Working-class Students Research Articles

Social class and streaming in contexts of educational disadvantage: what young people have to say

ABSTRACT This article critically examines the everyday practices of streaming working-class students into vocational education and training pathways in public high schools in Western Australia. It challenges existing beliefs, assumptions and practices underpinning the ways in which students are artificially divided into academic and non-academic forms of school knowledge at a young age. In a country that prides itself on the myth of egalitarianism, we argue that streaming functions to legitimate existing power relations, social hierarchies, and educational inequalities. Drawing on the tradition of critical ethnography, the article examines the post school reflections of five young adults, now studying at Tertiary and Further Education (TAFE) institutions, as they reflect on their experience of high school and the processes around their decision to enrol in a vocational education and training programme at school and with what effects. The article identifies five emergent key themes organised around the narrative of each student.

Working-class student-hood and ‘job-readiness’: Affective relations of class, gender and employability policy in higher education

ABSTRACT Past decades have seen increased emphasis on graduate employability as a driver of higher education policy. In the Australian context, employability discourses in the public domain have become inflected with anti-intellectual sentiment, serving to reproduce the perception that the humanities and social sciences are of less value to graduates’ employability than are science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine. Against this backdrop, and with particular reference to the Job-ready Graduates Package, we investigate how diverse notions of employability shape student-hood for working-class female students who are largely engaged in the social sciences. Attending to affective dynamics, we show how employability imperatives ‘land’ for these students, individually, and as an ‘equity group’. While employability policies are typically positioned as a salve for class inequalities, they can also discredit educational and employment endeavours of working-class students, and reproduce class tensions. To enhance employability policies, there is a need to move beyond reductionist models of job-readiness, towards responding to the complexities of policy as enacted through lived relations. We propose attending to the variability of both identity and value positions and recognising the contribution of affect and emotion to this complex set of policy dynamics.

Youth work, prosocial behaviour, and micro-foundation of working-class solidarity among vocational school students in China

ABSTRACT Despite the large number of working-class students having to work while attending schools, their work experience and the potential of class solidarity have been largely unaddressed. By bringing in a social psychological perspective, this article revives the sociological debates of working-class solidarity and challenges the defeatist view of solidarity since the neoliberal turn of the global economy. This article comprises two studies. In Study 1, a working-class solidarity measure (WCSM) was developed through interviews, followed by factor-analysis of a vocational school sample in China (n = 509). In Study 2, we validated the factor structure of the WCSM and adopted structural equation modelling to show that prosocial behaviour positively predicted solidarity among vocational school students (n = 2534). Contrary to the understanding that the working-class is divisive and fragmentary, our work shows that working-class solidarity can be built and consolidated through layers of prosocial behaviours by students with work experience.

Family Work Histories: Centering First-Generation and Working-Class Students in a Sociology Course

First-generation students often feel alone on college campuses. These students can find themselves excluded from organizations, traditions, and spaces that require financial, social, and cultural capital they may not have. In my Sociology of Work course, I use a family work history project to center and validate their experiences. Using census records and other sources, students reconstruct their parents’, grandparents’, and great-grandparents’ experience in the workplace. The histories of my first-generation students, in turn, provide the lens through which we collectively build a sociological analysis of the way that work shapes the trajectory of our lives. More specifically, these histories have taken us from farm and factory to the low-wage service sector, revealing both the troubles facing those without a college degree as well as their resilience. Overall, students describe this as a deeply meaningful project that confirms the pedagogical value of storytelling, particularly for first-generation students.

Theorizing the Teaching Triad

In this conversation essay, the authors incorporate teaching assistants (TAs) into pedagogical theorizing through what they call the teaching triad, an analytic heuristic to understand faculty-TA-undergraduate interactions. TAs are graduate students who are tasked with running discussion sections, smaller settings where undergraduates interact more directly with the material and one another. Yet, faculty pedagogies enable or constrain the work of TAs and shape classroom climates. We discuss three types of faculty pedagogies and their effects: (1) authoritarian pedagogies, wherein faculty exhibit inflexible, controlling behaviors that create a silencing and distrustful climate; (2) absentee pedagogies, characterized by a lack of faculty presence, which results in additional labor for TAs and confusion and panic for students; and (3) advocate pedagogies, which involve proactively engaged and flexible faculty approaches, cultivating an empowered environment. Understanding these dynamics is important for first-generation and/or working-class students, particularly those of color, who already face barriers to learning.

