Many blue-collar jobs, most of which are performed by men, are likely to be displaced by automation. These workers will, therefore, need to be retrained and reskilled, many of them choosing for engineering education as mature students. This paper uses Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis to draw a complex portrait of the experience of…

This article examines the existing relations between the social background, the cognitive skills, the sense of schooling experience, the relation to learning and the professional project in the construction of the meaning of their course choice for French boys living in working-class families and guided to vocational studies. It presents the…

Aidan Chambers' "Breaktime" (1978) is famous for its unique narrative style and sexual content. This focus has obscured another significant aspect of the novel: the role of social class in "Breaktime" and Chambers' working-class background have rarely been explored. Chambers was an example of what Richard Hoggart calls…

In this paper the author summarizes several life history case studies of adolescent boys who were identified at school as "wimps" and who eventually engaged in various forms of sexual violence. Such boys rarely are--if at all--discussed in the childhood, education and feminist literatures on sexual violence. The life stories reveal the…

In the 1980s, researchers established the need to document and analyse the educational attitudes, behaviours and outcomes of "ordinary kids" as a means of developing a holistic account of school experience. Yet, while significant attention is given to extremes in educational attitudes and behaviours, "ordinariness" tends to remain overlooked in…

Declining Catholic school enrollment rates coupled with increasing numbers of Latino Catholics (in the US) have prompted Catholic leaders to interrogate how they can best engage and meet the needs of the Latino community (Alliance for Catholic Education, 2009; Ospino, 2014). Much of this work focuses on how Catholic schools can attract Latino…