Working-class Boys Research Articles

Investigating the role of identity versatility in the discursive production of working-class boyhood, learner identities and educational engagement

Internationally, boys from working-class backgrounds are often the most likely to disengage from their formal education. Research on the educational experience of working-class boys has focused heavily on their identity barriers, often positioning these young men as either vulnerable or volatile in their formal education. Social theorists have sought to address the historical and cultural embedded (gendered) practices which influence the identity work of working-class boys. This conceptual article contributes to the study of working-class boyhood and education through first synthesizing key themes present in the historic and contemporary literature before adopting a feminist post-structural stance to consider how these themes are informed by our understandings of the discursive production of masculinities. Then, in the second half of the paper, we make visible what has been at the margins in the scholarship – identity versatility – which we define as contextual and agentic adaptation. Attention to versatility, we feel, offers the potential for a nuanced analysis regarding working-class boyhood, learner identities and educational engagement.

Social haunting in a former coalmining community: Primary school teachers’ perspectives on working-class boys’ experiences of schooling in post-industrial Britain

This paper complicates Avery Gordon's notion of ‘haunting’ to critically examine the educational experiences of working-class boys attending Lillydown Primary, a state school for pupils aged 3–11 in a former coalmining community in the north of England. It uses the notion of social haunting to demonstrate how particular modes of ‘being and doing’ traditionally associated with coalmining communities continue to affect the boys’ experiences of schooling, even though the British coal industry no longer exists, and the local colliery closed before they were born. The central argument of the paper is that by recognising the fullness of a social haunting, it is possible to engage working-class boys in educational processes and experiences from which they might otherwise feel excluded, alienated, or detached.

Learning to play: how working-class ‘lads’ negotiate PE in a working-class secondary school in England

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ways in which working-class boys negotiated the content and delivery of physical education at a ‘typical’, white working-class secondary school located in the north of England. The study utilised a quasi-ethnographical case-study design conducted over a non-continuous three-month period involving covert and overt participant observation, guided conversations, and group interviews. A total of 48 key stage 4 (Year 10 and 11) male pupils were selected to take part in eight focus groups following the observation of approximately 340 key stage four (KS4) pupils in PE lessons. The data revealed that the vast majority of these male pupils arrived at the school with a narrow sporting repertoire as result of the upbringings and lifestyles made up of ‘traditional’ working-class activities such as football and fishing. Their strong predisposition for recreational involvement in these activities impacted directly on what the young males would, and could, do during PE at school and in this way were able to influence (to lesser and greater degrees) the content and delivery of their PE experiences. The findings of the study, therefore, go some way explaining how PE in many working-class secondary schools may come to influence the long standing, class-related adult participation anomalies that continue to exist in the UK.

In the corner of working-class boys: Relational approaches and the re-orientating of habitus

The academic disengagement of working-class boys features regularly in sociology of education research which frequently highlights how their classed and gendered identities often serve as a barrier to their academic success. The salience of this issue is elevated in the current climate of social change which has renewed debates around gender identities. Analysing case study data from a Northern Ireland-based study, we draw on Bourdieu's theoretical construct of habitus to examine how school-community youth work collaboration encompassing relational approaches can be leveraged to foster better learning experiences and outcomes for such boys; and how their habitus can be reorientated toward a pro-school agenda by resultant changes in the field within which their learning occurs.

