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This paper argues that processes of marginalisation experienced by white working-class students provide insight into systemic problems with the English education system. White British students eligible for Free School Meals (FSM) are a low attaining group. This research investigates factors affecting their engagement and achievement. Fieldwork in three comprehensive secondary schools in a London borough used qualitative methods to gather data on the perspectives of staff, students and parents. Using Bourdieu's conceptual tools to guide the analysis, the study found that performance pressure and funding cuts can result in an institutional habitus which privileges academic attainment, side-lines the social and emotional aspects of learning and misrecognises working-class capitals. Such habitus fosters pedagogic practices which reduce levels of felt safety and limit opportunities to actively engage and exercise agency in the classroom. These conditions often make fragile the learner identity of white working-class students (and others) and prompt disengagement from school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista @mbienteeducação is the property of Nucleo de Publicacoes Institucionais and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this study, we conducted a meta-analysis of 2,191 empirical results reported in 213 existing studies to estimate the Mincer-type return to schooling in China. The results revealed that the return to schooling showed a positive impact, and the effect size was medium in terms of the partial correlation coefficient. We also found that workers in non-state sectors and urban regions, urban hukou workers, and women tend to have higher returns to schooling than their counterparts. Furthermore, the results indicate that the return to schooling registered a significant increase over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Post-industrial working-class communities remain 'haunted' the rhythms of the past. • Social haunting can help us understand working-class boys' experiences of school. • We need to recognise both the negative aspects and the goodness of the past. • The goodness of the past can be used to help engage working-class boys in learning. This paper complicates Avery Gordon's notion of 'haunting' to critically examine the educational experiences of working-class boys attending Lillydown Primary, a state school for pupils aged 3–11 in a former coalmining community in the north of England. It uses the notion of social haunting to demonstrate how particular modes of 'being and doing' traditionally associated with coalmining communities continue to affect the boys' experiences of schooling, even though the British coal industry no longer exists, and the local colliery closed before they were born. The central argument of the paper is that by recognising the fullness of a social haunting, it is possible to engage working-class boys in educational processes and experiences from which they might otherwise feel excluded, alienated, or detached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While several studies have estimated returns to education in Australia, there is limited evidence regarding the influence of health on the returns. This paper identifies how health affects returns to education in the labour market using the Heckman selection bias-corrected model. We measured health status using a self-rated health item with five response categories 'poor, fair, good, very good, and excellent'. The findings show that poor health or being unhealthy (defined as 'poor' or 'fair') interacts with education, such that the benefits of education (i.e. higher hourly wage rate) are curtailed in those with health problems; the adverse effect is stronger for those in lower skilled jobs. The estimated returns to an additional year of schooling on average over 2001-2017 is 7.43% and 6.88% for the healthy and unhealthy groups, respectively. Thus, the return for workers with poor health is 7.4% lower than the return for healthier workers (for each additional year of schooling). This gap in the returns is equivalent to a productivity loss of about $19-25 billion per year. The lower returns to education for workers with poor health likely results from lower productivity while at work rather than loss of working days as the estimate is based on an hourly wage rate (rather than days or hours absent from work). These lower returns may also be explained by unhealthy workers accepting lower paid jobs given the same levels of experience, skills and education that healthier counterparts have. The cost of poor health to labour market returns is further amplified in low-skilled occupations, a process which is likely to exacerbate socio-economic inequalities and undercut social mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As undergraduate degrees have become increasingly common and their relative value has declined, employers increasingly look for evidence other than human capital that can distinguish one candidate from another. Both social and personal capital are important in this respect, but also create disadvantages for university graduates from less privileged backgrounds. Using data from a qualitative longitudinal study, I will discuss the employment outcomes of working-class, first-generation university students in Canada. The findings to be presented highlight that working-class graduates struggle with the development and mobilisation of social and personal capital in the search for employment. Instead, they largely rely on formal job postings and trust in the value of their human capital. Some participants discussed mandatory internships and placements that took place during their education, and how they assisted them in the development of networks and social capital for career advancement. Shifting occupational goals can also be interpreted as the result of participants' reassessment of their chances to break into high-status professional careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where previous analyses of Virginia Woolf’s relationship to working-class education by Melba Cuddy-Keane and Beth Rigel Daugherty have focused on the role of the public library and Woolf’s Common Reader essays, this article explores Woolf’s interest in institutional applications of working-class education in The Years (1937) and ‘The Leaning Tower’ (1940). It argues that Woolf drew on contemporaneous educational debates in her analysis of the educational institution’s role in the cultivation of cultural and political democracy. The article builds on work by Anna Snaith and Alice Wood that has considered the influence of dialect scholar Joseph Wright on Woolf’s characterisation of Sam Robson in The Years. It further suggests the significance of Wright for a reading of the children’s song that explores its signifying role as a marker of educational division. ‘The Leaning Tower’, Woolf’s lecture to the Workers’ Educational Association, is assessed as a studied rhetorical performance that draws on contemporaneous educational debates as Woolf anticipates a socially and culturally democratic future in the post-war world that is ‘struggling to be born’ (Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 6 1933-1941 (London: Hogarth Press, 2011), p. 276). