answer.

It was during this prolonged back-and-forth between Brussels and São Paulo—which continued well beyond my ethnographic immersion, in the form of sociological imagination—but also between my position as a participant observer in these different schools, my professional involvement in the academic world and my commitments within social movements, that the comparison at the heart of this research gradually took shape. But the path that led me to the construction of this multicase study was nevertheless much more tumultuous than the relatively clear and structured form of the synthesis presented above might suggest.

Fieldwork subjected to the imperative of representativeness

When I began my fieldwork, however, I had only discovered the existence of the extended case method (Burawoy, 2009) for a few months, and still, in a form that remained eminently theoretical and abstract (Antoine, 2014). So, although I already had the intuition that this discovery was calling for a methodological revolution in the very way I was approaching sociological research, I had no idea how to concretely tackle this challenge. Unlike the graduate students at Berkeley, I was not fortunate enough to attend a graduate seminar on the extended case method, such as the one organized by Burawoy (1991, 1994) for almost two decades. I literally had no immediate interlocutor in Belgium at the time who could have guided me in the apprehension of this methodology, which was then almost unheard of in the field of French-speaking social sciences.

So, although I was embarking on a comparative research project which I could imagine would call for an extended case study, the references which ended up guiding the selection of the schools within which to deploy my ethnography were the principles of inductive tendencies that I had inherited from my academic socialization in Belgium (Van Campenhoudt and Quivy, 2011): trying to prove that the comparative ambition of my research was valid by attempting to build up a representative sample, increasing the number of cases I would take into consideration so as to demonstrate that I had been able to capture a broad spectrum of teaching practices, which would then guarantee the scientific solidity and epistemological validity of my sociological conclusions.

In order to make my sample as representative as possible of the diversity of public schools in Brussels and São Paulo, while at the same time limiting the spectrum of my sample so that the schools studied were deemed sufficiently similar to allow comparison, I decided to focus on free, state-funded schools offering an educational pathway to higher education.

In Belgium, I therefore did not investigate the technical and vocational high schools—which, although representing almost 50 percent of the student body (Service général du Pilotage du Système éducatif, 2014: 23), were on a separate track of secondary education without direct access to university—nor the elite colleges or institutes with a high socio-economic index, which, although free in Belgium—as it is the case for all basic and secondary education—exist in Brazil only as private, fee-paying schools, and were therefore not sharing the public character common to the schools in Brussels.

In São Paulo, over and above the profound difference that already exists between public and private education, a further rift divides public high schools accessible only by a competitive selection process—generally Escolas Técnicas Estaduais, the State Technical Schools—and the rest of public secondary education—Escolas Estaduais de Ensino Médio, the State High Schools—with an even greater contrast between public schools located on the outskirts of the city and the edges of favelas. The more chaotic day-to-day school life of the latter was so distant from the Belgian cases or the other Brazilian schools in my field research, that they were not candidates for inclusion in my sample either.

Despite this significant reduction in the amplitude of the spectrum of schools taken into consideration, it was nonetheless in no fewer than five distinct public secondary schools ¹ that I finally conducted this ethnographic research between 2010 and 2014: in Brussels, in two working-class schools, the Collège Léon XIII and the Athénée Constantin Meunier, and in a school more predominantly composed of middle-class students, the Lycée Saint-François; and in São Paulo, in a mass public school, the Escola Estadual João Goulart (EE João Goulart), and in a public school accessible only by a tight selection process, the Escola Técnica Estadual Florestan Fernandes (ETEFF).

Ethnographic immersion and constitution of the research material

In the wake of this initial exploration and sample-building phase, my first challenge was then to actually secure access to schools and teachers themselves. From a methodological standpoint, this phase of negotiation and immersion (a cornerstone of any ethnographic endeavor) has to be approached from the perspective of their constructional effects on the research process. But whereas the positivist framework tends to consider these “context effects” as bias to be controlled and avoided at all cost, reflexive science tends to integrate them as part of the research’s internal history.

Indeed, as summarized in the table below (see Table 2), while allowing the researcher to break the one-way glass of survey research, immersion in the field also involves the construction of social relationships, unavoidably triggering power dynamics—both dominating or being dominated—with the participants. Similarly, the extension of the participant observation across time and space will also imply the construction of a degree of proximity with some categories of actors more than others, thus silencing some voices over others.

