Bourdieu's theories enable us to conceptualise and understand why some people participate in higher education and some do not. Focussing on the working class as the marginalised social group in HE, Bourdieu demonstrated how education perpetuates inequality and lack of opportunity. The theories, or "thinking tools" as he called them,…

This article explores how the doing of social class and gender can intersect with the learning of science, through case studies of two male, working-class university students' constitutions of identities as physics students. In doing so, I challenge the taken-for-granted notion that male physics students have an unproblematic relation to…

This paper starts from the propositions that (a) pedagogy is central to the achievement of socially just education and (b) there are existing pedagogical approaches that can contribute to more socially just outcomes. Given the ostensible commitments of the current English Government to reducing educational inequality and to the importance of…

This paper compares the ways in which gender was articulated and experienced through the construction of children's education in two very different community-led educational initiatives in Britain: turn-of-the-century Socialist Sunday Schools and late-twentieth-century Black Supplementary Schools. Exploration of these historical examples of…

Through a discourse of diversity, specialism, equality and choice, selective schooling is again on the UK education agenda. A previous selection policy operated between 1944 and 1964. The argument that some children are more suited to a vocational education and others to an academic one is evident now and then. This paper focuses on the…

Research literature suggests that adults from working-class minority backgrounds demonstrate authoritarian and coercive tendencies in their choices of disciplinary strategies when compared with adults from middle-class, "white", "Anglo", or "North American" backgrounds. However, in a recent study in New York City,…