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While accepting that the concept of restricted code has a troubled history that resulted in Bernstein being associated with deficit models of working-class life, it is argued that the concept should be re-imagined rather than abandoned. Bernstein’s early work refers to restricted code as a form of condensed, shorthand established through familiarity that was not tied to class per se. In Volume 2 of Class, Codes and Control social class was an independent variable in the research designs and coding only that which could be explicitly spoken, produced working class groups as inferior in comparison to middle class groups: Bernstein’s disquiet can be sensed in many places across his work where he explicitly renounced a deficit model. Methodological and theoretical work on embodied knowledge is used here to explicate the more-than, codeable features of restricted codes. An illustration from studies in ex-coalmining, working-class communities is used to explore what is missed in conventional approaches to data coding. Other studies in ex-mining communities reveal the intergenerational transmission of rich resources that were vital for community survival. Re-imagining restricted codes as relational assemblages recognises the value of the dynamic, creative and intergenerational features of localised, embodied knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 community. The study focused on how young men performed their masculinities through different post-16 educational pathways and within the limits of place and a disadvantaged social class position. In this paper, I explore the way three of these young men who were enrolled on different vocational education and training courses learned how to display acceptable masculinities within these settings. Drawing on the work of Goffman, I argue that these vocational courses can ‘frame’ traditional forms of working-class masculinity, but also have the potential to enable alternative performances of masculinity to come through. However, the role of a locale’s industrial heritage on gendered and classed expectations is important, and the impact this has on successful futures needs to be recognised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including educational leadership, working-class students and the influence of socioeconomic factors to education.

When workers are myopic and the amount of financing provided by the government is sufficiently large, some workers acquire education even if they are better off without it. We show that government-provided loans generate a propagation mechanism that exacerbates inefficient college entry. Further, the extent of this inefficiency depends on the speed at which loans are provided, and not just on their amount. The extent of inefficient college entry also depends on the distribution of myopic workers in the population, and inefficiencies can arise even if not all workers are myopic. We extend the model to study the impact of the dropout rate and heterogeneous expectations as well the dynamic implications of inefficient college entry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational literature shows that students from working-class backgrounds are significantly less likely to persist to completion in higher education than middle-class students. This paper draws theoretically and analytically on Bernstein’s ([1990.Class, Codes and Control, Volume IV: The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse. London: Routledge; 2000.Pedagogy, Symbolic Control, and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield]) thesis that, through differential framing of pedagogic practices, the curriculum has capacity to accommodateallgroups of students. Pedagogic practices in both a science foundation course and four first-year mainstream science courses in a higher education institution in the South African context are examined. Whilst the foundation course exhibits modalities that generally favour access, the mainstream courses have some modalities that appear to be constraining. It is argued from a social justice perspective that holistic curriculum transformations that better enable epistemic transitions are an urgent imperative, and that consideration of differential framing of pedagogic modalities offer a close-up empirical means of conceptualising such reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Little work on the significance and implications of decision-making has been undertaken since that led by Hodkinson in the 1990s, and the experiences of young people on vocational programmes and their reasons for undertaking them remain under-theorised and poorly understood. Drawing on two narratives from a study exploring young people’s motivations for undertaking vocational programmes, this article explores the relationship between their positioning in fields and career decision-making. The article argues that social positioning is significant in its relationship to decision-making, to the way in which young people perceive and construct their careers and to the influence of serendipity on their transitions. Drawing on a range of international studies, the article explores the implications of these findings in terms of young people’s future engagement with the global labour market, giving consideration to (dissonant) perceptions of vocational education and training as contributing to economic growth whilst addressing issues of social exclusion and promoting