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In this paper the authors study 19 Global Middle Class (GMC) families currently residing in four global cities: Hong Kong; London; Buenos Aires; and Tel Aviv. Through qualitative in-depth interviews, they sought to gather insights about GMC parenting strategies, specifically drawing attention to the decision-making processes of school choice. To facilitate their analysis, they draw on Bourdieu's theory on types of capital and Ben-Porath's notion of bounded rationality. From the inductive analysis of their interview data with mobile GMC parents, they identified a subtype of cultural capital they called 'cosmopolitan start-up capital'. The overall argument in the paper is that the accumulation of cosmopolitan start-up capital is a specific strategy guiding the GMC families' school choice practices, set within a frame of mobilities. Given the growing number of mobile families who continuously enter and exit local education systems, focusing on this group is pertinent for policy makers and practitioners around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the harsh Chinese graduate labor market, urban, middle-class students continue to outpace those from rural, underprivileged backgrounds in job access and occupational attainment. Literature attributes this graduate employment gap to varied accumulation of social capital embedded in their social network, leading to advantages of middle-class. This social network-capital approach, however, rarely revealed the influences of a gradually established market system and ignored the agency of the individual job seekers. To gain a more comprehensive understanding towards this graduate employment discrepancy, this article examines the behaviors of the graduates not only in their job search processes, but also during campus experiences. Inspired by the concept habitus, this study aims to understand the cultural processes that underlie individual advancement throughout higher education, and consequently, the transition from higher education to the labor market. Drawn upon the interview data, this article found that middle-class students, compared with their underprivileged counterparts, have more sophisticated understanding towards a competitive labor market, higher level of confidence in mobilizing their agency, and apply more strategic plans towards future. This article argues that these delicately constructed middle-class disposition and behaviors guided by such disposition jointly contribute to the better performances of middle-class during job search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates the influence of a new national assignment system (NSAS) on Chilean middle-class advantage. This system was designed to increase educational equity by changing the previous school admission "rules" that were prejudicial against low-income students. We use Bourdieu's conceptual tools, drawing on concepts of capitals and field, to analyse the influence of the new rules of the game on the value of middle-class capitals. To understand how the new rules shape middle-class families' advantages, we link qualitative and quantitative analyses that empirically explore how families subjectively interpret the policy change and how objectively it shapes their access to desired schools. The qualitative phase shows that middle-class parents experience the NSAS as a risky new scenario. However, quantitative analysis shows the NSAS is associated with only a modest decrease in middle class-advantages. We illustrate the difficulty of transforming marketized educational systems, where previously privileged families react against equity-driven changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the inter-relationships among citizenship, class and disability through the methodological juxtaposition of critical policy analysis of constructions of disability and an autobiographical sociology of global middle-class parental strategies in school admissions processes in the Middle East. The author advances the theoretical case that disability is mediated through class and citizenship, and she elucidates the role of affect in the construction of disability and its relation to citizenship. Recognising emotion as a social, cultural and political practice, she proposes that this, in turn, has implications for reclaiming affect in the production of new knowledge on disability and citizenship in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the research was to identify the impact of the hot chair strategy on the acquisition of second grade intermediate students of the concepts and the development of the chemical survey and their higher thinking skills. The researchers adopted the experimental design of the two equal groups. The research community determines the average second grade students in the secondary schools in Tikrit for the academic year 2018 -2019, a high school was chosen for girls as a sample. Of a total of 69 students, 34 of the experimental group studied in accordance with the hot chair strategy and 35 students in control group studied the usual way. The researchers compared the two groups in the variables: grades of chemistry for the past year, age calculated by months, academic achievement of the parents of the students, degree of the chemical survey and higher thinking skills. The results showed that there was a superior difference between the students of the experimental group who studied according to the hot chair strategy on the female students of the control group, which studied according to the usual method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'School segregation' indicates the concentration of a minority into a school that significantly exceeds the presence of the same population living in the surrounding territory. A segregated school is generally synonymous of low level of attainment and social