The Earle Birney – Malcolm Lowry Connection

The eminent Canadian poet, Earle Birney (1904–95), and the late modernist writer, Malcolm Lowry (1909–57), shared not only a supportive friendship in Vancouver (ignited by Sybil Hutchinson in 1947) involving the patronage of each other’s verses. Their deeper connections were rooted in shared experiences under the influence of Marxist ideas in 1930s England. A self-proclaimed “working-class boy,” Birney was radicalized toward Marxism whilst studying for a Toronto doctoral degree during the Great Depression. Attracted to the Young Communist League, he was won over to Trotskyism in 1933 by Kenneth and Sylvia Johnstone. Convinced that the Communist position was “basically unMarxist” for failing to build a united front against Adolf Hitler, he co-launched a branch of the International Left Opposition (Trotskyist) of Canada and organized political groups in Utah. Yet it was in the United Kingdom in 1934 that he joined (with Esther Heiger, C.L.R. James, and others) the Marxist group within the Independent Labour Party. His correspondence with Trotsky culminated in a visit to Norway to seek advice. His doctoral thesis, 1930s criticism, and literary works – such as Down the Long Table – were shaped by Marxist aesthetics. A Cambridge undergraduate in English in 1929–32, Lowry was aware of the appeal of Marxism to many UK intellectuals. He became involved in political debates hosted by the Haldanes at Roebuck House and contributed to The Venture and Experiment. Liaising with the “Cambridge Five,” he was impressed by Guy Burgess who lent his surname to a character in his 1930s novel, In Ballast to the White Sea (2014), a treatise on communism and revolutions of politics and the soul. Inspired by Waldo Frank, he ensured that Trotskyism and its impact on Mexico are central themes in Under the Volcano (1947).

West African boys and early school leaving: persistence as counternarrative (Chicos negroafricanos y abandono escolar: la persistencia como contra-narrativa)

ABSTRACT ‘Black students’ are considered a group that has been widely studied in the international literature, but their educational situation in Spain has hardly been addressed. Based on an ethnography conducted in the Barcelona metropolitan region, this article examines experiences and educational trajectories of working-class black boys who are the sons of immigrants from West Africa. The research is framed within the European project Reducing Early School Leaving in Europe (RESL.eu), which has used a mixed methodology, longitudinal and comparative, to research the risk and protective factors of early school leaving in nine countries. The study also reveals how their supposed higher school leaving rate is challenged by the specificity of their trajectories, which emerge as a counternarrative of this group of youths as opposed to the hegemonic perspective of deficit from which they are often imagined. The results also warn about the need to review the usefulness of the standardized measures of Early Leaving of Education and Training (ELET) in youths aged 18 to 24.

The Dangers of Italian Americans Reading (Besides Going Blind)

Abstract What happens when a working-class boy in an Italian American family in the Bronx begins to love reading and gets absorbed in the world of books? This essay explores the fears and the hopes raised in one family in the mid-1960s and the ambivalence of success American-style. When books are scarce, they arrive with an aura around them of promise and danger, like visitors from another place and time. The article takes up the possibility that reading may represent betrayal, albeit perhaps a necessary one, and suggests that to become a scholar from a working-class background comes with pain, and that this pain may become a source of conceptual insight.

Post-school youths' schooling experiences and aspirations

While three million youth in South Africa are not in education, employment or training (NEETS), not much is known about their schooling experiences nor their aspirations for the future. Eighty-seven post-school youth (PSY) were enrolled at a youth development and organisation (IYDO) centre in a Black township to the south-east of Johannesburg. This paper analyses the perspectives of these post-school youths of their formal schooling experiences and their aspirations for the future. The paper is framed by Willis’s (2000) theory of the basic educational paradigm at the heart of the teaching relationship and intentional resistance from working class boys. Analysis of data showed the failure of the schools attended by the participants in providing a reasonable standard and quality of education as the main cause of dropping out of school. In spite of challenging structural constraints both historical and current, these post-school youth are not disaffected nor disengaged from quality education. Contrary to the literature, they aspire for a better life and for educational opportunities that would enable them to access professional and managerial jobs and upward social mobility. Appadurai’s (2004) theory of culture of aspiration enabled making sense of participants’ aspirations. The issue of post school youth requires not only alternative post school programmes but also attention to schooling practices within formal secondary school education.

‘They make time for you’: upwardly mobile working-class boys and understanding the dimensions of nurturing and supportive student–teacher relationships

ABSTRACT Improving the academic and social outcomes of boys – specifically boys from low-SES backgrounds – remains of international importance. With this in mind, research continues to document the ways in which relational learning is integral for the well-being of students, specifically those students in disadvantaged school contexts. This paper focuses on relational learning as an important resource that marginalised young men draw upon, informing their future orientation towards higher education beyond their compulsory schooling. Within studies of men and masculinities, the affective turn has recently played a significant role in how we understand men as relational. Focusing upon a cohort of boys from some of the poorest urban regions in Australia, the paper addresses how their affective relationships with teachers contribute not only to their conception of themselves as learners but also their general well-being, confidence and aspirations. Through highlighting two trends in the data – Teacher as Persistent Nurturer and Teacher as Supporter – the research presented extends two lines of inquiry. First, understanding student–teacher relationships in disadvantaged educational contexts and, second, the importance of positive student–teacher relationships for working-class boys who have historically disengaged from their education.

