The last several decades have seen a growth in scholarship and application of culturally responsive and sustaining educational (CRSE) approaches in schools serving youth of color. A growing body of research has shown how CRSE serves as an effective strategy to engage students of color, combat pernicious stereotypes, and improve academic outcomes.…

Low completion rates amongst students from Black working-class backgrounds remain a persistent challenge to post-apartheid university transformation in South Africa. Notions of universities as colour-blind, meritocratic, and post-racial have developed around a deficit and victim-blaming majoritarian narrative that individualises educational…

This collaborative autoethnography (Bochner and Ellis, 2016) has created a space for three women academics from working-class heritage, navigating the liminal and temporal space of the COVID-19 pandemic within a post-1992 Higher Education Institution, to explore the social relations of one Higher Education Institution and confront their lived…

This paper challenges the notion that quantitative data -- as a numeric truth -- exist independent of a nation's political and racial landscape. Utilising large-scale national attainment data, the analysis challenges the belief that 'White working class' children in England, especially boys, are 'the new oppressed' -- as a former equality adviser…

This paper draws on current international analysis of pandemic issues in education, and on recent arguments by critical economists and political scientists, to examine two scenarios for educational policy beyond the coronavirus pandemic. One looming possibility is an onrush of austerity, deep cuts to public education, financial hardship for the…

While the literature on the experiences of working-class Students of Color at selective, historically White institutions has grown significantly over the past twenty-five years, how this student population is making sense of their social class identity as they gain access to dominant cultural and social capital at their institutions remains…

This article is a reflective account of my work as a writer-in-residence in 12 post-primary schools, over two academic years. Coming from the perspective of a writer the article fills a gap in the literature, where a substantial body of work exists on the teacher as writer, but little exists on the writer as teacher. The article makes a case for…

Are scenarios in which disadvantaged students prefer not to attend (certain) universities a concern from the perspective of an egalitarian theory of justice? I consider this question from the respective perspectives of two prominent approaches to equality: distributive theories, which focus on the fairness of inequalities in outcomes, and…

This paper is both a careful analysis of a seminal piece of work in the sociology of education, as well as a passionate plea to revisit with renewed urgency, the way in which education continues to fail unacceptably large numbers of working-class children. Through closely examining the work of Dennis Marsden (with his colleague Brian Jackson) in…

Using a collection of settler family letters to the Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) in British Columbia, the first provincial government--supported "schooling by mail" arrangement of its kind in Canada, I highlight the efforts of rural families to secure an education for their children in the period between the First and Second…

Council estates have been contestable social spaces of contemporary urban life in metropolitan cities like London and the marginalizing spatial experience they provide for the "working class" has been a problematic topic for many disciplines like architecture, sociology, psychology and literature. Considering the significance of space…

The population of children in schools is rapidly becoming more ethnically and culturally diverse. However, there is a mismatch between the cultures in children's homes and the cultures in their schools. The funds of knowledge approach emerged in Tucson (Arizona, USA) in order to counter the deficit perspectives common in depictions of…

This article critiques the role of the ESKOM Expo for Young Scientists as a particularly salient node in the constitution of young learners' identity as prospective participants in the field of science and technology. The ESKOM Expo is seen as a particularly exciting means of providing access to the niche area of science and technology. Yet this…

It is a long-standing and commonly held belief in the United Kingdom and elsewhere that the use of elite forms of language reflects superior intellect and education. Expert opinion from sociolinguistics, however, contends that such a view is the result of middle-class bias and cannot be scientifically justified. In the 1960s and 1970s, such…

There has been renewed policy interest in intergenerational social mobility as a route to a fairer society, but in ignoring the sociological evidence this article will argue that the current policy agenda will fail to achieve its goal. Based on an analysis of "social congestion", "social exclusion", and "social…