I grew up on free school meals and now work as a school improvement adviser. In this article, I address discontinuities within my 'support and challenge' role, a role that can be constrained by educational policy enacted within a performative and panoptic culture of fear. Successive governments have concerned themselves with promoting equity…

In the last few decades, universities in India have witnessed the joining of a record number of students from marginalized communities and oftentimes struggle. This expansion of access has brought about changes within classrooms and college campuses, sometimes giving rise to contention and causing numerous conflicts as well. Centered around my…

Rising educational inequality is considered as one pressing social problem in many national education systems. There is limited existing literature that examines how youth from different social backgrounds perceive and consider social inequalities and "justice." This study addresses this research gap by probing the perspectives of…

Higher education should be a social good for everyone and, despite the intentions of university policy on inclusion and diversity with schemes on widening participation, the truth is that for working-class students, university is still a place where they encounter prejudices and feelings of exclusion. This article uses the method of…

Despite an extensive body of literature that has examined the role of museums in cultural reproduction and public education, most of the current discussion is western-centred. Whilst explorations of museum education in developing countries often focus on the institution, the agency perspective regarding how different social groups negotiate access…

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…

This case study builds on Bourdieu's theory of practice to explore the ways in which two rural lower-class EFL learners--Andy and Xu--developed contrasting digital literacy trajectories in non-instructional and naturalistic settings. This study also seeks to examine how different online literacy trajectories impact rural lower-class students'…

Substantial social stratification research conceptualizes education as a series of standard transitions from one stage to the next, such as from high school to college. Yet less research examines mandatory transitions within each educational stage, which we call "intermediate educational transitions." In this article, we examine a…

Disparities across race, gender, and class are important targets of descriptive research. But rather than only describe disparities, research would ideally inform interventions to close those gaps. The gap-closing estimand quantifies how much a gap (e.g., incomes by race) would close if we intervened to equalize a treatment (e.g., access to…

This qualitative case study examines whether the social ideologies of secondary school teachers about the future employment prospects of their Mexican American working-class students influence the pedagogies they deploy in their own classrooms. Drawing from social reproduction theory and earlier studies that have addressed social stratification…

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…

This book examines the structural and cultural factors that explain the persistence of an attainment gap between white and Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students in UK universities. So-called 'deficit' approaches have long represented the orthodoxy in higher education strategy-making, yet they overlook the structural and institutional…

This ethnographic study utilized border theory to examine how a bilingual Latinx teacher created equitable instruction for Mexican immigrant second-graders in a 50-50 dual-language (DL) classroom in the U.S. Midwest. Approximately half the students in the DL classroom came from Spanish-speaking, working-class homes, and half from English-speaking,…