This paper examines the history of the expansion of educational opportunities in the UK, to understand how different generations of ­working-class students managed to access HE. Based on 23 life-story interviews with working-class students, the study highlights how the changing dynamics of the structure of compulsory education and the labour…

Support for higher education is a known and well-documented venue for financial transfers within families, but practices of family support beyond college are less understood. Drawing on interviews with recent master's degrees recipients who have student debt, I find key class differences in the process and forms of family financial assistance for…

Implementing social-emotional learning skills into Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), the current study intended to extend the efficacy of CSR for teaching reading strategies when applying it to students in rural areas from a working-class community. To this purpose, forty-four students who made the comparison and the experimental groups were…

This article explores how first-in-family-graduate Roma and non-Roma Hungarians from the working-class experience education-driven social mobility and reconcile the dislocation of their primary-habitus due to changing class through transiting a "third space." Drawing on Bhabha's and bell hooks' development of this concept, we aim to…

This article presents the results of two projects exploring the experiences of working-class students in elite colleges. The first project is a nation-wide study that included 19 focus groups with 183 program participants of a condonable loan program, and additional interviews and focus groups with non-scholarship students, professors and…

Precipitated by a recent policy focus on diversifying Ireland's homogeneous teaching profession, there is an emerging research base focused on the experiences of teachers from under-represented groups. However, the life stories of teachers from lower socio-economic groups remain underexplored. Responsive to the mostly atheoretical nature of…

This article explores the role of affect in addressing the advantage conventionally accorded to high socio-economic status (SES) in higher education (HE) and how this advantage plays out for students from low SES backgrounds. Positioned as the 'other' to an assumed norm, the capacities of these students can be considered the 'wrong' capacities,…

In this article we connect critical librarianship and its practices of information literacy (IL) with working-class experiences of higher education (HE). Although the research literature and professional body of knowledge of critical information literacy (CIL), is one of the most theoretically-developed areas of wider critical librarianship…

Current approaches to building inclusive classrooms for first-generation and working-class students tend to emphasize communicative strategies: receiving students with welcoming messages that acknowledge and value their life experience and promoting a growth mindset. These methods are important, but they do little to address structural sources of…

First-generation and working-class (FGWC) students bring a different set of life experiences to the classroom than students of privilege. As an instructor from an FGWC background, I use the poverty simulation game Spent! to make economic stratification understandable to students who have led lives of economic privilege and bring FGWC…

El Puente Research Fellowship is a transformative program that uses culturally relevant and reflective pedagogies, curriculum, and praxis for first-generation, working-class college students beyond the traditional classroom. Drawing on the Chicana/Latina feminist epistemologies of "plática" and "convivencia," we argue that the…

The way in which young people's post-school intentions and pathways reflect their social background has been the subject of a good deal of research. However, much less attention has been paid to social differentiation in the amount and kind of career guidance information received by young people and its role in reinforcing or ameliorating social…

As leadership can be developed and practiced in multiple on- and off-campus contexts, this chapter offers ways to make experiential opportunities more accessible to poor and working-class students. Aiding students in leveraging leadership learning experiences they already have through family and community roles are explored.

This study utilizes adult learning, working-class masculinity, and political economy theories to explore the education and learning that supports engagement in the Just Transition movement in Central Appalachia. The central research question is as follows: in communities with economies formerly dominated by the coal industry, how does an…

This study explores the contrasting racialized geographies of St. Louis County and factors of local college accessibility by re-framing the concepts of college deserts and oases post the Ferguson uprising. Through a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis of educational divides, capital accumulation, and policing, we found dual spatial…