The purpose of this study is to explore how students' prior knowledge, skills, experiences, and networks (including family and community) influence major choice decisions among low-income and working-class students at Arizona's three state universities. Using a funds of knowledge framework, a survey was distributed to students at the three…

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…

The educational policies of 1860s Britain came into being as a result of the interplay between social, economic and political conditions, and the changing discourses of childhood and education that arose from them. While essentialised conceptualisations of 'the child' had existed since the early Enlightenment period, it was not until the…

Past decades have seen increased emphasis on graduate employability as a driver of higher education policy. In the Australian context, employability discourses in the public domain have become inflected with anti-intellectual sentiment, serving to reproduce the perception that the humanities and social sciences are of less value to graduates'…

The necessity of a college degree is irrefutable. However, the path to college for undocumented students can be crowded with boulders, steep walls, or altogether non-existent. Drawing on interviews with 25 undocumented Latina/o students and 5 years (2012-2017) of school ethnography, I show that their college-going experiences are framed by the…

This article theorises the hidden injuries of undocumented immigration statues. Through ten years of longitudinal ethnographic research (2012-2022), the author centres the experiences of two undocumented Latina youth as they navigate K-12 to higher education and discusses how immigration status, racialisation, and class immobility are intertwined.…

Analysis of data on school leavers in Scotland points towards considerable inequality in access to higher education. This is highlighted in terms of participation in higher education by young people from lower-income households or identifying as first in their families to consider going to university. The situation is more acute in terms of access…

This qualitative study, limited to only three female participants and bounded by proximity, sought to provide a better understanding of how the social class background of teachers may impact pedagogy. Utilizing Crenshaw's intersectionality of identity lens and Bourdieu's Cultural Reproduction Theory, this research focused on a social…

This chapter focuses on how working-class educational developers bring unique sensibilities to their work that can be both advantageous and challenging.

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…

In a context of universalization of Higher Education (HE) and fragmentation of educational trajectories, consolidating a process of educational and social mobility implies, for many students with non-traditional backgrounds, important identity conflicts. Based on 40 qualitative interviews with non-traditional working-class students enrolled in an…

This paper explores the ways in which working-class boys negotiated the content and delivery of physical education at a 'typical', white working-class secondary school located in the north of England. The study utilised a quasi-ethnographical case-study design conducted over a non-continuous three-month period involving covert and overt…

A rich literature has argued that so-called aspiration-raising policies tend to individualize structural conditions and thereby reproduce forms of inequality through young people's aspirations. This paper explores how aspiration-raising policy discourses are lived in ways that both accentuate but that might also contest their terms. Drawing on…

A prominent feature of the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd has been the renewed call for schools to become antiracist. What can be learnt from past unsuccessful attempts to implement antiracist education? Specific critiques of the antiracist movement made by prominent academics such as Paul Gilroy are worth…

The Highlander Nursery School, run by the Highlander Folk School from 1938 to 1953, provided no-cost early care and learning to the white working-class children of Summerfield, Tennessee. While Highlander is best known as a democratic education and movement-building hub that builds adults' capacity to shape labor and racial justice in their…