marginalization. This phenomenon can be addressed as an urban issue or an educational problem, studied through spatial measures or qualitative interviews, interpreted as an institutional or a spatial effect. Many disciplines and approaches have in fact addressed the topic. This article, through a critical literature review, identifies the main drivers of segregation in the institutional context, the residential distribution of the population and the households' choice. Taking into account evidence from the literature, especially from Northern Europe and United States, the author then disentangles the three drivers highlighting similarities and differences that can be found in diverse cities. Segregation in schools in fact seems eligible to acquire various shapes and features especially according to urban contexts, educational system and middle classes behaviors. The article will then highlight flaws in the current literature and suggest further research lines in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive research has explored the ability of young children to learn about the causal structure of the world from patterns of evidence. These studies, however, have been conducted with middle-class samples from North America and Europe. In the present study, low-income Peruvian 4- and 5-year-olds and adults, low-income U.S. 4- and 5-year-olds in Head Start programs, and middle-class children from the United States participated in a causal learning task (N = 435). Consistent with previous studies, children learned both specific causal relations and more abstract causal principles across culture and socioeconomic status (SES). The Peruvian children and adults generally performed like middle-class U.S. children and adults, but the low-SES U.S. children showed some differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the extent to which middle-class Christians, many of whom were progressive liberals, involved themselves in the Moral Instruction League (MIL) to intervene in 'improving' the moral character of the English working class. It considers how they reconciled their motivations and underlying theology with secular goals that sought to free morality from its theological basis in late nineteenth-century England. It argues that Christian members and supporters of the MIL, in a series of steps, began to distance themselves from the theological basis of their faith. This was in an age when people were overwhelmingly persuaded that religion and morality were inseparable and that moral education must be religious education in schools. It was the Christian faith, not doubt, that was widely assumed in Victorian England at all social levels. What was the philosophy that the organisation promoted in its approach to character-building?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of college-for-all policy, college aspirations among working-class and middle-class young adults have converged, yet class gaps in enrollment and completion persist. Building on previous literature that uncovers the structural barriers that block working-class mobility, we examine the specific narrative content that working-class and middle-class young adults and their parents attach to the broad "college for all" message. We investigate how their narratives of imagined futures shape how they perceive the riskiness of college decisions. In-depth interviews with 51 young adult-parent dyads suggest that working-class young adults envision college as a route to moral worth and an escape from their current grim reality—what we term "salvation." Their narratives lend self-efficacy and optimism to their lives, but are not organized in ways that protect them from the increasingly risky college landscape. Middle-class parents assume control over the meanings of college and deploy a narrative of insecurity about downward mobility in a competitive economy. By contesting the meaning of college as a vehicle for self-realization, this narrative buffers youth from risk even as it constrains feelings of self-determination in the transition to adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the ‘global middle classes’, cultural reproduction increasingly involves the international school as they promise considerable distinction [Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press] granting University passage past Anglo gate-keepers. This paper draws on research providing a multiphase exploration of the character of senior leadership in IB international schools. Participants emerged as white ‘English’ and Christian. However, data collected show that these leaders do not operationalise (organisational) international values; instead, they draw upon their own societal values in leadership. Yet, their stories and outlooks of global-mindedness sit uncritically, framed in ‘Inner Circle English’ [Kachru, B. 1985. “Standards, Codification and Sociolinguistic Realism: The English Language in the Outer Circle.” In English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures, edited by R. Quirk and H. G. Widdowson, 11-34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] advantage. Participants lean on a power-narrative of middle-class ‘Englishness’. As powerful policy-makers, this orientation defines the international school’s mission and vision. It appeals to the surge of international education, particularly in the global South, where international schools can be seen as incubators of ‘English’ epistemic advantage. It is unlikely that the consolidation of the ‘Brand of Britain’ will affect this demographic and their choices to ‘go UK’. The affordance of diminishing EU participation in the UK higher education system may work in favour of globalising middle classes and elites. Conversely, it is unlikely that lower income EU or UK domestic HE participation is likely to profit from this move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes