Previous work on working-class academics has highlighted recurring themes, such as micro-aggressions, imposter syndrome, liminality, exclusion, invisibility and habitus. These themes have been encapsulated in a number of metaphors, such as 'the ghost' and 'the phantom-limb', both of which connote absence, silence and marginalisation. Whilst these…

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…

This chapter acknowledges the historical origins and access points of positional leadership roles on campus. In addition to highlighting barriers for poor and working-class students, the chapter suggests broadening access to leadership learning from the lens of community cultural wealth.

As leadership can be developed and practiced in multiple on- and off-campus contexts, this chapter offers ways to make experiential opportunities more accessible to poor and working-class students. Aiding students in leveraging leadership learning experiences they already have through family and community roles are explored.

This article sifts the historical and philosophical soil out of which the comprehensive ideal in education has sprung. England's national school system emerged in the nineteenth century imbued with ruling-class assumptions about the education required for each supposed type of child destined to take his or her place in one of the three broad…

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.…

Jacob Olivey wanted Year 8 to know that ordinary people in the nineteenth century constructed their own identities. In this reflection on how his practice developed in his training year, Olivey illustrates the importance of using historical scholarship in choosing foundational knowledge to teach. He shows how he used that scholarship to shape and…

Drawing on my own experience as a working-class academic, as well of that of working-class students in the present, I discuss how the experience for working-class students in elite universities still includes many aspects of classism, even when those students can, and do, do very well indeed and even when policies are apparently in place to…

This paper considers gender and social class in relation to teacher education through an episodic study of the development of adult educational institutions in Huddersfield. It briefly discusses nineteenth-century mechanics' institutes in the town before moving to a consideration of school teacher training college students in the twentieth…

This chapter explores the concept of class straddling and offers institutional strategies to help poor- and working-class students form a sense of belonging.

Kappan editor Rafael Heller interviews Annette Lareau about her research into different experiences of childhood and family life. In her observations of families of different social classes, she learned that upper-middle-class families approach parenting as an act of "concerted cultivation" requiring ongoing attention, making them more…

Shonda L. Goward argues that conflating first-generation and low-income status elides the specific and significant barriers poor students experience. They may share the experience of not being familiar with the university system, but the challenges of food insecurity, jobs, and family responsibilities, along with a lack of a safety net, make it…

Young people from working-class backgrounds are feeling increasingly insecure in school, and for good reasons. The institution of schooling is being converted into an instrument of neoliberal control. In this paper, I discuss how schools are becoming increasingly insecure places for working-class young people, and how they are responding, and I do…

Jessica Calarco explains in this article that students from different backgrounds tend to manage problems in contrasting ways that can have real consequences in the classroom. More specifically, Calarco observed children from middle-class families tended to actively seek help from their teachers, while children from working-class families…

In this essay Malott traces his journey to critical pedagogy focusing on a significant element of his family's ethnic and class background and its connection to his own educational experiences from public schooling to university. Drawing on Marx's historical discussions at the end of Volume 1 of "Capital" Malott traces his own…