Working-class Students Research Articles

‘Helping academics shine’: An exploration into the relationships working-class professional services staff have with others in UK higher education

AbstractDrawing on research interviews with thirteen self-identifying working-class professional services employees in Russell Group institutions, this article attempts to develop a nuanced approach to understanding institutional cultures in UK universities, through the relationships within these establishments. Throughout the study, the tensions between working-class professional services or administrative staff and their counterparts working on academic trajectories became clear. Often highly qualified themselves, the participants in this study describe feelings relating to inadequacy and often negative attitudes proliferated towards them by academic staff. These relationships are framed within the perspective of three themes: academic hierarchies and superior academic value, treatment of staff, and language codes and patterns. In contrast, the participants in this sample often describe their relationships with their networks in professional services as highly positive, developmental, and enriching. This study focused on working-class professional services staff specifically. In the field of working-class research, professional services staff from working-class backgrounds have currently been largely omitted from research, which tends to focus on working-class students and working-class academics. Not all professional services staff identify as working-class, but due to this deficit of evidence in the research field, it is this group in particular that this paper focuses on. The findings in this paper suggest that the relationships these professional services staff have with academics are often fraught, difficult to manage, and at times, derogatory in their nature. This finding comes at the juxtaposition of the wider inclusion agenda UK universities pursue.

“The joy of being a cause” versus “the pleasure of finding things out”: subalternity and Bildung in higher education engineering and physics

AbstractThis paper will discuss the concepts of Bildung, subalternity, and physics- and engineering education and where these topics intersect and interact with one another. A central part of the concept of Bildung is educating citizens—active participators in society. At the same time, a central characteristic of subaltern groups is that their voices are not heard in society. If subaltern groups thus can be recruited into a Bildung-oriented education, their subalternness can over time be challenged, and the groups can be included as equals within society. In the study, 728 physics and bachelor engineering students are asked via a questionnaire about their motivation for their education choice to chart the potential for Bildung-oriented education within these fields. The responses are sorted through a thematic analysis. As this paper will show, the social background—class structure—differs significantly between physics- and bachelor engineering students, as do their motivations. These data along with documentation from previous research showing working-class students’ predisposition toward STEM disciplines facilitate the possibility of sketching possible paths toward Bildung for these students that at the same time can lift subaltern groups and make their voices heard.

Agonistic freedoms: enabling disaffected working-class students to turn-back-around to mainstream school

ABSTRACT The sifting and sorting mechanisms of Australia’s education system continue to work to the detriment of groups put at a disadvantage. For mainstream schools serving working-class communities in particular, the rejection of the offers and advantages of schooling continue to result in differential class consequences and inequalities for working-class young people. In response, this paper pursues a more hopeful project of schooling by considering how schools can work to circumvent the alienation of working-class students from the mainstream secondary school system. Foucault’s conceptualisations of ‘power relations’, ‘agonistic freedom’ and ‘technologies of the self’ are used alongside Kamler and Comber’s notion of ‘turn-around pedagogies’ to draw attention to the complex relationships between students’ subjectivities, their shifting dispositions towards school and eventual enticement to turn-back-around to mainstream school.

Justifying Meritocracy

The theoretical aim of this paper is to articulate a novel analytical framework that makes sense of our interlocutors’ apparently conflicting claims about the reality of meritocracy in China. The theoretical argument is rooted in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Chinese high school, where teachers and working-class students live under the shadows of the demanding and high-stakes university entrance exam (the gaokao). How is it possible to preserve the outwardly inconsistent positions (1) that the gaokao is egalitarian and, thus, fair and (2) that students’ much wealthier counterparts have significantly higher probabilities of success when compared to poorer students? This article argues for the possibility of dynamism in epistemic standards, suggesting that belief in structural systems like meritocracy might be founded in cognitive attempts to maintain the aims of ethical life. Keywords: China, epistemology, ethics, meritocracy, metacognition

Recognizing and Responding to the Untold Stories: How COVID-19 Affected Community College Students’ Decision to Withdraw

ABSTRACT The research paper is an investigation of student withdrawal in an urban community college that primarily serves working-class students, students of color, and first-generation college-goers. Community college students face a myriad of challenges that are not always obvious to faculty and often invisible to the institutions that serve them. At the same time, community colleges and the students they educate are often unfairly characterized as “less than,” suggesting how little they are understood. Nationally, community college students are nearly half of all undergraduates before the COVID-19 pandemic, but less than 40% of them graduate within six years. Additionally, the community college enrollment decline in the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic is causing alarm. As attempts to increase enrollment get underway, this research aims to demonstrate how previous obstacles collided with new complications brought by the pandemic and made college-going beyond challenging for many students. It is the author’s hope that these findings can shed new and much-needed light on recognizing these hardships and that higher education institutions can respond in ways that better support community college students.