an empirical contribution to the study of the global middle class (GMC), and sheds light on the complex relationships that are constructed and sustained by these families with their ‘home nation’ through their educational strategies. Drawing on an inductive analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with Israeli migrant mothers in the United Kingdom who constitute a specific fraction of the GMC, this article examines families’ identity constructions and how these shape their educational practices. The participants constitute a growing phenomenon - highly educated, mobile middle-class families who live and move around the world, and position themselves using global frames of references. We emphasise how country of origin acts as a symbolic object in the cultivation of their children’s identity and how different types of attachment to ‘home nation’ are perceived as offering valuable capital for the GMC. The article therefore contributes much-needed empirical analyses on education strategies within the GMC, and challenges the suggestion that critical to the definition of the GMC is that they are ‘rootless’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on middle-class parent activism in the Israeli policy-making arena. In recent decades, public education governance in Israel has been moving gradually from a quasi-social democratic mode to a neoliberal one. Two e-mobilizations of middle-class parents are studied: the ‘Strollers Protest’ of 2011 and the ‘Sardines Protest’ of 2014. First, we explore how these two protests used social media to promote changes in education policies. Next, we argue that social media can be used to promote both anti-neoliberal and pro-neoliberal policies in public education. We conclude by discussing the possible implications of social media on parent activism in the policy arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This opportunistic case-study highlights striking differences in 6 urban children’s and 12 preservice suburban middle-class teachers’ perception of science and discuss consequences of science education and beyond. I found that all of the interviewed urban children demonstrated scientific inquiries and interests outside of the school science education that can be characterized by diverse simultaneous discourses from diverse practices, i.e., “heterodiscoursia” (Matusov in Culture & Psychology, 17(1), 99-119, 2011b), despite their diverse, positive and negative, attitudes toward school science. In contrast to the urban children’s mixed attitudes to science, the preservice teachers view science negatively. They could not see science inquiries in the videotaped interviews of the urban children. There seemed to be many reasons for that. One of the possible reasons for that was that the preservice teachers tried to purify the science practice. Another reason was that they did not see a necessity to be interested and engaged in the curriculum that they are going to teach in future. The pedagogical consequences and remedies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demographically and geographically, lower middle class youth occupy an ambiguous position in Indonesian society, embodying elements of both privilege and marginality. Drawing on interviews and 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2008 and 2013, this article considers how an emerging provincial middle class seeks to make good on the promises of an expanding higher education system and proliferation of globalised youth cultures. I examine the capacity and limits of higher education in facilitating young people’s aspirations for youth lifestyles, jobs and the future in a regional labour market with high levels of youth underemployment and informality. Young people’s aspirations for employment and middle class standards of living are mitigated by their responsibilities towards their families and difficulties to establish the social connections needed to access jobs and opportunities. Faced with limited upward mobility, class as an aspirational category rather than everyday reality underpins young people’s claims about the good life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much of the literature on social class and language study in schools argues that for middle-class parents and their children, languages are chosen for their capacity to offer forms of distinction that provide an edge in the global labour market. In this paper, we draw on data collected from interviews with parents and children in middle-class schools in Australia to demonstrate how a complex amalgam of elite, cultural identity and/or trade language discourses came into play to explain the choice (or not) to study a language and the choice of specific languages. For many of the parents languages provided a limited form of ‘civic multiculturalism’, as a means of better understanding and respecting the ‘other’. We argue that the value attributed to high status languages via this discourse, means their continued presence in schools hoping to attract middle-class parents, but their relative absence in schools with largely working-class populations, where more ‘practical’ concerns dominate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this article is to problematize the ways class and gender are played out in adult students’ narratives about their occupational choice and future. Drawing on Beverly Skeggs, we analyse how students think about future occupations, what motivates them towards these and how they are able to form their future in relation to them. Taking on Sweden as a case, our results show that students’ narratives on their future occupations are classed as well as gendered. In their vision of future occupations, working-class students tend to focus on occupations helping and caring for others, while middle-class students tend to focus on work more as a means of fulfilling