‘They burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why’

In this article we connect critical librarianship and its practices of information literacy (IL) with working-class experiences of higher education (HE). Although the research literature and professional body of knowledge of critical information literacy (CIL), is one of the most theoretically-developed areas of wider critical librarianship (Critlib) movement, working-class knowledge and experiences remain underrepresented. One reason for this is that the values, behaviour and assumptions of library and HE workers are shaped by a HE system which inculcates middle-class values and cultural capitals within students, and stigmatises working-class students as lacking or in deficit. Hegemonic, or non-critical, IL proselytises middle-class values and assumptions about academic practices and skills development including the notion of an ideal student with behaviour and markers of identity which reflect those most privileged by wider society. In contrast CIL, framed as the socially-just practice of IL is theoretically well-placed to support working-class library workers in destabilising this alongside middle-class accomplices. Employing Yosso’s (2005) concept of community and cultural wealth (CCW), we analyse how library workers can recognise working-class cultural wealth within the context of CIL and wider working practices. As such narrative accounts are lacking in the literature, we utilise collaborative autoethnography (CAE) (Chang et al., 2013) to consider and interpret our own experiences of libraries when we were university students ourselves, and more recently as HE workers of working-class heritage.

Social Class Support: A Book Review

CITATION: Martin, G.L., & Ardoin, S. (Eds.) (2021). Social class supports: Programs and practices to serve and sustain poor and working-class students through higher education. Stylus Publishing.

From Here to There: Using Required Courses to Expand First-Generation Mentorship Accessibility

One challenge sociology departments face is conveying to undergraduates the relevance of a sociology degree for future careers. This challenge is more notable for first-generation and working-class students who research shows have more limited access to mentors. Here we present a department-level mentoring initiative designed to address systemic gaps first-generation students face in accessing mentorship, especially in relationship to career readiness. The mentoring module we examine here is the first of four delivered across our curriculum and focuses on introducing what sociologists do in “the real world,” advancing the idea of career transferability, and providing information on university resources helpful to developing student personal and professional identities. We discuss the context, implementation, and analysis of student reflections and conclude with lessons learned and strategies departments can draw on to improve mentoring of first-generation sociology students.

Playing Spent!: FGWC Experiences of Poverty Simulation Games

First-generation and working-class (FGWC) students bring a different set of life experiences to the classroom than students of privilege. As an instructor from an FGWC background, I use the poverty simulation game Spent! to make economic stratification understandable to students who have led lives of economic privilege and bring FGWC representation to the classroom in a way that honors their unique cultural capital. Despite a tendency toward consciousness raising for students of privilege, poverty simulation can still be a liberatory learning exercise for FGWC students when the cultural capital they bring to the classroom from their lived experience is valued and honored during the activity rather than objectified and subordinated. During the activity, as privileged students express shock at the realities of living paycheck to paycheck, FGWC students confidently share their situated knowledge of poverty. Building on prior assessments of the value of simulation games in the classroom, this article expands this knowledge by specifically looking at the experiences of FGWC students in addition to their more privileged peers in the context of Spent!

From Inclusive to Equitable Pedagogy: How to Design Course Assignments and Learning Activities That Address Structural Inequalities

Current approaches to building inclusive classrooms for first-generation and working-class students tend to emphasize communicative strategies: receiving students with welcoming messages that acknowledge and value their life experience and promoting a growth mindset. These methods are important, but they do little to address structural sources of exclusion, such as academic inequities and disadvantages in resources like time. Communicative strategies alone secure inclusion without equity. Equity, however, involves teaching and learning activities that promote fair treatment and access at a structural level in order to offer students a concrete path to classroom success. In this article, we develop a framework for designing assignments and learning activities that addresses the type of structural barriers that most affect first-generation, working-class, and racially minoritized students. We identify three distinct types of structural disadvantages—academic inequities, resource disadvantages, and cultural discrimination—and propose three strategies for equitable design: deliberative interdependence, transformative translation, and proactive engagement. We illustrate each strategy with concrete teaching methods. We conclude by suggesting that only a transformative, comprehensive shift to equity mindedness is capable of doing justice to the increasing diversity of college classrooms.

