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…

This article deploys a materialist theoretical and methodological framework to analyse and discuss capitalism's disabling phenomena. It is my intention to demonstrate how Marx's concept of a "relative surplus population" may be used to scrutinise capitalism's symbols, meanings, images, and practices which reproduce ableism as the norm.…

In this poem the author explores a difficult mentoring session he had with a group of white male working-class pupils who were at risk of being permanently excluded from their secondary school. He describes and analyses the specific context which gave rise to the poem and explains why he found writing a poem a salutary experience.

Adult education in the United Kingdom is historically associated with working-class movements in the nineteenth century. In recent years, however, with the popularity of postmodernism, social class has become a neglected concept among sociologists and adult educators. Wider participation strategies have increased the number of adult students…