Social Capital, Culture, and Codes in Higher Education: Bourdieusian and Bernsteinian Philosophical Underpinnings in the South Africa Environment

Social capital ignored is an “object of political and ideological struggle” created to stifle working-class students in educational spaces. Furthermore, as societal dynamics are constructed in the student-lecturer relationship, this article seeks to evaluate how deliberative democracy in the online higher education space can inspire care through the ongoing dialogue between student and lecturer. This is framed against the Bourdieusian (social capital) and Bernsteinian (social code) framework because both theorists’ work highlights how the dominant class (represented by lecturers) consciously and unconsciously tends to ignore students’ social and cultural capital and codes. This, in turn, leads to a lack of dialogue and care in student-lecturer relationships in higher education. One of this study’s findings is that higher education is aimed to support more middle-class students. The reason for this is that our findings show that lecturers tend not to know what to do with the social habitus of working-class or disadvantaged students. The aforementioned phenomena were foregrounded through Bourdieusian (social capital) and Bernsteinian (social code) model that is situated in the sociological approach, which is interpretive in nature, to explore whether dialogue and care were shown.

Using Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to explore higher education decision-making for working class women on an access to higher education course

Despite the increasing number of non-traditional students entering higher education (HE) in England, HE choices remain stratified by social class. Mature working class students are a target group of the widening participation policy, yet little attention has been given to their HE choices and decision-making. Through narrative inquiry, this study uses a creative method alongside focus groups and semi-structured interviews, and contributes a class perspective to the HE decision-making for 13 women on an Access to HE course. It links sociological theory to adult education, through a Bourdieusian framework. It evidences structural constraints and perceptions of belonging that impeded choices. A sense of place and feelings of fit (habitus) were significant for destination decisions. However, Access to HE course teachers were positively influential in helping students challenge embedded habitual ways of thinking and practice and in raising self-efficacy. The findings offer explanations as to why participation rates may be increasing but not widening enough. It illuminates how social class differences (intersected by age and gender) are crucial to understanding HE decision-making and places a much-needed focus on mature students to the widening participation and social mobility agenda.

Going the distance: benefits and challenges of a long-term study of working-class, first-in-family university students

ABSTRACT This paper draws on experiences gained in a 16-year qualitative study of the experiences of working-class students who were the first in their family to attend university. Although the study suffered from attrition and analysis was complicated because it became increasingly difficult to understand the data through any one theoretical or conceptual framework, this complexity also offered the opportunity for a more nuanced approach, to become reassured in earlier interpretations, and to correct past misinterpretations. Their long-term commitment to the research project led many of the participants to articulate benefits they gained from being in the study for 16 years. The opportunity to tell their stories and have their experiences as first-in-family students validated was something they identified as especially important and valuable to them. QLR thus offers unique benefits that are not possible in cross-sectional research.

Class matters: Employing photovoice with first-generation poor and working-class college students as a lens on intersecting identities.

Class matters: Employing photovoice with first-generation poor and working-class college students as a lens on intersecting identities.

Transforming oneself: delving into the processes of habitus transformation in the higher education field

In a context of universalization of Higher Education (HE) and fragmentation of educational trajectories, consolidating a process of educational and social mobility implies, for many students with non-traditional backgrounds, important identity conflicts. Based on 40 qualitative interviews with non-traditional working-class students enrolled in an HE institution in Barcelona (Spain), three major patterns of what we have called ‘habitus transformations’ have been identified: adaptation, substitution and dislocation or rupture. The results of this study suggest that the universalization of access to HE does not mechanically imply greater opportunities for educational success for non-traditional students. The contribution also introduces the subjective experience of being a non-traditional HE student and the emotional impacts and contradictions involved in the processes of social mobility through HE.

The elephant in the (class) room: cultural capital as personal differences and college segregation

This article presents the results of two projects exploring the experiences of working-class students in elite colleges. The first project is a nation-wide study that included 19 focus groups with 183 program participants of a condonable loan program, and additional interviews and focus groups with non-scholarship students, professors and administrators. The second project is an in-depth ethnographic project including 61 interviews with beneficiaries of the same condonable loan program and multiple ethnographic observations over 4 years. Two main consistent related themes appeared in the data. First, cultural capital and, more generally, social class differences are perceived as the result of personal preferences and individual choice. Second, this perception helps making social class invisible and allows the interpretation of college segregation as independent of the class structure. Both themes are related with the lack of open conversations about class in elite colleges and to the frames of abstract liberalism previously identified for the case of racism.

