Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández
Ed.M. AIE '00
For a practiced synthesizer of data and a skilled questioner of authority like Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, everything, even a place name, is subject to scrutiny, interpretation, deconstruction. Take the name of the Toronto street—Monarch Park—where he and his wife Bonnie and their two children have moved, now that he has accepted a tenure-track faculty job at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. “The street could have been named for the British royalty,” he says, grinning a little mischievously, “or it could have been named for the butterfly. That's why I like it.”
In his life as a professional scholar, Rubén interprets ethnographic data more than he does proper nouns. But even as a doctoral student writing a dissertation about the construction of elite identities among 36 students in an unnamed New England prep school, his qualitative analysis involved reading between the lines. “Shadowing these students, I listened to their speech, and noticed that they draw on meritocracy to convince themselves that they deserve what they get,” he remembers. “I noted their stress on social categories, and saw how they bonded with other students in their daily rituals. In essence, I was trying to understand how they talk about their privilege.”
Currently under review by several interested publishers, Rubén's thesis, tentatively titled Lives of Distinction, specifically analyzes the students' status-conscious discourse with regard to three things, including work (academic rather than occupational), social life (“But it's not about kids having illicit sex,” he cautions), and interpersonal intimacy. “And it's not about scandal at all, in fact, like some recent novels,” he adds, anticipating the predictable questions about whether the rich really are different. “It's a sympathetic portrayal of privileged kids in the act of getting a sophisticated education.” Nothing more, nothing less.
Nor, as the mere sound of his stately Spanish name would imply, is the book much more than slightly autobiographical. His, after all, is a different sort of demographic story. Unlike mythical northeasterners such as Garp or Holden Caulfield, the actual Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández grew up in Latin America, in Puerto Rico. “I attended a public school,” he says, “but one that is considered ‘elite', like a Boston Latin type of exam school.” With that education under his belt, he came to Boston in 1989 to study classical guitar at the Boston Conservatory, with a major in performance and a minor in composition. After graduating from the Conservatory, he met his wife-to-be, a Massachusetts native and modern dancer then working with the Prometheus Dance Company. Some months into their relationship, as they were making wedding plans, Bonnie learned that the Walnut Hill School for the Performing Arts in the Boston suburb of Natick was looking for a pair of artistic house parents. This good job— Rubén doubled as guitar teacher and house parent—was the introduction to the rarified world of elite education, northeastern style. Though this world is often stereotyped as insular and snobbish, and though it may have seemed that way to Rubén in the beginning, his immersion in it seems to have given him a less jaded view, so that it might seem natural—simply an opportunity for a lucky few students to travel more deeply and rewardingly into the storehouses of canonized cultural wealth than anyone in the society.
In a couple of years, the job at Walnut Hill would lead inadvertently to Rubén's enrollment at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, his 2000 graduation from the HGSE Arts in Education Program, his participation in a Harvard Project Zero-sponsored study of arts-based high schools (titled Passion and Industry by project director and AIE founder Jessica Hoffmann Davis), and his enrollment as a doctoral student at the Ed School.
During his six years of doctoral study, Rubén prepared in a number of ways for his current role of the educational researcher and professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. For one, he worked as a teaching fellow for Jessica Hoffmann Davis in the year-long sequence of core courses in the HGSE Arts in Education Program. “Jessica was a great mentor,” he recalls—“extremely energetic and challenging and professional and entertaining to boot.” He parlayed this teaching experience, during his final three years of study, into his own courses on the sociology of education at Tufts University and Simmons College and on curriculum theory at HGSE. “We read everything from John Dewey to W.E.B. DuBois to Jane Addams in those curriculum courses,” he notes. “The course had a US focus to it. But I'm planning to internationalize that focus in Toronto.”
As if that wasn't enough, Rubén served on the board of the Harvard Education Review, a job that has resulted in a lively life of letters for him. Aside from selecting scholarly essays for publication in the journal, he edited the HER special issue on Popular Culture and Education (2003) and the reprint collection Cultural Studies in Education (2004). “The popular culture special issue is a collection of new scholarly essays on cultural production and social change,” he notes, “with pieces on post-colonial art, youth culture, and media. The latter book is an anthology of articles from past issues of HER.” In addition to those books, he co-edited, with former HGSE visiting professor Jim Sears, Curriculum Work as a Public Moral Enterprise, a book that was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2004. With such a record already to his credit, the eventual publication of Rubén's thesis in book form will probably seem less eventful than it would be for a novice.
In his new tenure-track position at the University of Toronto, Rubén will elaborate on projects already begun during his graduate days at HGSE, and putting to good use the teaching and researching skills he's developed here. “I will teach an undergraduate course in popular culture and education and a graduate course in the arts in education,” he explains. “Also, I'll be investigating the greater Toronto area for community art centers, after-school sites where the arts are put into action, museum education departments, and the like,” he explains, “in hopes of finding arts-integration models and of engaging the university in the community. Since there are four arts-based high schools in Toronto alone and a very lively arts scene in the city, I may not have to waste much time trying to find these models as I might in a less progressive city,” he says. “They should be fascinating to study, too, because Toronto is now among the most multicultural cities in the world. Also, I hope to be planting the seeds for a degree program in the arts in education at OISE.”
“OISE,” did Rubén say? As most education scholars around the world already know, that's pronounced “Oy-see”—pronounced to rhyme unintentionally with “noisy”—and (again) it stands for Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, a school that he says “has been called Harvard of the North by some.”