Supporting white working class boys

Data suggests that white working class boys are among the lowest attainers in our schools. Matt Bromley considers why this is and what schools might be able to do about it

The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood by Lucy Andrew

Reviewed by: The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood by Lucy Andrew Ashley Johnson (bio) The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood. By Lucy Andrew. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Lucy Andrew’s thorough research in The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature rivals even Sherlock Holmes’s detective work as she dives deep into the milieu of boys’ detective fiction in Britain from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. The volume offers archival exploration of an impressive number of periodicals, articles, and short stories by multiple authors featuring a range of boy detectives and their adult counterparts, filling a hole in the field of detective and children’s fiction in her analysis of a genre that is “mostly forgotten today and largely unexplored by critics—despite their widespread influence and popularity at the time of their publication,” and her discussion of boys’ detective fiction is an effective and detailed entry point into the subgenre (2). [End Page 224] Andrew traces the transformation of the boy detective in story papers aimed at working class boys in Britain, offering clues as to why the character morphed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her search begins with an analysis of the “penny dreadful” tradition and chapters 1 and 2 address middle-class worries about the detrimental effects of crime literature on adolescent boys. Using serials and newspaper articles, Andrew explains that middle class adults felt that the criminal protagonists in penny stories led to criminal activity in working class boys. To combat this, the boy detective was revised from a criminal protagonist to the likes of Ernest Keen, a moral alternative to the criminal heroes found in early penny dreadfuls. As one of the earliest British texts specifically aimed at children, The Boy Detective attempted to “steer boy readers away from the path of juvenile delinquency and towards an acceptance of middle-class behavioural codes and values” (23). Thus, the aim here was to police boyhood. However, Ernest Keen was too independent and successful for adult readers; thus, the boy detective character disappears from popular reading and, when he returns around thirty years later, morphs into an assistant to adults. Andrew picks up the boy detective’s trail in chapter 3 with an analysis of the Harmsworth Brothers’ story papers of the 1890s which featured detective Sexton Blake, with his Chinese assistant We-wee, and detective Nelson Lee, with his assistant Nipper. Pertinent in this chapter is an analysis of the ways that the detective stories address anxieties about adolescent misbehavior and how they serve as colonizing works with the goal of preparing boys to be useful for the preservation of the British nation. With the future of the nation in the hands of the youth, boys’ detective fiction morphed again into a more diversified genre at the beginning of the twentieth century. The genre flipped the detective/assistant hierarchy and readers saw the introduction of the boy assistant as savior, as well as a rise in stories featuring an independent, professional boy detective. Here, society’s emphasis was on preparing boys to be defenders. However, Andrew explains that these revisions did not provide adequate role models. Thus, in 1908, Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement rose to fill the gap which constructed “a new boy detective model that encapsulates the core values of scouting, such as active citizenship, patriotism and teamwork” (94). This shift created a place for the boy detective in children’s fiction and he would continue to serve in his role as amateur child detective. With the arrival of World War I, society shifted from thinking about boyhood as preparation for manhood to boyhood as a time for boys to be boys, making room for the schoolboy detective. In chapter 5 Andrew explains that educational and legislative reform helped this mutation of the detective story because society became focused on improving child welfare and implementing the school as a “safe haven,” separating childhood from adulthood. Here, Andrew offers example after example of boy detectives who fulfill the role of schoolboy detective and learn from their experiences [End Page...

The Peer Group’s Agency in a Brazilian School

Black working-class boys are the group with the most significant difficulties in their schooling process. In dialogue with Raewyn Connell, we seek to analyze how the collective conceptions of peer groups have influenced the school engagement of Brazilian boys. We conducted an ethnographic research with students around the age of 14 at an urban state school in the periphery of the city of São Paulo. We analyzed the hierarchization process between two groups of boys, demonstrating the existence of a collective notion of masculinity that works against engagement with the school. Well-known to the Anglophone academic literature, this association is rather uncommon in the Brazilian literature. We have therefore attempted to describe and analyze here the challenges faced by Black working-class Brazilian boys to establish more positive educational trajectories.