'Levelling up' social mobility? Comparing the social and spatial mobility for university graduates across districts of Britain.

Social and spatial mobility have been subject to substantial recent sociological and policy debate. Complementing other recent work, in this paper we explore these patterns in relation to higher education. Making use of high-quality data from the higher education statistics agency (HESA), we ran a set of multilevel models to test whether the local authority areas where young people grow up influence social and spatial mobility into a higher professional or managerial job on graduation. We found entry to these patterns reflect pre-existing geographies of wealth and income, with more affluent rural and suburban areas in South-East England having higher levels of entry to these occupations. Graduates clustered from major cities tended to be spatially immobile and those from peripheral areas further away from these cities show a higher density of long-distance moves following graduation. We also explored the intersection between social and spatial mobility for graduates with the economic geography of Britain, showing that access to high-class occupations is not necessarily associated with long-distance moves across most British districts. Our evidence further suggests that the 'London effect', where working-class students have higher school attainment than their peers elsewhere, may not continue through to graduate employment.

Rural, Poor and Working-Class Student Postsecondary Experiences During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Policy Lessons Learned for Supporting Future College Success

Rural, Poor and Working-Class Student Postsecondary Experiences During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Policy Lessons Learned for Supporting Future College Success

Preservice teachers’ experiences navigating “adaptive learning” technology

ABSTRACT This hermeneutic-phenomenological study, following the work of van Manen, examines how kindergarten and elementary preservice teachers experienced practicum and student teaching in classrooms affected by the expansion of “adaptive learning” technology designed to assess children and personalize their learning. The researchers conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews and collected personal drawings from 21 mainly White and female preservice teachers in the Appalachian region of the US. The findings provided preservice teachers’ descriptions of the effects of “adaptive learning” contexts with attention to three subgroups that emerged: children experiencing traumatic stress, working class students, and students labeled as “gifted.” The findings suggested that from the view of preservice teachers, “adaptive learning” technology had a complicated role in classroom learning since it did not only extract data from children but reconstituted relations in the classroom. Although adaptive learning was used in part to ease teacher recruitment and retention challenges, it tended to have a negative effect on preservice teachers’ opportunities for learning. To improve levels of pedagogical thoughtfulness and tact in “adaptive learning” classrooms, the data suggested that new considerations of communication, scheduling, and engaging dialogically with the “adaptive learning” tools are paramount to creating better opportunities for mentoring, learning, and growth.

‘I don’t feel like I belong’: first-in-family girls’ constructions of belonging and space during the transition from secondary school into university

ABSTRACT University spaces can be experienced as unfamiliar and anxiety-inducing by working-class students. Early difficulties adjusting to university can lead to attrition. This article draws from a larger study examining the experiences of first-in-family (FIF) girls in one Australian city as they transition from secondary school into their first year of university. In exploring how FIF girls may experience the affective dimensions of belonging through university spaces, this article seeks to highlight how belonging occurs through gendered and classed meaning-making. The thematic analysis in this article is based on the narratives of two FIF girls, Kate and Christina. Central to this analysis is an exploration of how Kate and Christina navigate feelings of belonging within their universities according to the classed and gendered aspects of the multiple higher education spaces they come to inhabit.

How do the “Pastoral Children” transform into Modern Students? Reflections from the perspectives of cultural reproduction and cultural acculturation

Education serves as one of the most potent means to promote equity and justice, yet concurrently functions as a powerful mechanism for the reproduction of inequity and injustice. This study integrates the theories of cultural reproduction and cultural acculturation, combining macro-level structural considerations with micro-level agency perspectives to explore the regeneration mechanism of educational equity. Utilizing interview methods, data were collected from 83 students, 48 teachers, 25 parents, 26 education administrators, 12 leaders in education administration, and 9 local cultural elites in Kangding City, a central urban area for China's ethnic minorities. The findings indicate that minority working-class students from traditional communities, upon entering urban schools where the predominant culture is modern mainstream, face significant challenges related to strict temporal and spatial regulations, as well as the intense clash between the inward-seeking spiritual foundations of traditional culture and the outward-seeking demands of modern mainstream culture. This results in a profound cultural interruption and even conflict during the process of cultural reproduction, as students strive to master the new cultural capital taught in schools, facilitating cross-cultural adaptation and transforming into genuine modern students. Following cultural adaptation, new issues of cultural identity arise, leading students into a dilemma of self-reflection within diverse contexts and even fostering a dual alienation from both modern mainstream society and traditional communities. All these aspects underscore the imbalance in power relations between urban schools in marginalized communities, which, in teaching cultural capital and reinforcing social control, deviate to some extent from their original intent of addressing educational equity issues.