social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the contrasting predispositions of a group of working-class and middle-class undergraduates to using nepotism to gain advantage in the labour market. Drawing upon a Bourdieusian framework, it is argued that the middle-class students, whose habitus was aligned to the field, were more likely to express a willingness to utilise whatever networks they could to secure a ‘foot in the door’. Meanwhile, the working-class students, who were more insecure about the legitimacy of their participation within a middle-class field, expressed a commitment to a form of honour which ruled out using contacts on the grounds that it was morally unacceptable. They discussed a desire to ‘prove themselves’ which is arguably symptomatic of a deeply ingrained reliance on meritocracy. I explore how this may arise due to their habitus having developed within a dominated position in society where respectability is crucial to generating feelings of self-worth and value. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines Pecket Well College, a British user-led residential college for adult basic education, which was created by working-class adults with difficulties reading and writing. Tracing the development of Pecket, I argue that this selfdirected model of literacy challenges notions of expertise, redefines intellectual and knowledge-creation work, and reenvisions pedagogical tools based on community abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on the importance of labor education for unionized workforce through labor centers such as the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Labor Center. According to professor Sarah Laslett, business depends on higher education to provide officials who are trained and compare the spent resources between business schools and labor education. The author also mentions the significance of collective bargaining and the mixed economy to state-sponsored labor education.

The article deals with the establishment and function of the Jewish Mutual Instruction Society (JMIS) in London, 1848-1849. This occurrence forms a chapter in the social and educational history of the Anglo-Jewish community in the mid-nineteenth century in the context of Victorian society and reveals connections made between the Jewish community and the world around it. The article illustrates the meaning and influence of self-improvement ideology in the social history of the Anglo-Jewish community. The study examines the Jewish indication of the society, its goals and curriculum, its success and the characteristics of its members and managers; and raises the question of whether it was actually a mutual instruction society attended by Jewish workers. The article traces the community's reaction to the activity of the JMIS as reflected in the extensive coverage given to it by the Jewish Chronicle (which is the sole source of knowledge about the JMIS). The debate sheds light on the mutual effort of Jews and Christians to promote adult education in the Anglo-Jewish community. Finally, the study demonstrates the influence of the general society on the Jewish community and the educational interaction between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on a comparative study of working-class students’ experiences in English and Irish higher education. It highlights the lack of comparative studies on this topic based on qualitative research and why filling this gap is important in understanding access and widening participation. Drawing on biographical interviews with 139 people in a range of elite and non-elite institutions, the article discusses similarities as well as some differences between the data from the two countries in terms of class, identity and how working-class students view and value higher education. It maps out how the research relates to recent debates over social class and outlines the theoretical implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we analyze career dynamics for US workers who have more schooling than their peers in the same occupation. We use data from the NLSY79 combined with the CPS to analyze transitions into and out of overeducated employment, together with the corresponding effects on wages. Overeducation is a fairly persistent phenomenon at the aggregate and individual levels, with 66% of workers remaining overeducated after 1 year. Overeducation is not just more common but also more persistent among blacks and low-AFQT individuals. Further, the hazard rate out of overeducation drops by about 60% during the first 5 years spent overeducated. However, the estimation of a mixed proportional hazard model suggests that this is attributable to selection on unobservables rather than true duration dependence. Lastly, overeducation is associated with lower current as well as future wages, consistent with scarring effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explore the ways in which education functioned as a core tenet of the anti-tuberculosis (TB) movement in early twentieth-century Britain. Education can be seen to have taken on a unique role in the therapeutic regimes for TB from the late 1880s with Robert Philips’s Edinburgh Dispensary system. The focus on the ‘social management’ of the disease, however, continued to evolve throughout this period as it interacted with a broad and varied landscape of therapeutic provision for TB. By looking at the case of the Post Office Sanatorium Society (POSS), this article brings to light the ways in which themes of working-class sociability, respectability and autonomy created and sustained a unique system of therapeutic pedagogy for the tuberculous worker. Such pedagogy was emblematic of what Melanie Keene has termed ‘familiar science’, a mode of scientific education with its origins in early nineteenth-century educational practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents the impact of the introduction of lower secondary schools on the educational style of the working classes in Poland. This particular reform is seen as one of the elements of change to the education system adapting it to the general parameters of post-Fordism. The author supports the theory of Pierre Bourdieu, which states that society is divided into three social classes (upper, middle and popular) and each of them produces a specific lifestyle and style of education. The education style of a class provides individuals