How do underachieving working class students survive in the classroom? Critiques on the perspective of resistance

Abstract

The scholars of cultural reproduction have argued that the gap between the knowledge structure of the school curriculum and the reasoning ability of working class students functions as a crucial element in impeding their academic achievement. For researchers of the CCCS, such a failure tends to lead to the development of a counter-school culture. Working class students attempt to maintain their collective identity through the strategy of resistance, enabling them to reverse their dominated status in the power structure of capitalist society. Although the above theories highlight the interactions between this student group and structural constraints, the structure-led approach leads these academics to focus on the scope of defense mechanisms triggered by coercive structural constraints, while the influence of individualized agency on such interactions remains unknown. Agency may unleash such students from the rigid linkage between structural imposition and passive obedience. Accordingly, this qualitative study was designed to explore how underachieving working class students survived in a classroom, in which social relations, inscribed within curriculum and pedagogy, prescribed the scope of resistant behaviors and transformative actions.