The Graduate School Pipeline and First-Generation/Working-Class Inequalities

Sociological research has long been interested in inequalities generated by and within educational institutions. Although relatively rich as a literature, less analytic focus has centered on educational mobility and inequality experiences within graduate training specifically. In this article, we draw on a combination of survey and open-ended qualitative data from approximately 450 graduate students in the discipline of sociology to analyze graduate school pipeline divergences for first-generation and working-class students and the implications for inequalities in tangible resources, advising and support, and a sense of isolation. Our results point to an important connection between private undergraduate institutional enrollment and higher-status graduate program attendance—a pattern that undercuts social-class mobility in graduate training and creates notable precarities in debt, advising, and sense of belonging for first-generation and working-class graduate students. We conclude by discussing the unequal pathways revealed and their implications for merit and mobility, graduate training, and opportunity within our and other disciplines.

Building trust in elementary schools: the impact of home school community collaboration

There is a general consensus among contemporary social scientists that social trust is important(Alexander, 2003; Coleman, 1990; Delhey & Newton, 2003; Huang, 2003; Putnam, 1993). In thecontext of education, trust was seen as a goal and a tool for school improvement (Meier, 2002; Brown, 1998; Schneider & Bryk, 2002). This paper examines teachers’ trust in schools and the factors related to their level of trust. Results of factor analysis show that 19 items measuring teachers’ trust can be categorized into four factors of relational trust: “teachers trust on students”; “parents trust on teachers”; “teachers trust on parent” and “teachers trust on parental involvement”. Results from descriptive analysis indicated that teachers in general hold a positive attitude toward the students and their parents, and majority of teachers are also quite positive towards parents’ support and the mutual respect between teacher and parents in Hong Kong. Results from the hierarchical regression analysis suggested that parent social background factors (SES), but not teachers’ background factors, has the strongest association with teachers’ level of trust. The results suggested that upper-class students are more likely to have higher level of trust on student, trust on parent and trust on parental involvement. However, teachers are more likely work harder to establish trust relationship with parents from working class students. Moreover, the seven types of home-school-community collaboration appears to have different contribution to the dimensions of relational trust in Hong Kong elementary schools even after background factors have taken into account.

Canary in the mine: what white working-class underachievement reveals about processes of marginalisation in English secondary education

ABSTRACT This paper argues that processes of marginalisation experienced by white working-class students provide insight into systemic problems with the English education system. White British students eligible for Free School Meals (FSM) are a low attaining group. This research investigates factors affecting their engagement and achievement. Fieldwork in three comprehensive secondary schools in a London borough used qualitative methods to gather data on the perspectives of staff, students and parents. Using Bourdieu’s conceptual tools to guide the analysis, the study found that performance pressure and funding cuts can result in an institutional habitus which privileges academic attainment, side-lines the social and emotional aspects of learning and misrecognises working-class capitals. Such habitus fosters pedagogic practices which reduce levels of felt safety and limit opportunities to actively engage and exercise agency in the classroom. These conditions often make fragile the learner identity of white working-class students (and others) and prompt disengagement from school.

Let’s talk about class – exploring the everyday emotions and experiences of classism in Irish education: a thematic analysis of Irish Twitter conversations on class and education between 2018 and 2022

ABSTRACT This paper examines attitudes to classism in Irish education using a thematic analysis of social media conversations about social class between 2018 and 2022. Previous research indicates that Irish education systems are designed by and favour the dominant and ruling classes. However, few studies use the voice of the lived experience to explore the phenomenon. This article investigates Irish people’s communication of class inequalities in education via the social media platform Twitter (X). Braun and Clarke’s thematic analysis was employed to analyse and group the Tweets, with Dean’s framework on communicative capitalism to guide the findings. This study indicates that social media has become a legitimate platform to challenge hegemony in education by creating online communities or collective identities in struggles against social inequalities in Ireland. Findings reveal that classism continues to prevail in Irish education, with working-class Tweets on the lived experiences of discrimination providing novel insights on emerging themes such as elitism, inequality of access and symbolic violence. Future research in this area needs to focus on the effects of social class on educational attainment, access, and participation in Irish settings. In particular, examining weaknesses in current structures to support working-class students, and possible grassroot interventions and policies to mitigate the impacts of social class on education.