Table 2.

Reflexive science, power effects and the extended case method (Burawoy, 2009: 63).

Reflexive principles	Extended case method	Power Effects
Intervention	Extending Observer to Participant	Domination
Process	Extending Observations over Time and Space	Silencing
Structuration	Extension from Process to Forces	Objectification
Reconstruction	Extension of Theory	Normalization

Nonetheless, following the reflexive outlook of the extended case method, it is thus not a matter of invalidating ethnographic data production for being stained by these dynamics—as it would be following a positivist frame of reference—but to reflexively thematized them as part of the “power effects” unavoidably at play at the very core of the sociological research practice. They are indeed by themselves quite revealing from a sociological point of view: both regarding the inner dynamics of the research sites as such—and the subsequent positionality of the ethnographer inside them—and with respect to the broader trends of the societies within which they are embedded.

In Belgium, my field access—both in Léon XIII and Saint-François—was negotiated “from the top”: contacting directly the heads of schools and somehow securing their trust and approval through my Catholic university credentials. It was thus only after a one-to-one meeting in the principal’s office that I was introduced to the teachers and allowed in the staff and classrooms. In Brazil, on the contrary, my access was in some way enforced “from the bottom”: getting in contact with key teachers and gaining in their support through connections with unions or social movements—being then subsequently brought inside their classrooms, then introduced to some colleagues in the teachers’ lounge and only afterwards shown, at a distance, who the “person-in-charge” actually was.

Both access pathways thus revealed a certain power dynamics difference in the research sites: teachers being, at the time, somehow able to “enforce” the presence of a researcher in São Paulo, on one hand; the principals’ power to “impose” a researcher in the classroom not really being questioned in Brussels, on the other hand. From a reflexive standpoint, this also contributed to shaping both how I was initially seen and what I was initially told: Belgian teachers somehow seeing me as “coming from the management” while Brazilian ones could see me as “walking with the unionists”—inevitably coloring my ethnographic practice and data.

Indeed, moving from the status of an outside observer—the kind of positioning typically found in studies focusing on the critical reading of school curricula or solely on conducting interviews with teachers—to that of a participant in the school’s life requested to rely on the support of allies supporting me to enter day after day into the schools’ dense and enclosed social space. But while my first contact and ally among teachers in Saint-François was a highly regarded coordinator for the humanities area, connected to global NGOs and middle-class politics, the counterpart at João Goulart—who became my sui generis Portuguese teacher—was a rank-and-file sociology professor and union representative having migrated from the poorer Brazilian Northeast to the more opportunity rich São Paulo. And while my immersion in Florestan Fernandes was made possible by a colleague from the Universidade de São Paulo’s sociology department who was previously invited to the school to give a speech on the structural precarity of working conditions in Brazil (Braga, 2012), my access to Léon XIII was, in turn, secured thanks to the way my home university and its methodological tradition (Van Campenhoudt and Quivy, 2011)—with which I was precisely struggling—were held in high regards. The distinctiveness of each of these gatekeepers thus also hinted at broader social dynamics: the significance of both social movements and more critical sociological approaches in Brazil in the early 2010s, and of the pervasiveness of both NGOs politics and more mainstream scientific references in Belgium at the same period.

Still, staying almost exclusively on the side of teachers before and after classes as well as during breaks, domination and silencing effects were again quietly at play. Getting closer to these specific actors of the school ecosystem was indeed at same time pushing me further away from others. Again, this was not the case to dismiss this ethnography as a whole—itself driven by a research question and a theoretical framework focusing on teachers’ practices and worldviews—but to reflexively take these power effects into account and imagine ways to defuse very often hierarchical classroom dynamics, getting access to students’ voices by taking part in extracurricular activities or attending students assemblies.

Correspondingly, these very power effects also enabled me to get closer to the teachers whose classes I had followed over several weeks, allowing me to conduct more in-depth semi-structured interviews—the trust built up through a shared experience of school life having created the conditions for relatively freer speech. In an exceptional reversal of the logic of participant observation, these interviews thus provided me with the opportunity to temporarily submit the subjects of my research to my own agenda: addressing certain key themes—such as their life trajectories, their out-of-work activities or their thoughts on certain more general aspects of the school system—that these teachers rarely addressed spontaneously in the course of discussions punctuated by the routine of everyday school life, and thus playing an essential role in my apprehension of the sociological roots of their worldviews.