with certain dispositions to educational institutions and school careers, which are realised in the form of social practices (selection of specific type of schools, learning techniques, ways of spending time, etc.). The changes taking place in the education system in Poland over the last 15 years, i.e. since the 1999 reform, are similar to processes that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s in western countries. They include the economisation of education, the parameterisation and quantification of educational results, as well as the introduction of market mechanisms for managing and financing state-owned schools. The article is based on individual in-depth interviews conducted during two field studies organised in 2013-2014: Cultural practices of the working class (120 IDIs) and Class differences in cultural practices in the North-Eastern Poland (60 IDIs). The findings become the basis of formulating new theoretical and research proposals for the field of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three studies conducted among fifth and sixth graders examined how school contexts disrupt the achievement of working-class students by staging unfair comparison with their advantaged middle-class peers. In regular classrooms, differences in performance among students are usually showcased in a way that does not acknowledge the advantage (i.e., higher cultural capital) experienced by middle-class students, whose upbringing affords them more familiarity with the academic culture than their working-class peers have. Results of Study 1 revealed that rendering differences in performance visible in the classroom by having students raise their hands was enough to undermine the achievement of working-class students. In Studies 2 and 3, we manipulated students' familiarity with an arbitrary standard as a proxy for social class. Our results suggest that classroom settings that make differences in performance visible undermine the achievement of the students who are less familiar with academic culture. In Study 3, we showed that being aware of the advantage in familiarity with a task restores the performance of the students who have less familiarity with the task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: In one of the classics of educational philosophy, a key issue is remains unsettled. In Plato's Republic, Socrates makes a case for the importance of a comprehensive education. Socrates is unclear, however, about whether the producer class is eligible for this comprehensive education. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Previous scholars have attempted to settle this question either on the side of exclusion or inclusion of the third class in the program of education in Plato's Republic. I ask whether Plato may have intentionally crafted this ambiguity. Research Design: A philosophical analysis of Plato's Republic with reference to its historical context. Conclusions/Recommendations: I offer an alternative interpretation of the eligibility of the third class for the program of education in The Republic. I endorse neither the position that Socrates designs the education for the guardian class alone nor, on the other hand, that Socrates' call for class transfers logically requires the children of all classes to be educated together. Instead, I suggest that Plato's conflicting and confusing treatment of the third class's education in The Republic is a provocation for his readers--that is, there is reason to believe that Plato may have intentionally drawn readers into an inquiry about participation in common education in a just society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the overwhelming attention paid to the mother-child dyad in all realms of psychology and many in sociology, what theoretical frameworks are available to us through which to explore and understand father-daughter relationships? More specifically, what significance might working class fathers, both the flesh and blood person and the 'father in the mind' so frequently approached through the realm of the imaginary, have for their daughters' relationship with education? Drawing on a longitudinal study of girls growing up from 4 to 21 years old, we look to the work of psychoanalytic and psychosocial theorists to think about the place of fathers in the educational experiences, trajectories and outcomes of working class girls and young women. In doing so, we want to disassemble some of the 'heteronormative unconscious' ideas and phantasies, so often dependent on splitting, that are attached to femininity and masculinity, especially in their classed representations. We also want to explore the ways in which the terms of gender are simultaneously fixed and fluid, binary and challenging of the binary, when we consider working class girls and young women's relationships with their fathers and the connections that these may have with education and schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opportunities for further studies by working adults came under threat as the University of the Western Cape stopped the offering of after-hours classes in most of its Faculties. Unqualified and under-qualified librarians were directly affected by this decision. This article outlines an assessment of the conceptualisation and implementation of an action research project initiated by the Division for Lifelong learning. Using a realist evaluation approach, the assessment focuses on the implementation of strategies aimed at showing how lifelong learning opportunities, conceptualised and provided in flexible ways, could support innovation in learning and teaching in order to enhance access and success to learning by working people in the context of the Library and Information Science Department. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empowering settings are important places for people to develop leadership skills in order to enact social change. Yet, due to socio-cultural constructions of childhood in the US, especially constructions around working class and working poor children of Color, they are often not seen as capable or competent change agents, or in need of being in empowering settings. Based on a 9-month participant observation study of a first grade public charter school classroom in central California, this paper examines how one teacher used an alternative, artist-focused curriculum to take steps to facilitate a more empowering setting for her working class and working poor students, most of whom were Latina/o. We illustrate how this teacher worked to implement the components of an empowering setting within her classroom space: community building, peer-based support, meaningful roles, and shared leadership among her students. Student and teacher interviews are also used to triangulate findings. Implications include providing ways to assist young children as they become social change agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finland has been celebrated as a country where everyone has the possibility to educate themselves and to get ahead in life through education. However, social differences of educability continue to persist and social differences of employability are further construed in the neo-liberal market economy. In this article we will examine 2 adult graduates’ educational and working life histories based on an 8-year qualitative follow-up study. Lisa with a working-class background and Henri from a middle-class family have both graduated from general upper-secondary school for adults and also accomplished higher education degrees in adulthood. Lisa and Henri's cases show how class and gender, as well as age, intertwine in the construction of educability and employability in different narrative environments. Based on our analysis, academic education may turn out as a broken promise instead of a great salvation with good occupational prospects for individuals like Lisa with a working-class background. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This autoethnography posits that my presence as a working-class Chicana obtaining an education in the United States consequently created a Thirdspace environment I recognize as Nepantla. Thirdspace allowed me to navigate urban schooling and elite institutions of higher education. Two narratives demonstrate opposing forms of acquired dominant and nondominant forms of cultural capital to interrogate the value of Thirdspace when considering unique knowledge generated by an insider along the margins. This article articulates that strategic construction of bridges into Nepantla may assist Latino students to successfully navigate the schooling experience and offer the potential to reframe educational discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An impact of globalisation on higher education has been an increase in diversity in the student population in universities in English dominant settings. The increasing diversification has impacted on the linguistic ecology of higher education, resulting in a wide range of linguistic repertoires among the student body. In some institutions, particularly those situated in urban areas, the multilingual classroom may well be the norm. Bi/multilingual university students form a heterogeneous group, encompassing temporary sojourners and members of linguistic minority communities resident in the host country. These students’ linguistic, cultural, ethnic and social class backgrounds impact on their knowledge and experience of using academic language in higher education. In this article, I examine academic language in relation to a group of working class undergraduate university students from linguistic minority communities in the UK. I focus on the ‘socio-symbolic functions’ (Morek and Heller, this issue) of academic language for the participants in the context of an academic writing programme. I consider their ascribed institutional identity, as remedial users of academic language, and their inhabited identities as bi-dialectal users of English, native speakers of English and as multilingual subjects. I discuss how the participants’ ascribed institutional identity erased their bidialectal and multilingual capital and argue that higher education needs to attend to the inhabited identities of working class linguistic minority students in efforts to foster the development of their relationship to academic language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the politically contentious issue of White working-class student under-achievement within one particular school – a large and culturally diverse comprehensive secondary school in the greater London area. The article examines the equity philosophies and identity politics articulated by staff in their understanding of and approach to this under-achievement. It challenges the distributive logic and group identity politics that simplify, dislocate and distort equity issues. The article provides an illustration and theorising of remedies that offer potential in raising the educational performance of White working-class students – remedies not based on ethnic identity but rather on destabilizing the patterns of economic distribution and social disengagement that compromise these students’ schooling attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous research presented in this journal and elsewhere has suggested that vocational education is highly gender segregated and it is the heavy industrial sectors such as industry, vehicle and construction programmes that mainly attract boys with an anti-school attitude who are not interested in academic school work. However, there are good reasons to also question the reproduction of these stereotypes and how they may operate in relation to youth in education. This article therefore discusses issues connected to carrying out research in settings with a majority of boys from working-class backgrounds. It focuses specifically on methodological questions and possibly hidden forms of methodological bias in ethnographic research as well as the formulation of research questions (turn of gaze) and how these may work in relation to the reproduction or rupture of standard gender stereotypes in education research. The article highlights interviewing individually or in groups, initial encounters and the turn of gaze in ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relationship between class origin, educational attainment, and the capabilities of agency and voice. The main objectives are to investigate how class origin and educational attainment interact and to consider whether higher education reduces any structural inequalities in the social aspects of life. A longitudinal approach is applied, using a national survey of 1058 Swedish young people, controlling for baseline values of agency and voice. The empirical analysis reveals an