This article describes experiences in an Irish context of education programs delivered in 2 communities, 1 based on class (a working class urban community) and 1 based on sexual orientation (an urban lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community). It aims to illustrate how feminist education can play an important role in feminist community…

The disengagement of working-class boys from education continues to be a major issue in the United Kingdom; however, there has been little educational research in working-class boys' identity work surrounding learning practices where boys actively engage. This article attempts to address how identities are influenced by new literacies,…

This paper's topic is the educational upward mobility of members of the working class. It seeks to find out what makes educational success possible and aims to build a theory of educational upward mobility. Data have been collected through biographical-narrative interviews of Austrian graduates from working-class backgrounds. Their narratives have…

This article explores the school inspection as a political ritual for the management of tensions between competition and equality inherent in neo-liberal educational regulatory regimes. At the centre of the article is a case study of how teachers in an allegedly failing working-class English primary school coped with issues of social class,…

This research study explored how White working class Appalachian males who have completed, or who were within one term of completing a program of study at one of ten community and technical colleges in West Virginia perceived academic success. It examined their definitions of academic success, the perceptions they held regarding their own past and…

During the early catalanization of schooling in the Barcelona area in the 1980s, Castilian-speaking teenagers of working-class immigrant descent often struggled against Catalan language and identity. This longitudinal study followed a group of high-school classmates and found that as young adults, some but not all of the resistant working-class…

Patssi Valdez, one of the most influential yet understudied female artists of the Chicana/o movement, was the only original and long-term female member of the 1970s art collective Asco. Through the visual discourses of pachuca glamour and punk, Valdez negotiated and exploited the gendered ideologies that visually put her at the center of the…

I set out to explore the question: How do middle-class, working-class and low-income mothers experience their children's out of school summer time? Using qualitative basic interpretive approach, study findings draw from interview data, journal entries and participant observations from a study completed with 22 mothers of varying socioeconomic…

In this article, we report the results of a national survey of students in COAMFTE-accredited family therapy programs who self-identify as coming from lower- or working-class backgrounds. Results of the study reveal opportunity and tension relative to family, friends, and community because of social mobility associated with graduate education.…

Family policy was a key component of the "New" Labour government's family, social and education policy, and a wide range of family focused initiatives and interventions designed to "support" families and improve individual, family and social outcomes were introduced. The post-May 2010 coalition government's family policy…

This paper revisits Diana Leonard's seminal paper "Keeping close and spoiling in a south Wales town", by drawing on one mother and daughter case study. Leonard focused on geographical closeness and the strategies employed by parents to keep their children living at home, rather than sending them to university. In contrast, this paper…

This paper extends the work of Gamble, who followed Marx in seeing a reconstitution of the reserve army of labour as a key function of capitalist crisis, but it suggests a wider class reformation that includes what can be called the middle-working/working-middle class. Education and training to all levels are deeply implicated in this class…

Social class and income distribution remain the strongest predictors of both educational achievement and life outcomes. Despite government hopes, education does not generally promote social mobility; children from low income families tend to have lower attainment than their more affluent peers when they begin school, and the gap widens as they…

This article focuses on the accounts by teachers who are positioned and who position themselves as "effective." It draws on the relational aspects of positioning theory with respect to a determination of how the "effective teacher" position necessarily positions students. Findings suggest that students are positioned as (a)…

Patrick McGhee, vice chancellor of the University of East London, has a lot in common with many of the 28,000 students at the large urban institution he leads. He was the first in his family to attend university. And he dislikes much about the government's higher-education reform efforts, which he has deemed "misguided, premature, unproven…