Comparison of seemingly incomparable realities

But despite my best efforts to move closer to the inductive canons of comparison by expanding the scope of my ethnographic research and empirically grounding my theoretical questioning, I was constantly questioned by Belgian colleagues about the sociological relevance and epistemological validity of such a comparative undertaking. On one hand, I was told that it was all very well to work in migrant neighborhoods in Brussels or to show a pronounced interest for Latin America, but on the other I was made to understand that it all seemed a little erratic and lacking in coherence. I was thus insistently asked how on earth I was going to compare such dissimilar things as Brussels and São Paulo schools, without being given the slightest indication as to how I could go about it.

Notwithstanding their tendency to “tropicalize” Brazil from a Belgian point of view—dismissing the similarities they both share as Westernized societies bound by colonial history and the uneven and combined development of the world system—these remarks contributed to “feed [my] mounting insecurities and undermining [my] self-confidence—the self-confidence necessary to write an ambitious dissertation” (Burawoy, 2005: 49). So, I too started to wonder how I was going to manage to carry out a comparison of schools located in contexts as different as Brussels and São Paulo: weren’t the differences between Belgian and Brazilian societies, and the subsequent contrast between everyday school life and teaching practices that I was observing at the time, so profound as to make a comparative analysis of their complex articulations almost impossible?

Indeed, according to the inductive logic underlying the objections directed at my research, the practice of comparison should indeed tend toward highlighting similarities between cases, so as to be able to infer a certain number of generalizations likely to account for the widest possible range of cases. In this context, if I wished to compare the practices of Belgian and Brazilian teachers, I would have to focus on the common dimensions of the different school environments: physical layout of classrooms, interaction between students and teachers, academic rhythms, social composition of schools, and so on. In so doing, however, the whole idiosyncrasies of everyday school life and teaching practices—not to mention the broader social dynamics contributing to shaping them—would be somewhat bracketed so as not to hinder analytical induction, thus undermining the very foundations of an ambitious comparison.

My methodological anxieties began to fade, though, when I discovered that this unsettling experience was, in fact, a common experience for many other PhD students embarking on the path of the extended case method, as recounted by Michael Burawoy in Combat in the Dissertation Zone (Burawoy, 2005), a piercing self-analysis of his practice as a dissertation supervisor:

Before you take-off, lacking confidence in your ideas or disagreeing with my assessment of what you are up to, you may seek life support from other faculty authorities who have not held your hands through the agonizing process. But their off-the-cuff remarks, made in the hurried moments of office hours, can have a devastating impact. Subject to a barrage of innocent questions for which you are not prepared, you are thrown off balance. You are interrogated: How can you compare workers’ movements in Brazil and South Africa, or labor organizing in South Korea and the United States? How can you compare the African National Congress and the Palestinian Liberation Organization? How can you compare gambling in South Africa and Nevada, economic planning in Turkey and in France, or state security in Zimbabwe and Northern Ireland? How dare you compare Serbian ethnic cleansing in Bosnia with Israeli occupation of Palestine? How often have I heard the song of the proverbial apples and oranges? This complaint too easily misses the point: the sociological magic is precisely comparing the incomparable, comparing apples and oranges by turning them both into pears! The more counterintuitive the comparison, the deeper and daring the sociology. (Burawoy, 2005: 48–49)

Suddenly, the founding principles of the extended case method, of which I hitherto only had an abstract understanding, took on a much more concrete form: what made it possible to consider cases as comparable in this methodological perspective was not to reduce them to their few empirical similarities, all other things being equal, but the fact that their similarity was theoretically constructed, that they were regarded to be part of the same sociological object. I, therefore, had to proceed with the construction of my case study: making the schools and teachers I met during my fieldwork the expression of similar sociological objects, albeit shaped by distinctive social forces.

Laying the theoretical foundations of a multicase ethnography

But constituting the object of research in terms of cases thus means a departure from a common conception of the ethnographic fieldwork inherited from classical anthropology where “the village or the tribe used to be a ‘natural’ entity, [in the same way as the ethnographic] ‘site,’ albeit connected to other sites, [now seems to] speaks for itself as a natural essence that reveals itself through investigation” (Burawoy, 2009: 202).

