This paper draws on a three-year critical ethnography which interrogated intersections of social class, school and identity in an urban Irish community. The focus here is on the psycho-spatial disidentifications, inscriptions and class fractioning enacted throughout the school and community of Portown by a cohort of succeeding students from this…

Jessica Calarco explains in this article that students from different backgrounds tend to manage problems in contrasting ways that can have real consequences in the classroom. More specifically, Calarco observed children from middle-class families tended to actively seek help from their teachers, while children from working-class families…

In this essay Malott traces his journey to critical pedagogy focusing on a significant element of his family's ethnic and class background and its connection to his own educational experiences from public schooling to university. Drawing on Marx's historical discussions at the end of Volume 1 of "Capital" Malott traces his own…

Based on research in Karratha, a remote resource town in Western Australia, this paper explores the ways in which blue-collar affluence disturbs the meritocratic mythology of formal education. In the opening decade of the twenty-first century Karratha was one of Australia's most affluent towns, yet its adult population was characterised by a level…

This article asks why classical music in the UK, which is consumed and practiced by the middle and upper classes, is being used as a social action program for working-class children in British music education schemes inspired by El Sistema. Through exploring the discourse of the social benefits of classical music in the late nineteenth century, a…

Large socio-economic differences in educational attainment and participation in Higher Education (HE) are seen in the United Kingdom (UK). Furthermore, improvements in attainment and in rates of progression to university have been much faster for most ethnic minority groups than for White children. Political rhetoric explains these differences in…

Background: Scholars of children's literature have been investigating portrayals of females and racial groups for several decades, yet few have examined depictions of social class. Research on social class depictions in children's literature is needed in order to identify books that affirm children's class identities and offer…

This article employs Bourdieu's conceptual tools to unpack family influences on students' subject and university choices in China. This empirical study employed mixed research approaches, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, to examine students' choices of subjects and universities in a sample of secondary school students from the age…

This study was designed to build on the existing research on teaching and learning in community college contexts and the literature of college writing in two-year schools. The work of Pierre Bourdieu formed the primary theoretical framework and composition theory was used to position this study in the literature of the college writing discipline.…

"Welcoming Blue-Collar Scholars Into the Ivory Tower" is the first volume in a new book series designed to explore how institutional policies, practices, and cultures shape learning, development, and success for students who have been historically underserved or given limited consideration in the design of higher education contexts.…

This article builds a case for nuanced conceptualizations of "urban" and "-suburban" educational contexts and issues. The author analyzes data across two studies--one of upper-middle-class White parents with children in Chicago public schools, and the other of Black low-income and working-class parents who moved from Chicago to…

The role of music in Grenada, West Indies has traditionally been to pass on knowledges, values, and ideals; and to provide a means of connecting to one another through expressing commonality of experience, ancestry, and nationhood. This paper explores how Eric Matthew Gairy, during his era of political leadership in Grenada (1951-1979), exploited…

This paper reiterates the centrality of economics (relations of production) in Marxist models of class, while avoiding the crude determinism which results from a neglect of cultural aspects of class formation. It explores the confusion in education and educational sociology arising from non-Marxist conceptions of class which place an exaggerated…

As more state legislatures join the debate on school-choice and parent-trigger legislation, their discussions draw attention to an evolving landscape outside school walls where parental action shapes educational opportunity. Parents wield their political, social, economic, and cultural capital to secure the best educational outcomes for their…

The article reports findings from a small qualitative investigation into the perceptions of giftedness held by four working-class families in the northeast of England. Each family had a child identified as gifted in England's national program for gifted education. These findings include: intense hostility toward those of their neighbours they…