association between class origin and agency and voice. University education proves to be of central importance for the capabilities of agency and voice; however, this varied for young people with different class origin. Young people from manual working-class backgrounds benefit from higher education, while no significant result was found for young people with white-collar parents. The results indicate that higher education reduces structural differences in capabilities central for social participation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past decade or more there has been a growing concern at the levels of educational underachievement within loyalist working-class areas of Northern Ireland. The inability of both educational and social policy initiatives over the past decade to improve the situation in any meaningful way has raised important questions concerning how the problem can be tackled more effectively. Placing the issue within the theoretical framework of Gramsci's hegemony, this paper argues that there is a need to better understand the historical nature of the problem and to recognise the political and social forces that have shaped its existence. It argues that there is a need to move away from explaining Protestant underachievement simply by the availability of jobs in Ulster's industrial past and to place its roots in the complex battle for social, political, and economic power since the 1801 Act of Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the disadvantaged position of working-class children in the education system, it is important to understand how parents and families might support their children to succeed academically. This paper reports on 35 case studies that were conducted as part of the Effective Provision of Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE 3–16) research project. Using in-depth interviews with children and parents this study investigates parental involvement with school and learning during primary and secondary school years in working-class families with children who are academically succeeding above prediction and children who are progressing as predicted, given their background characteristics. The paper provides descriptions of emotional and practical support for academic learning in these families and discusses how parents explain their involvement or lack thereof. This paper identifies differences in socialisation practices between the two groups of working-class families: ‘accomplishment of natural growth’ in families with children progressing as predicted (Lareau, 2003) and ‘active cultivation’ in families with children succeeding above prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social class disparities in higher education between working-class students (i.e., students who are low income and/or do not have parents with four-year college degrees) and middle-class students (i.e., students who are high income and/or have at least one parent with a four year-degree) are on the rise. There is an urgent need for interventions, or changes to universities' ideas and practices, to increase working-class students' access to and performance in higher education. The current article identifies key factors that characterize successful interventions aimed at reducing social class disparities, and proposes additional interventions that have the potential to improve working-class students' chances of college success. As we propose in the article, effective interventions must first address key individual and structural factors that can create barriers to students' college success. At the same time, interventions should also fortify school-relevant selves, or increase students' sense that the pursuit of a college degree is central to 'who I am.' When students experience this strong connection between their selves and what it means to attend and perform well in college, they will gain a sense that they fit in the academic environment and will be empowered to do what it takes to succeed there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last few decades, the South Wales Valleys (UK) have undergone a considerable economic, social, cultural and political transformation, altering youth transitions from school to work. Drawing on a two and a half year ethnographic study, in the paper I concentrate on a group of academically successful young white working-class men aged 16–18 years who were dealing with these changes. I argue that these studious performances of young working-class masculinity offer a different way in which to view a disadvantaged community and explore working-class educational success. However, I argue that their future aspirations to attend university are still tempered by the classed and gender codes that underpin expectations of manhood in this deindustrial community and which can impact on successful transitions to adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Southern New Hampshire University's (SNHU) plan to introduce competency-based education for working adults in the U.S. Topics include need for post-secondary education as, according to the authors, U.S. faces a scarcity of college-educated workforce, university's president Paul LeBlanc planning an education model, and employer's concern for talent management and diversity in management profiles.

This article explores poverty from the perspective of the intergenerational transmission. That is, it suggests that communities, and specifically a post-industrial community in South Wales, had developed coping strategies to manage the precarious character of employment associated with the mining and steel industries. These post-industrial communities are now marked by poverty. Part of the way schools are currently adapting to changes in the economic base is to offer more vocationally oriented courses especially in the upper school. This article asks whether this kind of provision is enough for young people in post-industrial communities. To understand achievement in education, it is becoming increasingly important to recognise the cultural values that young people inherit from the industrial past and how these still act as survival strategies today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Social & Education History / Historia Social y de la Educación is the property of Social & Education History / Historia Social y de la Educacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)