According to the substantial rationality (Burawoy, 2009: 68) governing the extended case method, the object of research doesn’t indeed reveal itself simply by having shared the time and space of actors over a long period of time; it is theoretically constructed—as highlighted by Michael Burawoy’s reflection on his own practice of comparative research, undertaking a comparison between his experience as a metalworker in the United States in the 1970s (Burawoy, 1979) and a similar experience in the countries of the Eastern Bloc in the late 1980s (Burawoy and Lukács, 1992):

We have to be self-conscious about the theory we bring to the site that turns it into a case of something—in this chapter a capitalist factory or socialist factory. What is a factory? What is a capitalist factory? What is a socialist factory? These are not innocent questions whose answers emerge spontaneously from the data but come packaged in theoretical frameworks. (Burawoy, 2009: 202)

In the context of this research, it was Gramsci’s theoretical contributions (Gramsci, 2011; Thomas, 2009) that enabled me to build the foundations of the comparison structuring my case study. Indeed, both Brussels and São Paulo teachers can be seen as intellectuals (Giroux, 1988), as practical and ideological organizers of society who even if subject to mainstream expectations are nonetheless not without a certain margin of maneuvers to steer their practices in a variety of possible directions. As for Belgian and Brazilian public schools, they can be approached as “trenches and permanent fortifications [. . .] of the compact structure of modern democracies” (Gramsci, 1978: 364-Q13§7)—and therefore also as terrains of struggles between different pedagogic projects and visions of society, as evidenced by various recent disputes in Brazil (Knijnik, 2020), Europe (Allen, 2023) and the United States (Zimmerman, 2022).

Consequently, while in the inductive perspective of my initial sociological training the appreciable social and political differences between Brussels and São Paulo—as well as the internal diversity of both cities’ public school systems—seemed to constitute a real headache, making my various fieldworks almost incomparable, in the reflexive perspective of the extended method they became significant advantages for my comparative research. Considering these distinct cases as expressions of the same sociological object will indeed allow their differences to emerge more clearly—then contributing to hindering theoretical normalization (see Table 2), a power effect consisting in the imposition of a one-size-fits-all type of generalization to a diverse social reality. It is thus precisely because teachers from the same scientific disciplines were doing very different things across diverse types of public schools in Brussels and São Paulo that this multicase ethnography called more than ever to seek out the sources of what makes the uniqueness of the ideological ambiance of each school, or the distinctiveness of the conceptions of history and society that teachers were introducing to their students, within the particular social and political configurations of each society, and the way these were shaping distinct worldviews and teaching agencies.

Narrowing the focus on the most contrasted cases

However, when I started to revisit my field data and began to write up my case study, I was brutally confronted with the very real difficulty of constructing a multicase research project rooted in no less than five secondary schools, each of them distinguished by their position in their respective educational systems, their student bodies, their teaching staff or even their ideological frames of reference. In fact, depending on the differences I would choose to highlight as significant, several different comparative case studies could emerge from my ethnography. I could, for instance, decide to compare the Belgian schools—in order to shed light on the sources and consequences of the social and racial segregation of the Brussels school system—or to contrast the Brazilian schools—in order to grasp all the contradictions of the public education network in the state of São Paulo. I could also compare the mass public schools in Brussels and São Paulo—to highlight the highly unequal development of the right to education in Belgium and Brazil—or compare the selective schools—with the aim of determining the ideological specificities of the training offered to “inheritors” (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1971) in a society in the heart of Europe, on one hand, and in one of Latin America’s largest metropolis on the other.

