‘TO IB OR NOT TO IB’
‘TO IB OR NOT TO IB’

Summary/Abstract: This localized small-scale ethnographic study addresses issues associated with students’ choices to study in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program (IBO: IBDP, 2020), rather than following a Ministry of Education (MEB) curriculum, at a mixed-gender secular high school in Turkey. This study examines the implications that curriculum choices have on students’ pedagogic identity (Bernstein, 2000). Students’ curriculum decisions are based on academic results, on a future they envision for themselves, teacher feedback, and school participation. Student commentaries provide evidence of factors involved in how students make the choice to study the IBDP and what personal effects those decisions may have. Teaching faculty anecdotal evidence offers background information to contextualize the students’ choices. Dilts’ Logical Levels model (1986) is used to deconstruct the decisions that students make within a wider cultural context. An argument is made that acceptance into the IBDP leads to an awareness of social differences and hierarchies, and that the logic of students’ choices induces a positive selection of the more talented individuals into a group with a superior reputation, and how members of that group ‘exert control over their perceived identity’ (Kim & Loury, 2019).

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