Stable, healthy marriages and relationships can bolster the economic security and well-being of adults and children. However, reality is much more complex. Relatively few children currently live in families with married parents in which only the father is employed. In fact, more than half of U.S. children today will spend at least part of their…

Many Chicagoans are getting shortchanged, particularly when it comes to money exchange between the Illinois Lottery (IL) and Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE). A significant portion of lottery sales is earmarked for education in Illinois. Because these revenues are not generated equally, however, some contribute more to education via the…

An emerging literature indicates that dispositional bias in causal attribution of social behavior is weaker for people with working-class (vs. middle-class) backgrounds. However, it is unknown whether this difference is also present in spontaneous forms of trait inference. In the current work, American undergraduates were asked to merely memorize…

In the 1980s, researchers established the need to document and analyse the educational attitudes, behaviours and outcomes of "ordinary kids" as a means of developing a holistic account of school experience. Yet, while significant attention is given to extremes in educational attitudes and behaviours, "ordinariness" tends to remain overlooked in…

This article examines the institutional transformations of language-in-education programmes in Madrid, linked to wider socio-economic processes of change. Drawing on a research team's ethnographic revisit, we explore how wider processes are impacting everyday discursive practices in the Bridging Class (BC) programme, first implemented in 2003 to…

This study examines change and the conditions of change in the masculinity of Olli, a working-class Finnish school boy. It explores "respect" as a status bound to masculine reputation, resources for obtaining respect in gendered identity work, and the negotiation of power in peer relations. I discuss how a "banal balancer"…

Sociology has long recognized the centrality of the body in the reciprocal construction of individuals and society, and recent research has explored the influence of a variety of social institutions on the body. Significant research has established the influence of social class, child-rearing practices, and variable language forms in families and…

The history of popular education is a long-standing field of research. Its beginnings trace back at least to the mid-twentieth century and it maintains its attractiveness for many researchers, both historians and educators. But, using the same label, quite different lines of research have been developed. They correspond to different ideas about…

Young people in Irish schools are required to choose whether to sit secondary exam subjects at higher or ordinary level. This paper draws on a mixed methods longitudinal study of students in 12 case-study schools to trace the factors influencing take-up of higher level subjects within lower secondary education. School organisation and process are…

Basil Bernstein (1971) introduced the notion of the Restricted and the Elaborated code, claiming that working-class speakers have access only to the former but middle-class members to both. In an attempt to test this theory in the Iranian context and to investigate the effect of social class on the quality of students language use, we examined the…

Academic mobility promotes the development of joint research activities, broadens the horizons of researchers, lecturers and professors, and promotes knowledge flows between institutions. This book offers a contemporary perspective on the mobility of academics across the globe with contributions by authors based in Australia, Germany, Ireland,…

While stories of working-class and minority students overcoming obstacles to attend and graduate from college tend to emphasize the individualistic and meritocratic aspect, this book--based in extensive empiral study of American high school classrooms, and in theories of social and cultural capital--examines the social relations that often…

In this paper we investigate the effect of variable input on the acquisition of grammar. More specifically, we examine the acquisition of the third person singular marker -s on the auxiliary "do" in comprehension and production in two groups of children who are exposed to similar varieties of English but that differ with respect to adult…

Declining Catholic school enrollment rates coupled with increasing numbers of Latino Catholics (in the US) have prompted Catholic leaders to interrogate how they can best engage and meet the needs of the Latino community (Alliance for Catholic Education, 2009; Ospino, 2014). Much of this work focuses on how Catholic schools can attract Latino…

Higher education (HE) is often viewed as a conduit for social mobility through which working-class students can secure improved life-chances. However, the link between HE and social mobility is largely viewed as unproblematic. Little research has explored the possible impact of academic failure (in HE) on the trajectories of working-class students…