I thus gradually came to realize that the representativeness criterion that had governed my field research, in my attempt to respond to the positivist-inspired criticisms leveled at me—in effect succumbing to the temptation to ignore the reflexive score of the methodology that I had chosen to adopt—was in fact proving to be fairly irrelevant in the context of an extended case study; as Cihan Tuğal (2009) remarkably reminds us in the introduction to his case study of the fusion between Islamism and capitalism under the aegis of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP, supported by a long-term ethnographic research in Sultanbeyli, a suburban district on Istanbul’s Asian shore:

As stated above, the extended case method also emphasizes the uniqueness of cases rather than their representativeness. Sultanbeyli is informative not because it is a microcosm of Turkey (let alone the Islamic world) but because it was significant in the heyday of Islamism due to its role as a model, and it has now lost that status with the absorption of Islamism [into the Turkish regime]. [. . .] The logic of focusing on this unique case is to reconstruct theory rather than tell a representative story that is meant to exhaust all [what could be told about the] Islamic experience. (Tuğal, 2009: 13)

I, therefore, had to start dancing to the rhythm of the methodology I had decided to embrace. Instead of extending the number of cases so that the results of the research could be held to be representative of the practice of as many Brussels and São Paulo teachers as possible, it was rather the cases themselves that needed to be extended, so as to capture the emergence of their specificities in the way they were shaped by specific social forces. I then decided to center my research on the two cases that resonated the most with my theoretical questioning, that is, the schools where the contrasts of teaching practices and related political horizons were the strongest and the most visible: on one hand, the Lycée Saint-François—a secondary school from the Catholic network ² in Brussels—and its daily school life marked by a strong presence of NGOs and by an insistent emphasis on democratic citizenship principles; and on the other hand, the Escola Técnica Estadual Florestan Fernandes (ETEFF)—a technical high school in São Paulo—and its permeableness to the dynamics of Brazilian social movements and to sustained references to critical theoretical approaches.

But focalizing my case study did not, however, prevent me from drawing on material gathered in the three other schools involved in my fieldwork. The latter played indeed a decisive role in tempering the observations made at the two main schools, highlighting how Saint-François and Florestan Fernandes were, before anything else, pretty similar in regard to their respective positions in their school systems.

Both student bodies were indeed the result of an extensive selection process, albeit in forms typical to each society: forthright and direct in the case of ETEFF—under the shape of a vestibulinho (Bandera, 2014), diminutive of vestibular, the extremely selective admission exam to the prestigious Brazilian public universities—indirect and insidious in the case of the Lycée—via a profoundly socially segregative academic selection process (André, 2012) consistently orienting students considered as “less performing” toward technical and vocational education, non-existing in Saint-François senior classes. The kinds of students found in the graduating classes, where I mainly focused my ethnography, were thus selected to be academic achievers, with all the social and racial contradictions implied by these so-called meritocratic models (Bento, 2022): mostly white, coming from intermediate social strata, and aiming toward higher education.

Besides far less favorable pay conditions, larger class sizes and much heavier teaching load in Brazil than in Belgium, these similarities between Saint-François and Florestan Fernandes thus express the contradictions of their respective public education systems, creating at the same time the conditions of possibility for academic and extra-curricular activities that were less frequent, or even non-existent, in the more precarious school environment of the other schools included in the fieldwork. And it was intriguingly these very similarities that made the differences of their ideological “essence of the air” even more contrasting, outlining puzzles regarding both the strikingly divergent political dimensions of their pedagogical approaches and the very social processes that made possible in the first place.

Comparing two pedagogically and ideologically contrasted schools

The Brazilian school was standing out for the coherence of its humanities faculty. A group of teachers, sharing close trajectories along Brazilian social movements and common critical scientific perspectives, had in fact come together and started articulating an innovative interdisciplinary project around a multifaceted reading of The Conditions of the English Working Class by Friedrich Engels (1987): looking at social classes and the rise of the Industrial Revolution in sociology classes; dealing with the transition between Ancient Regime and the bourgeois revolutions in history classes; and studying the way industrialization was changing the cityscape in geography classes.

The Belgian teachers, on the contrary, were lacking this kind of collective organization but were still sharing some similar academic background from their years spent in Belgian French-speaking universities—where the kind of Marxist-leaning theoretical references to which their fellow Brazilian colleagues were used were notoriously weak, or even absent. Fearing backlash from the public school inspection body in charge of monitoring curriculum enforcement, they were mostly following the focus on competences and skills acquisitions shaping the history curriculum, actively using the only textbook actually existing at the time—unaware that two third of the scientific board of its last volume had resigned, criticizing a lack of global perspective and conflictual interpretation of 20th century history.

