Working-class High School Research Articles

Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped

Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped

Schools of Democracy

In the late 20th century, a wave of democratic transformation swept away dictatorships of the right and left across Europe, Africa and much of Asia; and for the first time in human history most citizens lived under governments they had chosen in free elections. Liberal democracy, characterized by multiparty elections, individual liberties, free enterprise and independent trade unions, seemed poised to dominate the future, but today populist movements challenge the liberal consensus and global public opinion surveys indicate a loss of faith in democratic values. The rapid decline in labor union membership across the developed world may be a contributing factor. Social scientists have documented the function of labor unions as “schools” of democracy where working-class high school graduates learn crucial civic skills, boosting their political participation and reducing the gap between socioeconomic classes. This may explain why AFL President Samuel Gompers’s observation, that “there never yet existed coincident with each other autocracy in the shop and democracy in political life” remains true 125 years later, and highlights a major threat to democracy today.

Being a moffie with toxic parents - An autoethnography of bullying and coming out

ABSTRACTThis article uses autoethnography to impart the author's personal reflections of identity work, reconciling various identities, growing up as a gay boy, experiences of being bullied and subsequently coming out. Growing up in a conservative rural town exposed the author to compulsory heterosexuality and the prevailing order of gender conformity, and highlighted his not fitting in. The intent of autoethnography is to recognise the complicated link between the personal and the cultural, and to make room for non-traditional ways of analysis and communication. Emotion work as a theoretical basis for reconciling his identity, as well as social learning theory, is briefly explored. This is necessary insofar as boys learn to be masculine by imitating others' behaviour and getting responses from them-as the author did in his then boys boarding school. The boys attending the boarding school claimed that disliking 'moflies' (faggots) was just a part of what it means to be a guy, based on heteronormativity as a central component of peer pressure. Boys may use social and emotional harassment/bullying to make it difficult for other boys to be successful at school. The author experienced these interactions with other learners in an Afrikaans working-class high school. In the article, he reflects on the fact that it is through communication, social connections and psychotherapy that a person learns his/her identity and what that means in the culture into which he/she was born.

Cultural Competence Development, Critical Service Learning, and Latino/a Youth Empowerment: A Qualitative Case Study

ABSTRACTAs universities create service-learning programs, educators are experimenting with pedagogical approaches that enhance learning outcomes while benefiting communities. We present a qualitative case study of a radio-based, service-learning program, grounded in a Freirean foundation and aimed at developing the cultural competence and sense of citizenship of undergraduate students while empowering working-class high school Latino/a students. Undergraduate students benefited the most from the program; they enhanced their cultural competence skills, awareness of social issues, and sense of civic responsibility. Latino/a high school students who stayed in the program for at least a year developed self-confidence, self-esteem, and a sense of self-efficacy.

Working-class high school learners' challenge to change: insights from the Equal Education movement in South Africa

Hargreaves (2002) suggested that vigorous social movements have the potential to improve the quality of (and increase the equity in) public education. This paper explores the role of Equal Education, an education social movement in South Africa led by university students and secondary school learners, in the process of educational change. Drawing on interviews with the organisation’s founding members, organisers and secondary school learners, the paper examines how the organisation/social movement embodies what Oakes and Rogers (2007) describe as ‘learning power’ and in the process contribute to improvement in public education.

Average American teenager? White working-class high school students navigate race, privilege and opportunity

Using findings from an interview-based ethnographic research study, this article explores the social identity development of white suburban high school students in a working-class area of north-eastern United States. Discussion focuses on the ways that ‘whiteness’ and ‘normality’ become conflated for these white working-class teens as they identify themselves as ‘average,’ ‘regular,’ and ‘normal,’ by enlisting neoliberal discourses of individuality, consumerism, and opportunity. I argue that these discourses of normality work to hide both the white privilege as well as the disadvantages the teens experience as a result of their working-class backgrounds.