Social-Class Inequalities in Distance Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digital Divide, Cultural Mismatch, and Psychological Barriers

The COVID-19 pandemic forced universities to move towards distance learning, requiring increased use of digital tools and more independent learning from students. In this context, the present study examined two previously documented barriers that contribute to social-class disparities in universities: the digital divide and the experience of cultural mismatch. Cultural mismatch refers to the disconnect between the highly independent cultural norms of universities and the interdependent cultural norms common among working-class students. Our goals are to (1) replicate the findings related to these barriers in a European context (2) provide pandemic-specific data related to these barriers, and (3) examine how the digital divide and cultural mismatch relate to psychological factors and learning behaviors necessary for academic success. Two thousand two hundred and seventy-five students in France answered questions about their digital access/use, self-construal, psychological factors (i.e., sense of belonging, self-efficacy, intentions to drop-out from the university), and learning behaviors (e.g., attending class, asking questions). Results showed that working-class students have less digital access and value interdependence more than their middle/upper-class peers, suggesting they are more likely to experience a cultural mismatch. Structural equation modeling revealed that both the digital divide and the experience of cultural mismatch undermines working-class students’ psychological experience (e.g., belonging), which, in turn, hinders their learning behavior. The distance learning required by the pandemic led to increased needs for digital access and independence, and therefore more negatively affected working-class students, which could fuel and widen the social-class achievement gap.

Getting a head start: capital inheritance and the labour market entry of Finnish business graduates

Previous studies have associated participation in higher education with the formation of middle-class advantages. Studies have shown that graduates from affluent family backgrounds gain more advantages from graduate degrees and secure better job opportunities than their less privileged counterparts. Drawing on the Bourdieusian framework, this study uses qualitative interview data (n = 29) to examine how recent business graduates mobilise economic, cultural and social capital for their entry into the Finnish labour market. The context of the Finnish welfare society brings novel insights to research on the inheritance of different forms of capital. Our findings reveal that although middle-class students do have a head start in entry to the graduate labour market, the Finnish society and higher education system even out social inequalities in graduate employment as working-class students may utilise institutional resources, socialise with peers and accumulate work experience to cross structural and dispositional barriers.

The relationship between class-based habitus and choice of university and field of study

Enrollments in higher education have expanded greatly, but without elimination of all forms of inequality. Research in industrialized countries has shown that the path students follow in their transition from secondary school continues to be associated with their social class. This study provides quantitative evidence of that relationship in a non-industrial country like Chile. Multinomial logistic and linear regression of university admission data managed by the Department of Evaluation, Measurement and Registration describing 130,000 applicants for the years 2015 and 2017 were used to estimate the probability of a member of a particular social class choosing a given university and academic field of study. The results show differences regarding law programs and science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs. Class differences were particularly important in the choice of university. Working-class students were more likely to apply to public universities, avoiding elite and especially private institutions. The findings provide further support for Bourdieu’s habitus explanation of class reproduction. They suggest more attention to the level of segregation in Chilean higher education and the factors that produce it.

Broken Compass: A Screenplay Exploring Economic Inequality in Indonesia’s Education System

Good quality education should be accessible to everyone, regardless of their economic status. Unfortunately, often better education in Indonesia comes with a heavy price tag that eliminates working class people from accessing it. This thesis attempts to find out why the working class people are economically discriminated and how they face the discrimination. Using screenplay and young adult dystopian genre, this thesis tries to show the side effects of said economic inequality if taken to the extreme. With Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of school as cultural reproduction, the working class students, including the protagonist Thalia, are discriminated against because they are seen as threats to their resources. To reciprocate, Thalia challenges the system, which sparks a rebellion inside the school. The worldbuilding aspect of the genre is based on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of social space, capitals, and agency. Thalia from the working class utilizes her agency to face the discrimination.