The contrasting compositions of the teaching staff and diverging orientations of the teaching activities were then resulting in quite different types of final assignments. At ETEFF, students were invited to question the topicality of Engels’s book by carrying out a fieldwork research plunging into a vibrant São Paulo’s city life often unknown to them, in order to look at the conditions of the Brazilian working population in the early 21st century. While at the Lycée, one of the most prominent conclusive projects, straight from the textbook, was to undertake a comparison between Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, with a view to uncovering the common grounds between totalitarian regimes—overlooking the very distinctive social, political and historical processes tragically leading to these two dictatorships.

So, while the Brazilian students were invited to test a theoretical approach in order to evaluate in which ways it could still be relevant nowadays, being able to question and update it based on the observations made during fieldwork, their Belgian colleagues were meanwhile asked to confirm a theory looking at similarities between cases, thus failing to highlight the very blind spots of the chosen unifying concept (Traverso, 2017). The logic of comparison and underlying epistemological principles couldn’t be more different.

Similarly, the kind of outreach activities aimed at the socio-political awakening of students also revealed quite meaningful distinctions. While the teachers at ETEFF were regularly inviting critical academics or union and social movements representatives to interact with the students during “Florestan Talks” in the main school auditorium, their counterparts at the Lycée were in turn organizing “Democracy Watch” events in times of elections, asking journalists from some established Belgian newspapers to moderate debates between leaders of mainstream political parties. And this contrast between a more social movement-oriented tendency and a more institutional one then extends to the kind of extracurricular activities offered to students.

At Florestan Fernandes, one of the first field trips offered to recently admitted students was a visit to one of the settlements of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra [MST: Landless Workers’ Movement]. Focused on agro-ecological production and the meaning of a social movement struggling in favor of agrarian reform in an agribusiness dominated Brazil, this visit was often a wake-up call for students—questioning the prejudices over MST often shared in more conservative circles and the Brazilian media.

In Belgium, by contrast, the main protagonist was not a grassroot social movement but a global NGO. The Oxfam logo was indeed ubiquitous in the corridors and classrooms, on posters with the catchphrase “flavours of the world, taste of justice” or on stickers featuring the tagline “FairTrade@School.” The focus was then put more on consumption—as an individual citizen choice to purchase “fair-trade” goods—than on production—understood in its political dimension as a struggle carried out by self-organized social movements fighting for land reforms and more egalitarian income distribution.

The “essence of the air” in these two schools was thus strikingly different, supporting and stimulating quite distinctive forms of student activism. In Saint-François, the center of the schoolyard was occupied by the “Oxfam shack” in which, during breaks, volunteered students—organized in teams coordinated by one of the main teachers from the humanities area—were selling fair-trade sweets from the global NGO line of products to their fellow classmates. As a highly anticipated event in the school calendar, the traditional “Oxfam breakfast” was then organized once a year, bringing together hundreds of students and dozens of teachers to taste juices, cookies and other dried fruits—a kind of citizen action highly regarded as an ethical commitment to make the world a fairer place, without having to leave the school premises.

In Florestan Fernandes, the center of the schoolyard was contrastingly occupied by a little square nicknamed “Praceta do Grêmio” [Students’ Council Little Square]. Surrounded by trees of the Atlantic Forest and forming a small theater, it was the place where students were holding meetings and self-organized assemblies after classes, addressing both issues related to the daily school life and broader socio-political questions. In the year following my main fieldwork, ETEFF students noticeably stood out for taking an active part in the Movimento Passe Livre [Free Fare Movement] and in the struggle in favor of free public transportation in São Paulo, very spark of the Jornadas de Junho [June Days] of 2013, one of the largest and more pivotal mobilizations in the history of contemporary Brazil.

From an emerging puzzle to the search for sources of differences

In spite of their shared position in their respective school systems and similar social composition of their students’ bodies, teaching practices, extracurricular activities and even student activism in Saint-François and Florestan Fernandes were thus deeply contrasting: teachers, from the same subject area, were not teaching the same things in the same ways; schools, as part of their public education systems, were not encouraging the same kind of critical thinking and promoting the same conception of citizenship; and students, as political actors in the making, were not organizing in the same manner and with the same goals.