Challenging Dominant Representations of Marginalized Boys and Men in Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities

Raewyn Connell famously theorized hegemonic masculinity, explaining its dominance over femininity and “subordinated” and “marginalized” masculinities. Attending to representations of the latter, we argue that “men in the margin” are commonly wrongly and/or simplistically depicted as regressive and violent in response to their marginalization. Focusing on representations of working-class boys and men, we illustrate the stereotypical treatment of “men in the margin” more broadly, making clear that this goes against Connell’s treatment of such men. Conversely, privileged boys and men are commonly held up by critical studies on men and masculinities scholars as paragons of progressive change. The characterization of boys and men in the margin as regressive and patriarchal impedes the ability to address problems like violence, misogyny, and homophobia and overlooks the possibilities for transformation that emerge among marginalized communities.

Recognition of boys as readers through a social justice lens

ABSTRACT This paper considers whether societal changes are making space for some working-class boys to go against the grain and foster positive reader identities. Drawing on interviews with 30 Australian boys about their experiences at school, Nancy Fraser’s social justice framework is used to explore their parity of participation as readers. Responses raise questions about the need for recognition of boys as readers across demographics and more equitable redistribution of reading resources to the most economically marginalised educational contexts. Boys’ narratives also challenge homogeneous images of boy/girl reading preferences that are often represented in literacy policies. The article explores nuances in how working-class boys conceive of themselves as readers within their local communities amidst global shifts in the post-industrial era. It also positions Fraser’s social justice framework as a transferable lens for situated analysis that educators interested in enhancing parity of participation for marginalised students can draw upon.

Ethnography and the Fate of Informal Culture: Rereading Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour

Abstract As the increasing discussion over social stratification and mobility indicates, the idea of “education changes destiny” has progressively been brought into question. In his classic study of British working-class boys from 1975, which is widely read in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and education, Paul Willis uncompromisingly revealed that liberal ideology about equal opportunity was only an empty promise and, more importantly, how the counter-cultural cognition and expression adopted the constraints of the structural conditions and at the same time leads to the reproduction of them. Despite the tragic mechanism behind the contradictory counter-culture, Willis remained optimistic about the radical potential in the symbolic works against dominant discourse. His in-depth ethnographic description didn’t only contribute to the endless theoretical debate about Structure and Process, but also provided a methodological approach encouraging extensive fieldwork, in which he believed the “theoretical uncertainty” lies. Ethnography can really “become the intellectual education of those who are governed,” if the scholars are willing to understand and communicate with the informal cultural groups and believe that their fate can be changed.

Machines of Youth: America's Car Obsession

Machines of Youth is about men and boys and their relationship with the automobile in the last century. While Gary S. Cross offers a chapter on the low-rider movement within the Hispanic community and makes occasional references to African Americans and women, the book is mainly about white, primarily working-class boys and men and their desire to modify cars into hot rods ready to cruise the strip, hoping to attract women, to race the cars in the streets, or to impress other aficionados. Cross has written widely on consumer behavior and like his Consumed Nostalgia (2015), where he also explores hot-rod culture during the 1950s. In Machines of Youth he blends ethnographic and historical approaches to better discuss the influence and meaning of the automobile, which shaped “several generations of American youth” (p. 17). The depression and World War II eras provided the starting point for young men to buy cheap used cars and modify them into hot rods. The do-it-yourself mentality and the desire to tinker with the machine technology proved attractive for many primarily young, white teenagers, and they quickly learned how to modify their jalopies into hot rods designed to show off their customizing skills and speed. This led to a rise in street racing as the hot rod “represented a challenge to the established order” (p. 32). After the war, tensions between the adult world and young men and their cars became a social problem, encouraging the rise of hot-rods clubs, magazines, and a national organization—the National Hot Rod Association—which sought to legitimize the hobby and make it more acceptable to mainstream America. The hot-rod culture played a central role in many teenage boys' social lives from the 1950s to the 1970s, especially as it related to rebellion (in the form of street racing), defining their masculinity, and changing courtship patterns. Especially interesting is Cross's discussion of the cruise culture, “embodied the thrill of initiation into adult society and freedom from adult constraints” (p. 82).

