Working-class student experiences

Abstract

Working-class identity is often framed in problematic and deficit-minded ways in educational spaces, and damaging and essentializing narratives that are often perpetuated about working-class identity can have consequential implications for students. This chapter explores the significance of a social class-sensitive approach to pedagogy and practice in education, including the ways that working-classness and the construction of racialized identity intersect, both historically and in contemporary U.S. culture; the embodied experiences of being working class; and the principles of a social class-sensitive pedagogy and what they offer educators. In addition, this chapter makes explicit the embodied nature of being working class and engages the reader in considering what it is to have a ‘working-classed body’. Through this exploration, an argument is put forth that social class status is an ongoing process enacted in and through bodies, which results in embodied learning and the disciplining of bodies to know and recognize ‘their place’. And finally, this chapter concludes with an examination of the hierarchies that are created and maintained at the intersection of race and class, and the tensions inherent in the role of educators and education in reinforcing these hierarchies.