The ‘C-Word’: novice teachers, class identities and class strategising

Lisa Jones

doi:10.1080/14681366.2019.1566161

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper draws on a longitudinal qualitative study exploring the influence of the social class identities of novice teachers on their emerging teacher identities. The paper focuses on the ways in which, even at an implicit level, many novice teachers appear to recognise that their own (or perceptions of their own) class identity and the associated cultural capital that they bring might not be equally valued in all school settings. Thus, whilst some novice teachers are constrained/restricted by their class identities, others, often those with middle-class identities, are more able to play strategically with their class, minimising the potential disadvantages of a perceived lack of appropriate cultural capital. This paper therefore sets out to explore these responses given that they yield strong support for the self-reflection, problematisation and critique of novice teachers’ identities in initial teacher education and training programmes.

Highlights

Social class has largely been met with silence and resistance within both policy and wider discourses around Initial Teacher Education (ITE) (Reay 2006; Burn and Childs 2016) despite the overwhelming evidence of its central role in relation to educational inequalities (Reay 2017; Leathwood and Archer 2006)
Whilst this study focused on 11 novice teachers in total, this paper presents the stories of four of the participants
It would seem that whilst their ability and empathy towards working with children from working-class backgrounds might well be a strength for such novice teachers, it acted as strategy through which to draw out positive cultural capital from their potentially constraining and restrictive classed identities in the context of teaching

Summary

Introduction

Social class has largely been met with silence and resistance within both policy and wider discourses around Initial Teacher Education (ITE) (Reay 2006; Burn and Childs 2016) despite the overwhelming evidence of its central role in relation to educational inequalities (Reay 2017; Leathwood and Archer 2006). This paper seeks to examine the forms of strategising invoked by novice teachers aligned to middle and working-class identities when they (often implicitly) understood that the cultural capital they brought into teaching may not be valued in all educational settings.

Objectives

Results

Conclusion