‘Coloured’ Boys Talk: Constructing Heterosexual Masculinities in a Working Class High School Context

This article presents the results of a year-long ethnographic study of 13 ‘Coloured’, working class, high school boys aged 14–17 in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Data derived using participant observation and semi-structured in-depth interviews. Social constructionist perspectives were used as a basis for discourse analysis. An interrogation of participant accounts illustrated the contradictory and ambiguous nature of their heterosexual identities. The findings suggest the simultaneous performance of crude, misogynistic masculinities, and more loving and respectful attitudes towards women and girls. The alternate discursive positions show potential for more equitable gender relationships to be encouraged in historically disadvantaged teenage boys.

Vive la Resistance! (De)Constructing Classmates in a White Working Class High School

English Language Arts class in a predominantly white suburban high school may seem like an unlikely site for transformational pedagogy. Teachers and students speak the same national language and most of the teachers grew up and were educated in working class communities. Despite these roots, it is far too easy for teachers to forget that our “portfolios of experiences” have created access to middle class cultural values. If teachers unconsciously internalize middle class values, we might unwittingly judge working class students as academically deficient rather than engage in empowering, critical pedagogies. Teachers might reconsider student resistance as a force for co-creating curriculum to empower otherwise marginalized students. This piece explores the nuances of social class, power, and language through the experiences of a teacher and her 11th grade students as they negotiate two units of study that are heavily laden with social class: poetry and college entrance. Analysis and reflection indicate that students in a white working class high school can benefit from pedagogies that embrace, rather than dismiss, student resistance.

Doing More for Keisha

In their editorial “Doing more for Kate” (16 Dec. 2005, p. [1741][1]), T. Cech and D. Kennedy describe a young woman who might have been a productive scientist, but was transformed into a business major by the anomie of a large research university. Keisha, a valedictorian from a working class high school, was also overwhelmed at a large research university. Rather than changing majors, however, Keisha transferred to a smaller public comprehensive university. There she was soon noticed by an instructor, who drew out her story and introduced her to other faculty. She is now engaged in an undergraduate research project, is academically successful, and seems well on the way to graduate school and a scientific career. Although efforts to energize teaching in large classes should be applauded, it is a mistake to believe that this is more than a palliative for the real pathology that afflicts the U.S. scientific pipeline. The anecdotes about Kate and Keisha really say that scientific training and the development of a scientific workforce are intensely personal and human activities. This is not the mission of large research universities, nor are teachers of even the best large classes particularly good at it. Assuming that intellectual capability in the young is not determined solely by the income of their parents, perhaps the greatest unexploited pool of scientific talent exists among the children of the working class. It is the public comprehensive universities, those invisible and disregarded institutions, that are most likely and best qualified to mentor and develop this impecunious human resource. Yet it is precisely those institutions that are being starved to death by state legislatures nationwide. If Cech and Kennedy are correct that the U.S. scientific enterprise is threatened, then the science establishment might do even more for Kate and Keisha by attacking the political disease rather than the pedagogical symptoms. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1123580

Making White: Constructing Race in a South African High School

As a social and cultural phenomenon, race is continually remade within changing circumstances and is constructed and located, in part, in institutions’ pedagogical practices and discourses. In this article I examine how the administration of a multiracial, working-class high school in Durban, South Africa produces “white” in an era of political and social transition.As the population of Fernwood High School (a pseudonym) shifts from majority white working class to black working class, the school administration strives to reposition the school as “white,” despite its predominantly black student population. This whiteness is not only a carryover from the apartheid era, but is actively produced within a new set of circumstances. Using the discourses and practices of sports and standards, the school administration attempts to create a whiteness that separates the school from the newly democratic nation-state of South Africa. Despite students’ and some staff’s general complacency and outright resistance, rugby and athletics are heralded as critical nodes of the school’s “white” identity, connecting the school to other, local white schools, and disconnecting it from black schools. Dress standards function in a similar manner, creating an imagined equivalence between Fernwood and other white schools in Durban (and elite schools around the world), and disassociating Fernwood from black schools in South Africa and the “third world” writ large. This pedagogy of whiteness forms the core of the administration’s relationship with Fernwood students, and maps how race is remade within a changing national context.

