Comparison as Analysis, Interview Technique, and Relational Ethic: Findings and Reflections from a Study on the International Baccalaureate in Ecuador

In 2012, Ecuador signed an agreement aimed at introducing the International Baccalaureate (IB) into the country’s public secondary schools. Spearheaded by former president Rafael Correa, the agreement was articulated as a form of co-optation, where the Ecuadorian government was appropriating an important signifier of elite differentiation in the effort to both challenge local elites and provide public school students with additional post-secondary opportunities. In this chapter, Tiago Bittencourt troubles this guiding logic by examining the uneven processes of capital conversion occurring in two socially distinct schools offering the IB. He highlights how students’ abilities to convert the IB’s graduating diploma into future academic opportunities is limited by the material and symbolic conditions of each school, and by different understandings and enactments of “care” by the schools’ staff. Methodologically, Bittencourt considers how these findings were only enabled by an engagement with a relational approach to comparison, that actively strived to invite and include participants into the comparative process. He concludes by discussing the affordances of a broadened understanding of comparison as a mode of analysis, interview technique, and relational ethic.