Teachers, as key practical and ideological organizers of the daily school life, were thus steering their teaching practices in very different pedagogical and political ways, introducing their students to divergent interpretations of history, understandings of society and imaginations of the future. While the global trend at the Lycée was significantly leaning toward the UNESCO’s and Council of Europe’s conception of education for democratic citizenship as a crucial vector of social cohesion and political legitimation of the status quo, through active participation in the European variation of liberal democracy and its non-governmental industrial complex; the central dynamic at ETEFF was, at the time, very much echoing Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy and bell hooks’ (1994) call to teach to transgress, facing and questioning the contradictions of Brazilian society as a way to chart possible paths and forms of organization for transformative action.

Making sense of the contrast emerging from the comparison between Saint-François and Florestan Fernandes thus requires “to understand how, under different concrete conditions” divergent conceptions of teaching, history and society ended up “making good sense” (Hall, 1986: 46) for these teachers. As Stuart Hall pointed out in his analysis of the success of Thatcherism in the eighties, “ideas [indeed] only become effective if they do, in the end, connect with a particular constellation of social forces” (Hall, 1983: 42). Solving this emerging puzzle thus calls, in the spirit of the extended case method, to shed light on the way specific social forces in the Brazilian and Belgian society came to shape these teachers’ trajectories and worldviews, coloring their teaching practices by providing a fertile ground for one or the other pedagogical project, and ultimately giving life to politically distinct school realities.

Brussels—small capital city of a Minority World country—combines the paradoxes of major Western European cities: enjoying both a wide extension of social rights and a relatively high level of income equality (Marx and Van Cant, 2018) inherited from the post-war Social Pact (Luyten and Vanthemsche, 1995) while at the same time being marked by a significant urban and social segregation of the population with immigrant background (Andersson et al., 2018)—especially in the educational field (Baysu and de Valk, 2012). These conflicting characteristics of the Belgian welfare state and of its regime of social conciliation were thus shaping the lived world of both students and teachers at Saint-François. Combined with a political and academic socialization rooted in the 1990s and early 2000s—marked by the proclamation of the end of history and the apparent triumph of the European liberal democratic model—this constellation of social forces provided an appreciable level of credibility to a conception of civic education aiming at boasting social cohesion through participation in institutional politics and by volunteering with NGOs—especially resonant in a school for intermediate sectors such as the Lycée.

São Paulo—megalopolis of the Majority World par excellence—meanwhile, stands out as the expression of a Brazilian society historically marked by a profound social (Carvalho, 2020), racial (Urrea-Giraldo et al., 2022) and educational (Ernica and Rodrigues, 2020) segregation, as well as by highly precarious teaching working conditions (Montoya et al., 2021; Venco and Rigolon, 2014). But it is also the cradle of a pole of social contestation that played a significant role both in the fall of the military dictatorship (1964–1985) and during the subsequent period of redemocratization, leaving a lasting imprint on urban and rural social movements inherited from the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as on Brazilian public universities and its vibrant student movements. These combined dynamics have then played a major role in shaping the political and intellectual outlooks of ETEFF’s teachers. They constituted the common sociocultural ground of the teaching collective and the shared political grammar of its progressive pedagogic project, aiming at promoting social justice through articulation with self-organized social movements and in-depth questioning of society’s inner contradictions—going somehow against the grain of middle-class politics, and therefore further underlining Florestan Fernandes distinctiveness in a highly segregated society.

Yet, in order to temper the weight given to these forces in the shaping of empirical reality—a power effect Burawoy calls objectification (see Table 2)—factoring the global trends of these societies into the understanding of the distinctiveness of their local teaching processes—and how they provide the “conditions of possibilities” making variations of pedagogical practices possible or even thinkable—also has to be a dynamic endeavor. In Florestan Fernandes, the teachers’ collective organization and the interdisciplinary project at the center of my ethnography were indeed slowly dismantled in the years following my fieldwork, suffering from increasing pressure from the school board and from the overall reactionary kickback that hit Brazilian politics in the late 2010s—especially fierce in the field of public education in the wake of the Escola sem Partido [Non-partisan School] conservative movement (Knijnik, 2020) and the attempts to impose a “civic-military” educational model in several states, including São Paulo. Around the same time at Saint-François, the students instead revealed some unsuspected resources, taking an active part in the school strikes for climate that recently mobilized the Belgian youth, following a trend of radicalization of environmental struggles in Europe—showing how the concept of citizenship could indeed be colored in a very different way if directly confronting systemic contradictions, especially in a context of rising right-wing extremism across the continent.

