This paper draws from a critical ethnographic case study of the Roses in Concrete Community School (RiC) in East Oakland, California to explore their approach to repurposing a traditional school into a community responsive learning institution by operationalizing a critical humanist vision of education in a marginalized, urban community. The…

Bourdieu argued that class-based inequalities influenced educational outcomes and this paper illustrates the relevance of Bourdieu's concepts in understanding one specific community. A wider study by the authors used the concept of habitus to identify factors which impacted on the participants--predominantly white working-class…

I have spent my whole life in 'class', first as a working-class girl and then as a primary school teacher, and later as an academic. My academic career spans over twenty-five years taking the work of Pierre Bourdieu to the limit. Taking Bourdieu's work to the limits is to engage with his research affectively as well as intellectually, to recognise…

This case study illustrates why a group of young adults from a working-class community in the UK choose not to participate in HE despite having the necessary qualifications. It highlights the impact that parents have on HE participation decisions, and the network of social connections participants are able to mobilise from their parents. It shows…

Given the widened access to Chinese higher education, a large proportion of students studying at Chinese colleges come from rural lower-class families and encounter different challenges in English language learning. By using Bourdieu's social theoretical lenses, this case study explores how the interplay of capital, habitus and social fields…

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a novel United States federal education programme that enrolled nearly three million men during the 1930s and early 1940s. This public work relief programme provides a case study of the ways that masculine, eugenicist ideas concerning public education evolved from the Progressive Era through the Great…

International authors have argued that social class inequalities can influence parental engagement in education. Lareau argued that middle-class families possess the resources to actively cultivate their children to succeed academically, whereas working-class and poor families feel they lack such resources and allow their children to develop…

Since the 1970s, the process of deindustrialisation, accompanied by social, cultural and political changes, has altered youth transitions from school to work. This paper is drawn from an Economic and Social Research Council-funded study that explored the diversity of white, working-class young men (aged between 16 and 18) in a post-industrial…

Background: Art making is a personal and social process in which learners make meaning for themselves and audiences through the production of artifacts. In classrooms, this personal and social process is made concrete through dialogue. Methods: This paper presents an illustrative case study of how sixth-grade student, Jo, developed voice through…

Research about home educators is often limited by a reliance on convenience-based samples. This paper explores an alternative source of information: written reports from inquiries held by the French public administration on every registered home-educated child. First, I depict how these inquiries are legally designed and how our research team has…

Through the case-study experiences of 24 White and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) working-class students from three very different universities, we aim to illuminate the often hidden struggle for recognition and respect for classed, 'raced' and gendered ways of being in the university. We discuss how the students perceive their identities…

Every day brings news about so-called Islamic State and its seduction of young people in the West. The radicalization of young Muslims causes alarm; even the desirability of multiculturalism is questioned in troubled cities where racism and Islamophobia are on the rise. This book is a case study of one distressed post-industrial city struggling…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to consider how working-class boys constitute themselves as subjects of "value" through a close examination of their occupational aspirations. The authors consider two significant influences on the aspirations of these young men: "space" and "place"; and neoliberal discourses…

This paper offers insights into the increasing dichotomy that exists between official forms of opportunity and access and the actual "lived experience" of young peoples' trajectories towards careers in the UK's market-orientated Sport-Fitness and Physical Education employment sectors. It does so by drawing on data generated by an…

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…