Feet of Class and Relations of Power

Abstract

This chapter explores the consciousness of class that underpins my research interest in education policy. It focuses on what I know about relations of class, how I came to know it, and the present relationship between that knowledge and my research interest in policy. The first section explores the relationship between my educational biography and its policy context, focusing primarily on the construction of class, gender and learner identities within a secondary modern school of the early 1960s. Less immediately obvious was the construction and assumption of ‘whiteness’ and unproblematised ‘Britishness’. In this chapter, I highlight the understanding that identities are framed by their time and place; had I been born in 1984 rather than 1948, in France or Canada rather than England, into a middle-class rather than a working-class family, black rather than white, my biography would be very different. This is not simply due to the obvious differences in experience or privilege, but due also to the particularities of the education policies that operated at that time and place. In the second section I consider the relationship between my auto/biography and my interest in policy research.KeywordsEducation PolicyTechnical SchoolGrammar SchoolClass MatterLearner IdentityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.