themselves as individuals. These differences are also gendered. Female students are more likely than their male counterparts to picture their future occupations in relation to having children and a family. This tells us that in the female students’ narratives, there tends to be a strong focus on caring – for their families as well as in future occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper, based on three waves of qualitative data with middle-income families outside of Philadelphia, explores how families deal with the challenge of financing postsecondary education over time. Because of economic setbacks, these families adopt a variety of financial maneuvers to support their young adult children's postsecondary educational plans. In particular, families are driven to sacrifice familial savings accounts and retirement funds, take on significant student loan burdens, and downgrade children's college plans to cheaper, often less prestigious, options. These results highlight the financial vulnerability of families in the middle of the income distribution and the complicated relationship between family economics and postsecondary educational plans for children. [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]

The growing young middle class in India is often portrayed as encompassing a ‘global sensitivity’. International mobility is one strategy for middle class families to gain a positional advantage on a competitive labour market. Negotiating place attachment and global horizons may create a range of possibilities often attached to discourses of individualization and self-realization. This paper analyses young people’s dispositions towards mobility in the transition from education to work by drawing on Bourdieu’s central concepts of symbolic capital and habitus. Interviews with students in higher secondary school in Kerala’s state capital Thiruvananthapuram, southwest India, covered broad themes like future expectations, skills and knowledge, everyday whereabouts and family life which were discussed in relation to a perceived activity space. I argue that young people’s future aspirations are shaped in a profound way by the history of Kerala’s in and out migration, and draw attention to differences within the middle class where transnational capital distinguishes rather than unifies ‘Indian youth’. Furthermore, this paper unpacks the complex, variegated images of different cities, countries and regions as symbols of cultural or economic capital in Malayali students’ expectations of their future education and employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on 44 in-depth interviews with undergraduates, this research explores whether and how class background matters for students’ social experiences at an elite university. The findings reveal that, compared with upper-class students, both lower- and middle-class students are disadvantaged in their social integration due to a lack of resources (time and money) and a mismatch of cultural styles. Middle-class students tend to reference upward to their upper-class peers, developing a critical view of the campus social system. In contrast, lower-class students reference their less advantaged peers or family members who do not have access to elite spaces. Our findings suggest that the stratified social system on campus reduces lower- and middle-class students’ potential for upward mobility within a high-stakes setting. Thus, scholars and policymakers should pay attention not only to the experiences of lower-class students but also to the challenges confronting middle-class students at highly selective universities. [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]

A growing body of literature has begun to explore the individual identities, motivations, and school choices of middle-class, typically white, parents who choose to reside in socioeconomically and racially mixed central city neighborhoods. Drawing on qualitative research in three US cities, we argue that a focus on middle-class parents’ collective engagement in schooling is particularly important in under-resourced urban contexts. In these environments, we show, middle-class parents’ use of social networks often extends beyond basic information-sharing about school quality to encompass a range of activities undertaken with other families ‘like them’ who have also chosen to enroll their children in an urban public school. We find that, in some instances, middle-class parents’ collective actions can benefit an entire class or school. Yet in other instances, their activation of social capital can contribute to processes of social reproduction in urban schooling by excluding or marginalizing low-income students and their families. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It has been argued that middle-class parents engage in the ‘concerted cultivation’ of their children with a view to securing their future status. One aspect of this ‘concerted cultivation’ entails the enrolment of children in organised enrichment activities. While scholars have focused on the ‘enrichment’ market for school-aged children, few have examined the preschool market. This article presents an analysis of a Sydney-based Australian parenting publication with a focus on advertisements for enrichment and entertainment activities targeting preschool-aged children. Many of these advertisements promote the message that future educational success is predicated on parental investment in the preschool years and mothers/parents are urged to do all they can to give their child a ‘head start’ on learning. This analysis highlights how these activities are promoted as a strategy for class reproduction, suggesting that anxiety about children’s future status has seeped into the preschool years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with the ways in which formal learning environments increasingly have