A visit to another class? Working-class graduates entering university and the graduate labour market in Finland

ABSTRACT Working-class students often face more challenges in securing graduate-level jobs than their middle-class peers. This paper applies the concept of boundary crossing in studying the experience of Finnish business graduates from a working-class background (n = 27) and asks what types of boundaries they have faced and how they have managed them on their pathway through and after university studies. We identify three major boundaries: getting the actual study place, learning to be a student in university and graduating and getting a job in the graduate labour market. Our findings indicate that successful transitions are possible, as the Finnish higher education system enables them in many ways. However, successful boundary work demands socialising to the norms and values of the new social field as well as renewed relationships with one’s social background. This paper discusses the implications of these findings for the development of inclusive policies and practices.

Interrogating the Myths of Education: Dorothy Bryant'sElla Price's JournalandMiss Giardino

Interrogating the Myths of Education: Dorothy Bryant's<i>Ella Price's Journal</i>and<i>Miss Giardino</i>

:The Right to Higher Education: A Political Theory

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Higher aims fulfilled: The Social Capital Academy as a means for advancing underrepresented students in comprehensive university business schools

Current research underscores how a college education can reflect broader social inequality via the disproportionate flow of resources to elite universities and advantaged students. In contrast, underresourced comprehensive universities disproportionately serve minority, first-generation, and working-class students. This article argues that the comprehensive university is uniquely positioned to reduce social inequality and that the comprehensive university undergraduate business school (CUUBS) should test a new approach to education. The article also advocates a substantive response to social inequality by (1) focusing on undergraduate business education within comprehensive universities rather than MBA programs in well-funded, elite business schools, (2) implementing a strategic emphasis on career-related jobs (CRJs) for underrepresented students, and (3) helping students pursue CRJs via the development of a Social Capital Academy (SCA). This article describes the benefits of an SCA for underrepresented students, its requirements and benefits for universities and business communities, and the possibilities for scaling the program to address social inequality. Future applications of the SCA to STEM-related fields are also explored.

Unintended Pedagogical Consequences of Emergency Remote Teaching at a Rural-Based University in South Africa

In this empirical article, we argue that while emergency remote teaching (ERT) may have achieved its goal of saving the academic years during the COVID-19 pandemic, it also constructed unintended pedagogical consequences that were possibly overlooked at the time of advocating for it. We also contend that students and lecturers from rural-based universities (RBUs) in South Africa experienced different unintended pedagogical consequences compared to their counterparts who belong to urban-based universities (UBUs). Thus, the research question that the article raises is as follows: What were the unintended pedagogical consequences that students and lecturers based at RBUs experienced during the transition to ERT? Drawing on students’ and lecturers’ lived experiences of ERT, this article foregrounds unintended pedagogical consequences that arose at one RBU in South Africa during the transition from face-to-face teaching to ERT. Underpinned by the tenets of critical realism philosophy, as well as student integration theory, in-depth interviews with three lecturers and six students were conducted. The findings of the study indicate that home conditions, individual characteristics, pre-COVID-19 blended learning experiences, university training and support, teaching, learning, assessment practices, and policies altogether contributed to the construction of unintended pedagogical consequences of ERT presented in this article. These consequences include (1) the exclusion of low-income students from active teaching and learning, (2) equipping middle-class students with better chances of success than working-class students, (3) distressing female students and lecturers more than their male counterparts, and (4) unproductive assessment practices. This study may be beneficial to academics and policymakers from similar contexts in their plight to continue with remote teaching and assessment (RTA) after the pandemic.

Strategically Unequal: How Class, Culture, and Institutional Context Shape Academic Strategies

When facing common setbacks like a missed due date or low assignment grade, some students take action to change the outcome while others do not. This study compares academic strategies by social class and across institutional context through interviews with working- and upper-middle-class students at a public regional and flagship university. Academic strategies are based on parentally-transmitted skills and knowledge as well as class-cultural norms of selfhood and the meaning of being a student. At the flagship, class-privileged students negotiated grades and deadlines using strategies rooted in a sense of entitlement and norms of individualism and self-exceptionalism, whereas working-class students’ norms of interdependence and compliance inhibited negotiation, reproducing existing inequalities. Institutional context mediated this effect: at the regional, both groups requested flexibility but did not (successfully) contest grades, minimizing class-privileged students’ advantage. Organizational habitus explains why academic strategies differed and were more or less likely to reproduce inequality at each university.