Previous work on working-class academics has highlighted recurring themes, such as micro-aggressions, imposter syndrome, liminality, exclusion, invisibility and habitus. These themes have been encapsulated in a number of metaphors, such as 'the ghost' and 'the phantom-limb', both of which connote absence, silence and marginalisation. Whilst these…

From the 1960s until his death in 1997, Albert Shanker was a major force in expanding the labor movement, defending and improving public education, and fighting for all people to live freely in democracies. As president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), he became known…

The Highlander Nursery School, run by the Highlander Folk School from 1938 to 1953, provided no-cost early care and learning to the white working-class children of Summerfield, Tennessee. While Highlander is best known as a democratic education and movement-building hub that builds adults' capacity to shape labor and racial justice in their…

First-generation students often feel alone on college campuses. These students can find themselves excluded from organizations, traditions, and spaces that require financial, social, and cultural capital they may not have. In my Sociology of Work course, I use a family work history project to center and validate their experiences. Using census…

In the summer of 1978, at Church Teachers' College in Mandeville, Jamaica, a class of advanced students participating in the Jamaica Movement for the Advancement of Literacy (JAMAL) wrote, cast, rehearsed, and performed a play that satirized several major institutions--the family, the church, and the business sector--as well as class and gender…

This fact sheet synthesizes research findings and survey results from parents and program providers to illustrate how afterschool programs are accelerating students' academic growth, supporting their well-being, and helping working families. Additionally, the fact sheet highlights the overwhelming support afterschool programs have from voters…

Drawing on the notions of neoliberal governmentality, regime of subjectification, as well as on the ordoliberal conception of social policy, self and class, I analyse how neoliberalism is entrenched in the formation of the affirmative action policy in higher education in Chile. Based on a fieldwork focused on the two main affirmative action…

This paper reads Marx's distinction between the method of inquiry and presentation as distinct and Marxist pedagogical logics that take the form of learning and studying. After articulating the differences and their current conceptualizations in educational theory, I turn to different interpretations of the "Grundrisse" and…

Disparities across race, gender, and class are important targets of descriptive research. But rather than only describe disparities, research would ideally inform interventions to close those gaps. The gap-closing estimand quantifies how much a gap (e.g., incomes by race) would close if we intervened to equalize a treatment (e.g., access to…

Current approaches to building inclusive classrooms for first-generation and working-class students tend to emphasize communicative strategies: receiving students with welcoming messages that acknowledge and value their life experience and promoting a growth mindset. These methods are important, but they do little to address structural sources of…

El Puente Research Fellowship is a transformative program that uses culturally relevant and reflective pedagogies, curriculum, and praxis for first-generation, working-class college students beyond the traditional classroom. Drawing on the Chicana/Latina feminist epistemologies of "plática" and "convivencia," we argue that the…

This article deploys a materialist theoretical and methodological framework to analyse and discuss capitalism's disabling phenomena. It is my intention to demonstrate how Marx's concept of a "relative surplus population" may be used to scrutinise capitalism's symbols, meanings, images, and practices which reproduce ableism as the norm.…

In this conversation essay, the authors incorporate teaching assistants (TAs) into pedagogical theorizing through what they call the teaching triad, an analytic heuristic to understand faculty-TA-undergraduate interactions. TAs are graduate students who are tasked with running discussion sections, smaller settings where undergraduates interact…

A central element in the writing of marginal subjects is the personal and autobiographical voice they use to write about themselves and their experiences. This article uses a personal voice- autoethnography - to examine, in a multi-layered manner, one-stop of the author's educational biography and her path, as a working-class Mizrahi woman, to…

Some historians still hold back from assigning literature out of concern for historical accuracy, but using fiction and popular culture is no longer unusual and, if anything, using novels may be seen as outdated in some circles. The author suggests that one way to reinvigorate the use of the novel when teaching history is to center a class on only…