to compete with informal ones, where such informal learning environments can be seen as penetrations from global ‘scapes’ into local conditions of circulation and uptake of semiotic resources. The study is based on close observation of a group of upwardly mobile Chinese consumers who have access to informal learning environments and acquire discourses to express their tastes in cultural goods. As effects of their access to the informal learning environments, the informants expand their identity repertoires and bind one space to another through their sociocultural practices. Such identity effects are the outcome of scaled forms of access to globally circulating semiotic resources whose indexical value needs to be enacted, renegotiated, and learned. In explaining the rescaling of the informants, access to informal global learning environments is as important as their access to advanced formal education, and the combination of such scaled resources informs their emergence as a globally recognizable middle class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the expanded higher education in China, middle-class students are found to have better access to job information than their underprivileged counterparts; they also gain better jobs in the labour market. Researchers have turned to social capital theory to explain this phenomenon, claiming that middle-class students with wider social network and higher status contacts are more likely to acquire better jobs. Instead of following the social capital approach, this study examines the job search discrepancy between two student groups by investigating the role of parents, that is, parental involvement both prior to and during the graduates’ job search, and the influence of parents in the job search. Sixty-fourth-year students from middle-class and underprivileged social backgrounds in Wuhan were interviewed from 2011 to 2012. Based on these data, middle-class parents are more extensively involved in the job search of their children by offering social ties, constructing middle-class accredited qualities for their children and supervising the job search behaviour of their children. By contrast, underprivileged parents know little about the campus life and job searching experiences of the children. Thus, these parents participate less actively in the job search of their children. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a theoretical argument regarding the power of school to shape parental involvement in culturally informed ways. The paper emerges out of preliminary fieldwork among Jewish middle-class parents in a town in northern Israel, during which our attention was drawn to the intense activity in and around their children’s transition to primary school. This activity became a lens for the exploration and articulation of a theoretical claim, according to which parental involvement is not just a matter of the fit or lack of fit between the cultural capital imported from home into school, as posited by much of the relevant literature. Rather, the cultural shaping of parental involvement takes placewithin and throughencounters between school and family: by means of the school’s cultivation of ‘proper’ disposition and comportment for parents, the power of emotional community and the recruitment of a key cultural symbol. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background/Context: Despite decades of research, the persistence of the gap in student achievement between disadvantaged minority students and their middle-class peers remains unexplained. Purpose/Objective: The purpose of the current article is to propose a new model of the achievement gap. Research Design: Data were analyzed from three nationally representative data sets: The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study of the Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K), the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), and the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS). Findings/Results: The achievement gap may be explained as a consequence of the conventional structure of schooling and the failure to individualize task difficulty and provide performance feedback in a way that is necessary to ensure that all students experience mastery. Many students become disengaged and the effect is most severe for disadvantaged minority students. Alternative theories of the achievement gap do not adequately explain the observed pattern of data. A league table analysis indicates that interventions based on the proposed model of the achievement gap are more efficient than 21 alternative approaches for raising achievement and suggest a promising strategy for addressing the achievement gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once societies embarked on programmes of mass education home schooling became essentially a middle-class project and remains so. This paper looks at the educational experiences of some lower middle class women at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for whom the resources of the middle-class home were simply not available. It explores both their experiences of formal schooling and of the educational provision they chose to seek and found among other groups and institutional frameworks in their society. The range and extended chronology of their educational experiences highlight the need to reconceptualise education as extended processes of physical, intellectual and moral socialisation not necessarily limited to the years of childhood and/or adolescence or time-stopped in any way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent Russian studies by the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, have revealed the economic and sociocultural characteristics of the Russian middle class as an aspect of Russia's development model. The maximum resource for the growth of that class, which at the time of