Working-class academic narratives reveal a number of common themes, like dual estrangement and internalized class conflict. A less popularized motif is the bookish child who is catapulted out of her working-class origins. But some working-class academics, like myself, were not academically ambitious as children. I am a nontraditional working-class…

This paper charts the emergence of community publishing and worker writer groups in England in the early 1970s. These workshops supported working class and marginalized people to express their personal experience through poetry, prose, autobiography and history, a process with significant educational, cultural, political and social implications.…

This article presents a short story of the authors, who show how they have "entered research", that is, entered the earliest conception of research and the early formation of research collaboration. As the authors worked together, they realised they had common concerns and life experiences. Each proudly identifies as working class…

Grounded in feminist notions of valuing lived experiences and constructing knowledge about the wider world from material realities, this article uses autobiographical narratives and poststructural and critical theories to argue for change in children's literature. The author presents two simultaneous streams of shifting, representations and…

The study circle is described as a democratic and emancipatory method for learning that can be summarized in three words: learning by sharing. This method offers opportunities and possibilities for all participants to contribute their previous knowledge and experiences through open and democratic dialogue. As a method for "liberal adult…

In psychological terms, impostor syndrome is a cognitive distortion that prevents a person from internalizing any sense of accomplishment. By many accounts, academics--graduate students, junior professors, and even some full professors--relate to this only a little less than they relate to eye strain. The condition was first identified in 1978 by…

This paper examines the inexorable rise of "health" as regulative discourse, highlighting its class and cultural dimensions. With reference to the policy content of recent obesity reports, analysis suggests that contemporary concerns around obesity are but a modern variant of earlier eighteenth and nineteenth century child saving crusades whose…

I use building workers' wages for 1209-2004 and the skill premium to consider the causes and consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Real wages were trendless before 1800, as would be predicted for the Malthusian era. Comparing wages with population, however, suggests that the break from the technological stagnation of the Malthusian era came…

The instrumentalist motives of the working-class students are reconsidered. The local situations of these students suggest that we cannot assume what these students motives for instrumentalist behaviors might be, for instance some might emphasize the role of their families in shaping work values while others might emphasize peers and neighborhood…

This article explores whether private adventure and dame schools were anything more than "nurseries of ignorance" in nineteenth-century Wales. It traces the origins, development and make-up of these small schools, through an analysis of educational reports, biographical material, census returns and other sources. Private adventure…

"Class Construction" explores class, racial, and gender identity construction among white, working-class students. Delving into River City High School, Freie asks what happens to the adolescent children of working-class families when economic changes such as globalization and technological advancements have altered the face of working-class jobs.…

Public higher education has undergone a process similar to that in the national polity: a one-sided struggle by those with power to shape the institution to be more market driven, more focused on what will generate (non-state) revenues, more dominated by top administrators, and less concerned about the working class and people of color. This…

Although teen pregnancy and birth rates in the United States declined for ten straight years during the 1990s and were less than half of comparative figures from 1957, the year of the all-time high of teen pregnancy, nearly one in ten teenage young women still became pregnant in 2001, with half of these young women giving birth. Teen pregnancy…

This article focuses on the role of Grace Paterson (1843-1925) in education, health and social welfare in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Glasgow. Integral to her efforts to improve the health of the city's poor was her emphasis on the need to raise the standards of the domestic education of working-class girls and women, both in the…

A Canadian project is planning to document the array of learning strategies used by working class people. Findings will be used to sensitize public policymaking regarding working class education in general and to design training programs in terms of the learning contexts in which they must operate. (JOW)