Conducts case studies of proficient undergraduate writers from working-class backgrounds in the context of a course preparing sophomore and junior students to be tutors for first-year basic writers. Finds that students explained their experiences suggesting a greater degree of agency, an awareness of themselves as writers in a "contact zone," and…

Assumptions about learner identity are often based on a deficit view of the working classes. This chapter illustrates an alternative discourse that shows how one family literacy program in Scotland generated useful knowledge.

This article reports on case study research of seven- and eight-year-old children's discourse about reading. The case studies were selected to provide classrooms in contrasting neighbourhoods within a white "working class" town in the North of England. Mixed methods were employed, but primarily the case studies were ethnographic in…

This book describes the classrooms and homes of working class children struggling not only to learn to read but also to deal with the kind of subjectivity that literacy simultaneously holds out to and refuses them. One theme threaded throughout the book concerns the ways in which students' engagements with literacies are connected with their own…

Explores of the influences of social class on one adolescent's language and literacy practices as she moved from high school in an isolated rural community to college in an urban framework. Notes the student became alienated by college courses that did not acknowledge language competencies related to her status as a working-class person. Concludes…

The research reported in this paper attempts to document the actual learning practices of working-class people in the context of the much heralded "knowledge-based economy." Our primary thesis is that working-class peoples' indigenous learning capacities have been denied, suppressed, degraded or diverted within most capitalist schooling,…

This article is based upon a comparative, ethnographic case study of two groups of 10-11-year-old boys--one middle-class, the other working-class--living in Belfast. Drawing upon Bourdieu's related concepts of symbolic violence and habitus, it shows how locality can help to explain the very different educational and career aspirations found…

How do marginalized parents construct their role in promoting their children's access to educational opportunity? What lessons might their experience have for our understanding of parent involvement beyond the parameters of traditional models? This qualitative case study examined the beliefs, goals, and practices of 16 working-class African…

Social class influences parent involvement in schooling. This book uses the case study method to compare family-school relationships in a working-class elementary school with those in an upper middle-class school, focusing on one first grade class in each school, and within the two schools, on 12 families, over the course of their children's first…

The issue of social class rarely injects itself into assignments in honors English composition courses. The students take few chances with structure, analysis, voice, or audience invocation. Clearly bright students, they seemed baffled when asked for complication in their thinking or to take a chance with an unconventional structure. It was time…

Ethnographic case studies of nine British working class children were conducted in order to investigate learning from the perspectives of the families. The research aim was to study children learning outside school in situations that were not specifically set up with learning in mind; in social contexts where learning was not an obligation or…

Provides a case study of how school effectiveness policy is mediated by teachers and Local Education Authority (LEA) advisors. Uses qualitative data of a "failing" junior school in the United Kingdom to highlight (1) an LEA response to an evaluation by the Office for Standards in Education and (2) staff mediation of the LEA intervention.…

Adult education in North Korea first eliminated illiteracy and is now concentrating on raising the level of general knowledge of the working people to that of college graduates. The first stage was concluded when illiteracy was eradicated by 1949 through the establishment of educational institutions for the literacy crusade. The second stage was…

Preschool home visiting projects have been used in England since the 1970s to work with disadvantaged mothers and children; the strategies of education for prevention and parent participation are common themes. This article studies participating mothers' expectations and experiences, and finds their lack of confidence or sense of influence…

Uses ethnographic methods to examine cultural norms regarding inclusion and cooperation at a multiethnic middle school serving predominantly working-class Caucasians and Chicanos. The principal's strong leadership and the cultural congruity of socioeconomic norms help explain the high degree of cooperation and inclusion in the school. (SLD)