the study comprised 40% of Russia's economically active population, is not expected to grow by more than 8-10% of the overall country's population. The middle class has certain advantages compared to other social strata in terms of financial and living conditions, and a higher professional status. Some problems are also stated, including a drastic decline in governmental resource, uncertainty about the future, an increase in the proportion of unsophisticated leisure in contrast to active leisure. A consensus between the state and the middle class is feasible as to obligations to resolve social problems. However, no consensus is sofar available [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1940, a "critical mass" of variously trained scholars collaborated as part of the University of Chicago's Committee on Human Development (CHD) and conducted pioneering interdisciplinary research that put education at the center (Havighurst, n.d.b, p. 9.14). The four most important figures here were Lloyd Warner, Allison Davis, Robert Havighurst, and Ralph Tyler. This essay focuses on the CHD's theoretical and practical achievements as they related to education, emphasizing in particular the Committee's combination of anthropological, sociological, and psychological theory. Positing class as a type of culture, CHD researchers took concrete steps, especially in the realm of intelligence testing, to make education less biased in favor of the middle class and more inclusive of the skills and abilities of the lower class. This essay explores these historical synergies between anthropology, psychology, and education, and it explains the ends to which these Chicago intellectuals put them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having noted that some use of Bourdieusian concepts in educational research is superficial, this paper offers a view of the distinctiveness of Bourdieu’s concepts via the example of misrecognition, which is differentiated from the concept with the same name in Fraser’s work. An account is given of a recent research project on white middle-class identity and school choice, which suggests that whilst parents avoided a common misrecognition (regarding school quality), they were nevertheless reliant on other forms of misrecognition (regarding the qualities of their children) that are equally important in the relationship between social class and educational inequalities. Finally, the paper suggests that educational understandings, including some educational research, are predisposed to misrecognise Bourdieusian concepts, and four areas of tension are identified. The paper argues against ‘light usage’ of Bourdieu whilst acknowledging that the approach can produce a pessimistic account that is at odds with some educational values. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Alternative School Day (ASD) is a project for adolescents who have difficulties in several areas. Nine pupils (14–16-years-old), their parents and teachers were interviewed during autumn and spring. The pupils attended ASD one day per week. All of them had a working-class background. The study focuses on the school as a middle-class arena, and for pupils with other class background, it represents an ‘away ground’. Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and habitus, and Giroux's emphasis of individuals as intentional actors, have been used to study domination and resistance in schools. The findings may indicate that there exist both domination and resistance in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study addresses how private tutoring influences middle-class students’ use of in-class time in formal schools. Through interviews with five third-year public senior high school students from middle-class families in Taiwan, the research found that with the help of private tutoring those students were able to use the “time-stealing” strategy to steal time from an ongoing class and create a “double-context learning situation” to optimize the efficiency of the use of their in-class time. This behavior not only undermined teachers’ teaching in formal schools, but also exposed the inadequacy of formal schooling in satisfying students’ need for knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pursuit of high-quality schools for their children is one of the main factors motivating middle-class families to exit urban communities. This study draws on interviews with middle-class mothers in Boston who have opted instead to stay in the city to explore how they evaluated their local public elementary schools. Specifically, I examine how some middle-class mothers deploy their cultural capital in the process of embracing a choice that others may see as risky or surprising. Findings reveal that respondents’ awareness of and confidence in their own cultural capital—in particular, their ability to provide enriching learning opportunities outside the classroom—shape how they think about the kind of school their children need and enable them to downplay the relevance of the district’s standardized test scores. This, in turn, allows them to privilege other aspects of the educational experience when deciding among public school options. