This article works to dispel the myth that Latino urban high-school students are not capable of performing at high academic levels. Whereas much educational research emphasizes the academic underachievement of urban Latino students, this article counteracts this research by describing the four success factors that three working-class Puerto Rican…

Drawing on a study of a Swedish secondary school with a heterogeneous intake, this article provides an analysis of the social relations and segregation within an individual school. As shown in the analysis, young people from different socio-economic backgrounds were largely separated in school, differently positioned and in conflict with each…

Drawing upon a case-study of the students and teaching staff of an Advanced Vocational Certificate of Education (AVCE) in Travel and Tourism, this paper examines the effects of the institutional habitus of a Further and Higher Education (FHE) college upon the higher education choices of a group of ethnically-mixed, working-class young people. The…

Stratification is a central issue in family research, yet relatively few studies highlight its impact on family processes. Drawing on in-depth interviews (N = 137) and observational data (N = 12), we extend Melvin Kohn's research on childrearing values by examining how parental commitments to self-direction and conformity are enacted in daily…

The impact of a difference in social class on the therapeutic relationship has received less attention than other differences between counsellor and client, such as gender, race and sexual orientation. In this qualitative research study six clients who identified as working class were interviewed about their experience of a therapeutic…

First published in 1957, following a battle with nervous lawyers, "The Uses of Literacy" is recognized as one of the founding texts of cultural studies. Its critique of mass culture reverberated far beyond that discipline. It influenced the librarians of the day who were beginning to think about issues of class and consider their…

This study consists of a comparative analysis of patterns of de-escalation between ages 17-18 and 32, based on data from two well-known prospective longitudinal studies, the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (a study of 411 working-class males in London) and the Montreal Two Samples Longitudinal Study (a sample of 470 adjudicated…

The literature suggests that members of the working class value informal ("hot") information rather than formal ("cold") information. They are also said to lack a future orientation; have a fatalistic (and pessimistic) attitude to life; and have low aspirations. These values should influence the way students from working-class backgrounds approach…

Participatory research with children in the main focuses on short-term interactions. As this practice develops, questions about longer-term consequences for participants have arisen, examining the empowering claims for this research approach. This article reports the findings from continued contact with participants of an ethnographic…

This article examines the relation between social class and language attitudes through a triangulated study that analyses the attitudes of 836 secondary school students from different socioeconomic backgrounds toward the 3 official spoken languages used in postcolonial Hong Kong (HK; i.e., Cantonese, English, and Putonghua). The respondents were…

This article will explore the role of "CYC," a community-based youth center, in providing a sense of what I call "Youth (Comm)Unity" for Chinese American youth from low-income immigrant families. While CYC combines the youths' home and school worlds, it is also distinct from these worlds by forming a new and hybrid culture/space. In doing so, I…

This article illustrates the application of critical literacy (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Gutierrez, 2008; Morrell, 2007) pedagogies that draw from young people's funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) to actively nurture personally, authentically, and culturally caring relationships (Howard, 2002; Noddings, 1992;…

Economic inequality is high and rising in a number of developed countries, including in the United Kingdom and the United States. There are growing concerns that this may have negative implications for equality of opportunity, and the extent to which social disadvantage is transmitted across generations. It is widely believed that providing…

With reference to an ESRC/TLRP project conducted across two academic years with working-class students in higher education (HE), this paper explores the relationship between geographies of home and those of university at two UK HE institutions. It addresses how social relations inflected by class influence the experience of students as they adapt…

Previous research suggests that the quality of parents' relationships can influence their children's adjustment, but most studies have focused on the negative effects of marital conflict for children in White middle-class families. The current study focuses on the potential benefits of positive marital quality for children in working-class first…