In January of 2001, the TimberWest Corporation permanently closed its Youbou sawmill facility near Duncan, British Columbia, Canada laying off 220 workers. On the surface, the Youbou mill closure reinforced a pervasive sense that workers and communities in the province are increasingly vulnerable to an ever more globally integrated and footloose…

Empowerment is a contested concept, an ideology creating new forms of control. Conceptualizing it as a multilevel construct is a step toward building a new hegemony for the working class, by raising consciousness of control, participation, shared vision, and ownership. (SK)

Reflecting on her study of working-class women's life stories, the author shows how several realizations influenced and changed these steps of the research process: collecting stories, developing coding methods, designing a comparative study, considering labels, attending to variations, addressing self-other relationships, and listening to life…

Discussion groups with diverse working class men who were predominantly non-participants in higher education examined how they used various discourses of masculinity when arguing for and against higher education participation. Discusses potential implications of these discourses for their continued underrepresentation in higher education.…

More working-class students are entering universities--mainly because the restructuring of the American economy has made a college degree an entry-level requirement for mid- and low-level jobs, the kind that call for manipulating information rather than steel or concrete. Despite these changing job demands, however, the class structure of the…

At one time, academic inquiries into the relationship between socioeconomic class and language acquisition were commonplace, but the past 20 years have seen a decrease in work that focuses on the intersection between class and early language learning. Recently, however, against the backdrop of the No Child Left Behind legislation in the United…

In Central America the Cold War support of the elites by the United States was designed to ward off the communist threat. At the same time social and economic demands by the working and middle classes created revolutionary movements in the face of rigid and violent responses by Central American governments. Issues of social justice pervaded the…

This paper examines the effect of school social class composition on pupil learner identities in British primary schools. In the current British education system, high-stakes testing has a pervasive effect on the pedagogical relationship between teachers and pupils. The data in this paper, from ethnographic research in a working-class school and a…

This ethnographic reflection foregrounds the efforts a K-12 English-medium (EM) school in Kolkata is making to pull EM schooling more fully into India's multilingual ethos. By focusing on the special needs of a small group of struggling working-class girls, the successes of the majority of working-class students at this school become more visible.…

A substantial amount of research in mathematics education seeks to document disparities in achievement between middle-class White students and students who are Black, Latina/Latino, First Nations, English language learners, or working class. I outline the dangers in maintaining an achievement-gap focus. These dangers include offering little more…

This article investigates how 15-year-old white and Turkish students in two Inner London comprehensive schools, one in a predominantly working-class area (Millroad School) and the other in a more middle-class environment (Darwin School), construct their identities. Drawing on mainly qualitative data from documentary sources, focus groups and…

The links between changes in sibling conflict and intimacy and changes in perceived peer social competence and depression symptoms were examined from middle childhood through adolescence. Participants were mothers, fathers and first- and second-born siblings from 197 White, working/middle class, two-parent families. Peer competence peaked in …

Recent decades have witnessed the waning fortunes of social class as a historical category of analysis. In particular working-class education is rarely discussed in historiography although there has been significant work done in this area, particularly in adult education and literacy. A reassessment of these studies allows us to examine the ways…

Analyzes data from the 1984 Survey of Income and Program Participation concerning business owners as distinct from the self-employed. Findings indicate that 11.9 percent of nonagricultural workers are business owners and that 70.8 percent of businesses are sole proprietorships. (CH)

Discusses survey data concerned with the occupational rewards considered important by a sample of working-class job applicants. Focuses on how work objectives are affected by gender and situational values. Male-female work values are fairly similar--both are primarily situational--but sex differences increased in the presence of children. (KH)