For many students, making their way to higher education requires more than hard work and determination. Low-income minority students who overcome obstacles to achieve academic success have usually encountered at least one college-educated adult in their schooling who took the initiative to reach out to them and provide concrete academic guidance.…

This study grew out of the realization that implicit literacy expectations between working class United Auto Workers (UAW) staff and professional class staff were complicating the filling out and filing of a position audit form. Professional class supervisors had designed the form as a measure of fairness, in that each UAW employee on campus was…

This paper uses Bourdieu's concept of field to analyse findings from an ethnographic study of Entry to Employment (E2E) programmes in England. Entry to Employment is a work-based learning programme which aims to re-engage young people with "barriers to learning" inhibiting access to further education, training or employment. The paper…

In a recent paper on gender inequality in higher education Buchman and DiPrete (2006) assume that the decrease in the gender gap in college completion in the US can partly be explained by changes in the allocation of familial resources in favour of women. However, they do not test this hypothesis empirically. In this paper I examine the effects of…

Contrary to what has usually been asserted, the "New English" that became a near-orthodoxy in the later 1960s and '70s had its essential origins in the apparently less promising setting of the later 1950s. Current research into English teaching in three postwar London secondary schools is revealing that in at least one working-class…

Chicanas and Mexican women share a history of colonialism that has (a) sustained oppressive constructions of gender roles and sexuality, (b) produced and reproduced them as racially inferior and as able to be silenced, conquered, and dominated physically and mentally, and (c) contributed to the exploitation of their labor. Given that colonialism…

This paper provides an in-depth, "case study" style analysis of the experiences of two 13-year-old British Asian girls from a larger qualitative study investigating minority ethnic students' aspirations in science. Through the lens of identity as performativity and Bourdieu's notions of "habitus" and capital, the ways in which…

As a group, low-income, low-socioeconomic status, first-generation and working class students have lower persistence rates and educational attainment than their peers from higher- socioeconomic backgrounds. These gaps in college persistence and degree attainment have endured over the years with no evidence that they are diminishing in time. This…

This article examines teachers' perceptions of parent involvement through the narratives of 15 racially and linguistically diverse teachers who worked together at Jefferson Elementary, an inner-city school in Northern California composed mostly of African-American, Latino, and Asian students. One overarching research question framed the…

This storytelling begins with a positioning of why and how we use "testimonio" as part of a larger project of social justice and transformative pedagogies. In this collective "testimonio," 5 working-class Latina scholars tell the stories of their struggles to overcome the challenges of language and assimilation, of gender discrimination and…

This article examines the origins, influence, and contemporary understandings of class-based theories of student resistance in education, contributing to or emerging from "Learning to Labor" by Paul Willis. It reports the results of a review of the literature that discusses class-based student resistance and cites the seminal book. More than 500…

Focusing on vocational learning in the English further education (FE) sector and situating it within its social, political and historical context, this paper provides an overview of English attitudes towards the vocational and its subordinate status in relation to "academic" education. It outlines the development of FE in England,…

This book presents the evidence gathered from original interviews to show how the aspirations of young people develop in light of their social circumstances. Those who attend independent schools will find that the relationship between what goes on at home and at school makes it socially almost impossible not to have achievable aspirations for a…

According to research based on the 2004 Survey of Income and Program Participation, working families with young children living in poverty pay 32 percent of their income on child care, nearly five times more than families living at more than 200 percent of the poverty level. This brief asks policy makers to consider allowing more subsidies to be…

This article explores the celebrated film "The Hunters" (Swedish title: "Jagarna") within the context of the discourse of "Internal Orientalism." By juxtaposing a contemporary Swedish film with historical accounts and contemporary news media, I demonstrate how the film reworks and (re)produces representations of the…