Revealing the highly context-sensitive dimension of teaching practices, school dynamics and forms of students’ engagements, these shifts therefore further highlight the conflicting nature of public school politics. As terrains of struggles between diverging conceptions of history and society, they stand out as privileged observation sites of ongoing “culture wars” shaped by global social dynamics defining the arc of possibilities of local teaching practices. As evidenced by this research, reconstructing the distinctiveness of each case thus entails uncovering the singular combination of these social forces—not according to any claim to representativeness, but because they were sociologically significant regarding fundamental dimensions of each society.

Conclusion

Embracing the reflexive principles of the extended case method, the structure of this article followed the actual process of the research diachronic development—often obfuscated by a classic journal article format failing to provide crucial behind-the-scenes insights into the research process—thereby highlighting the logic of “successive approximation” at the very core of a multicase study design. As Burawoy (2009: 205) pointed out, it is indeed “impossible to concentrate on all four moments of comparative ethnography at the same time.” Instead, the researcher has to “proceed moment by moment [. . .] in such a way that each step responds to anomalies created by the previous steps” (see Table 1)—each research process therefore ending up piecing together its unique articulation and pathway.

So, while Burawoy started his ethnographic research as a metalworker in a Hungarian steel mill in the mid-eighties by seeking a synchronic comparison between the capitalist context of his previous research in the United States and the one of a planned economy, his posterior research in the USSR in the early nineties began in turn with a diachronic comparison of the very process of transition to capitalism. And when in the first case, the research ended up on the reconstruction of his theory of exploitation through obfuscation outlined in Manufacturing Consent (Burawoy, 1979), his latter journey brought him from the context of the fall of Soviet bureaucratic collectivism to a Polanyian reconstruction of Marxist theory able to account for the devastating force of marketization, and finally to reconsider his own positionality as an outsider in a process that had literally overwhelmed him as a researcher.

In the case of the present research, the comparison at its core was for its part sparked by the sociological questions and political concerns raised by my academic and ethnographic positionality as I traveled back and forth between both sides of the Atlantic and the equator. This then led to my prolonged immersion in the everyday life of Brussels’ and São Paulo’s public high schools in order to reconstruct the social and political processes at play in teaching practices, and subsequently to the theoretical extension needed to make this seemingly counterintuitive comparison possible. It is then from there that I turned to the Belgian and Brazilian social and political contexts, as a way to make sense of the very differences emerging from the contrast between teaching practices, extracurricular activities or forms of student activism.

Despite being precisely regarded by the inductive approach as limiting factors of such ambition, these four fundamental dimensions of reflexive science have therefore proved decisive in the exercise of comparison. Teachers and students were indeed not studied behind a one-way glass or through an impersonal survey in order to gather seemingly unaltered and comparable data, but via an unavoidably messy immersion in schools and classrooms—following a logic proper to each field which proved highly significant regarding the specific dynamics of the schools and societies under study. Nor were everyday school life and teaching practices streamlined into easily comparable variables but approached as concrete social situations as a whole, gradually turning more intriguing through confrontation with others. Theory was likewise not induced from the ground up but was rather drawn on as basic conceptual building blocks for the multicase study, connecting teachers and schools across distinctive research sites to turn them actually comparable. Finally, the broader social context hasn’t been put aside either, as mere backdrop of a research focusing solely on classrooms or institutional dynamics, but used as a key lens enabling to make sense of what teachers were actually doing—the singularities of their practices only taking on full meaning when connected to the wider context in which their social trajectories and worldviews were embedded.

Proposing a reflexive alternative to positive science, the extended case method thus emerges both as a fruitful approach to compare seemingly “incomparable” social realities and as a source of inspiration to overcome the objections such provocative research projects can raise. Inviting to pursue the least conventional comparisons by conceptually establishing common analytical grounds connecting distinct social situations and contexts, it therefore contributes to stimulating a form of critical sociological imagination, challenging the taken for granted and revealing the diversity of possible practices, agencies and worldviews across increasingly unequal and segregated social worlds.