School open days: a quasi-commercial device?

Abstract

Since the 1990s, and with special intensity since the 2000s, holding    a School Open Day (SOD) gradually became a generalized practice among primary and secondary schools in Catalonia. SOD were seen as a tool to empower them, in line with the impulse of school autonomy. Its rapid diffusion in subsequent years to the entire educational  field,  however, poses the question of whether they have become promotional competitive practices between centers in order to attract pupils, thus getting closer to functioning as an educational quasi-market. In order to answer this question, we have carried out an ethnographic observation of SOD in 42 primary schools in Barcelona and two cities in its metropolitan conurbation, in a sample diversified in terms of property (public or private), neighborhood socioeconomic level, previous year applications received, material and organizational profile, and pedagogical style. Grounded on the codification and subsequent analysis of  the  different  observed  dimensions  of  SOD, we propose a typology of 10 main patterns through which they respond     to, and reconfigure, their positions in the educational field. The article’s conclusion is that through the enactment in SOD, which stage subtle quasi- commercial dynamics, differentiation between schools is intensified in  what Dupriez and Cornet (2005) name “educational niches”. This implies  its differentiation, both positional -acquiring a specific position in the  field, with a particular exchange value- and cultural -shaping a specific identity in a context where, paradoxically, pedagogic discourses are centered around very similar clichés.