Another London, another point of view: the use of defamiliarisation to elicit empathy in the reader for the white working-class protagonist in Another London and their ‘real-world’ equivalents

ABSTRACT In literary fiction, white working-class characters are often represented as part of a homogenised group, complete with stereotypical behaviours and characteristics. Using Fredric Jameson's theory of the ideologeme to identify representational tropes of white working-class characters, this article analyses the juxtaposition of free-indirect discourse and first-person narration in Another London as a defamiliarisation technique to expose the ideologemes of white working-class literary representation. It then examines how, using practice-based research methodologies, the novel attempts to elicit empathy in the reader for the protagonist – an individuated white working-class character – and by doing so challenge the reader's assumptions about the lifestyles of members of this group. The reader's literary experience can translate into ‘real-world’ changes in their perception of, and assumptions about, the behaviours and lifestyles of members of the white working class, thereby challenging stereotypical representations in mainstream media and politics, as well as literature. Another London is a novel written as the creative component of a Ph.D. Creative Writing. Set on a council estate in East London, it follows the social and psychological development of a white working-class boy into adulthood as he lives through fictionalised parallels of real-life events, which force him to confront his own ethnic and class identity.

"But the Child Is Flighty, Playful, Curious"

By the end of the nineteenth century, working-class children increasingly fell under adult supervision. Working-class boys, however, retained much autonomy over their leisure time. By examining memoirs and police archives, this article shows that boys’ play often flirted with the criminal or the dangerous. When boys entered the workplace, this reputation for lawless play followed them. Drawing on accident reports, this article demonstrates that employers and republican labor inspectors blamed boys for dangerous workplace accidents by highlighting boys’ playful nature. The article concludes by showing how reformers constructed spaces for boys’ leisure in an attempt to tame and direct their play. I argue that this reckless play became one of the defining characteristics of working-class boyhood both within peer society and to external observers. Regulating boys’ play thus became a way to ensure that they matured seamlessly into worker-citizens.

Kompetent aktör eller psykiskt skör?

Mental health problems among children and youth is positioned as one of the most urgent public health issues in Sweden today. Both research and official reports assert that mental health issues have increased among adolescents, especially girls, during the last decades. The aim of this study is to investigate how changes in childhood and gender discourses have implicated the construction of young people’s mental health as a public problem since the early 1990s up until today. The empirical material consists of documents published by state authorities between 1990 and 1998, and between 2006 and 2017. The results show that the construction of mental health issues among children and youth is characterized by an ideological and gendered shift, promoting different ideals of childhood. In early 1990s, young people’s poor mental health was understood as a result of social inequality, most common among working-class boys with behavioral problems. Today, it is framed as an introvert phenomenon most common among girls, who are depicted as having trouble handling stress and performance-related pressure. In this shift, the child (read boy) is initially framed as a “child of society” in need of support, to later on being defined as a “competent child” (read girl) who has the responsibility to create a good life for herself. In this way, the construction of mental health among children and youth reflects how gender orders are reformulated in the individualized era, where young girls who do not embody neoliberal ideals of independency, flexibility, and female empowerment are framed as mentally fragile and in crisis. Furthermore, the construction shows how current ideas about the child as a competent actor has central implications for today’s understanding of young people’s mental health.

Rural Failures

Critical boyhood scholars have consistently problematized the moral panic directed at boys’ educational achievements, for instance, by illustrating how the issue is intersected by power hierarchies such class and race, but have not been as attentive to the spatialized dimensions of this discourse. In the Swedish debate, boys in (post)industrial towns in rural regions—affected by decades of deindustrialization—are often pointed out as at risk of becoming unemployed societal liabilities. Documenting the lives, aspirations, and future trajectories of young and rural working-class boys, the television series The School Boys (Skolpojkarna) analyzed in this article reproduces this trope and connects anxieties regarding “redundant” masculinities with rural spaces. Using feminist and post-structural approaches to gender and space, I show how this media production, supplied for educational purposes, mediates normative understandings of young rural masculinity.