(IN) SECURE TIMES

This article documents a moment in history when poor and working-class white boys and men are struggling in their schools, communities, and workplaces against the “Other” as a means of framing identities. Drawing on two independent qualitative studies, the authors investigate distinct locations where poor and working-class boys and men invent, relate to, and distance from marginalized groups in an effort to create self. First the authors look at an ethnography of “the Freeway boys,” a community of urban white working-class high school boys who must deal with the economic ravagement of their neighborhood and their insecure place in a world different than that of their fathers. Next, the authors draw from a large-scale survey of young adults to hear how a combined sample of urban poor and working-class white men narrate identities that are carved explicitly out of territory bordered by white women and African American men. Across sites, the authors theorize how high schools and workplaces both, in part, create white masculinities and interrupt them, at a time when white working-class boys and men feel under siege.

Urban White Working-Class Males and the Possibilities of Collective Anger: Patrolling Riley Road

The study, which was conducted in white working-class bars, investigates how a group of white working-class mates aged 25–30 struggle to construct a sense of masculine identity in the context of a postindustrial economy. Previously, Willis (1977) argued that secondary-school “lads,” in part, shaped their masculine identity around the male Saber jobs they hoped to hold in the future. In a deindustrialized economy, Weis (1990) found that white working-class high school boys retained a sense of masculinity by envisioning a future male-dominant domestic framework. This research investigates how a group of white working-class men turn to their community for a sense of identity, and how these men channel their anger at their devalued economic status into policing their neighborhood from an African American male presence. It will be argued that possibly through policing, or forcibly defining the borders of their community, these men are trying to act out versions of their embattled masculinity.

Urban Students, Liminality, and the Postindustrial Context

The effects of deindustrialization and the shift to a postindustrial society have contributed to an evolution in the organization and operation of cities. This qualitative case study explored urban working-class high school students' perceptions of school, work, and the future within this changing context; their inability or hesitancy to construct their futures; the lack of a peer-group hierarchy; and the mainly positive racial and ethnic relations in the school. Liminality, an anthropological and sociological construct, appeared to capture some of the complexities and contradictions of these macroeconomic and social changes and to explain some of the daily realities of urban students.

Dropping Out in a Working Class High School: adolescent voices on the decision to leave

Abstract Although many high school drop‐outs share a history of academic failure and truancy behaviour, their underlying reasons for leaving school are far more complex, and involve a web of both personal and school‐related problems. Interviews with drop‐outs from a working class high school in the USA revealed how the school's response, or lack of response, to their problems compounds their difficulties and creates a tension over the source of blame for their failure. On the one hand, these adolescents criticised the school for its failings, but on the other hand, they attributed much of their failure to themselves. In resolving this issue of blame, these suburban white drop‐outs, in contrast to inner‐city minority youth, indicated that, ultimately, they themselves must be at fault for failing to conform to the expectations and demands of school. An explanation for this difference is offered by contrasting their lack of collective identity with the racial consciousness of African American drop‐outs.

Ideological Development In Working-Class Youth

The authors report on research in progress regarding modes of political thought among "bright" working-class adolescents. The basic question framing the study was "Has the ideology of working-class youth shifted away from its traditional focus on upward mobility toward a radical critique of the society?" The study consisted of in-depth interviews with working-class high school students with IQ's over 115. A pilot study revealed little heightened political consciousness and the authors turned to an exploration of the effects of community context on ideological development. The second phase of the research studied working-class adolescents in three contrasting community settings. Initial findings indicate on the one hand a widespread ethic of individual responsibility and a general suspicion of political involvement,but on the other hand, substantial community and individual variation in personal visions of the future and levels of support for the American political system. The authors speculate on the complex problems involved when middle-class persons engage in political consciousness raising among working-class adolescents,who would have to take substantial personal risks were they to adopt a more radical position.

Evaluation of an attempt to teach scientific inquiry and criticism in a working class high school

AbstractA group of 15 low SES 14‐year‐olds, who had not yet reached Piaget's stage of “formal operations”, were taught to design controlled experiments and to criticize poorly controlled experiments. As judged by performance on a nonstandardized text, they learned to do this well, and significantly outperformed matched controls. (p <.001). The results were interpreted with reference to Inhelder and Piaget's work on the origins of scientific thinking.