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we offer a unique contribution to understandings of schooling as a site for the production of social class difference. We bring together the rich body of work that has been conducted on middle-class educational identities, with explorations of the centrality of the feminine in representations of class difference from the field of critical girlhood studies. This is done in order to explore how young femininities mediate the representation of class difference in the environment of the private girls’ school. Drawing from our two research studies, located in private girls’ schools in Australia and the United Kingdom, we argue that the notion of ‘disgust’, commonly used in recent engagements around class, has only limited purchase in understanding the representation of class difference in these schools. It is the inconsistencies and complexities in how class and class relations are produced that we wish to illuminate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In different schooling systems throughout the world children of socially advantaged groups experience a higher degree of academic success than children of minority or underprivileged groups. However, there is evidence that academic success comes at a cost. In this paper, based on the findings of an ethnographic research at a Spanish middle-upper class high school, it is argued that secondary school socialization has a strong focus on the future, and it fosters feelings of anxiety in the children of elites. Students believe that a good academic trajectory is the cornerstone to a successful career and they try to take individual control of their future lives without learning how to influence their competitive social context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares access to full-time undergraduate higher education (HE) by members of less advantaged social classes and ethnic minorities across the four ‘home countries’ of the UK. It uses data on applicants to HE in selected years from 1996 to 2010. In all home countries students from intermediate and working-class backgrounds retained a broadly level share of a rising total participation in HE, while ethnic minorities increased their share. Intermediate- and working-class students were more likely to study within their own home country, as were ethnic-minority students in England, but minority students from Northern Ireland and Scotland were much more likely than white students to study elsewhere (usually England). Some aspects of the admissions process appear to have been ‘unfair’ to lower class applicants; this was the same across the UK although the relative success of applications from colleges and independent schools, which might accentuate or mitigate inequalities, varied across the home countries. In England and Wales, ethnic-minority applicants were less likely to be offered a place but they compensated (only partially in the case of older universities) by gaining entry through clearing; in Scotland they were as likely to be offered a place but less likely to enter HE. The paper discusses the potential of such comparisons for benchmarking and for policy learning. It concludes that the similarities between the home countries are more substantial than their differences, and that administrative and political devolution in the 1990s has had little impact on inequalities in HE. There is no evidence of a significant impact of the divergence between market policies in England and the more social-democratic policies of the devolved administrations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses upon the classed and early professional experiences of middle-class novice teachers in England experiencing and contemplating working in schools serving socio-economically disadvantaged communities. Through an examination of the visibility and invisibility of social class in education set within an increasingly unequal and changed social landscape, the article reports upon research which seeks to better understand the class identities of these teachers. Evidence is presented of the key, yet complex, role that social class occupies within the working lives of new teachers and reveals the different ways in which teachers respond to the classed dimensions of their early professional experiences. It is concluded that the fundamentally important role that social class plays in terms of shaping early professional experiences in teaching suggests the need not only for a commensurately enhanced focus as part of early professional development, but also for attention that is sensitively attuned to the class identities of teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative research explores women's experiences of accessing higher education (HE) in England, through the mother–daughter relationship. Women's pathways to university and their funding histories are presented from both past and recent generations, to contextualise an understanding of funding HE in light of the 2012 tuition fee increase. Interview data indicate that the middle-class mothers in this study continue to engage and mediate their social, cultural and economic capital to enhance their daughters' education beyond secondary school and into the tertiary sector. Subsequently, social and educational mobility has been reproduced or transformed positively in all of the dyads. A Bourdieusian approach is used to explore the class-inflected patterns and themes between habitus, capital and field in the process of accessing HE. The advantage of mothers' continuing support through the mobilisation of capitals, along with their suggestions of anxiety surrounding tuition fees exacerbate the possibility of the marginalisation of access to HE for those from more disadvantaged or less-supported social backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under-representation in UK higher education of students from less privileged social backgrounds is an enduring problem. While there are examples of productive participation, the pattern of collective trajectories of this group differs sharply from that of traditional entrants. The onus falls largely on students to adapt to established practices that remain strongly oriented towards traditional white middle-class populations. Bourdieu's theory of practice informed the analysis of data emerging from a longitudinal case study, and empirical insights are offered into how students with non-traditional academic backgrounds experienced and negotiated the demands of studying in one of the UK's research-intensive universities. A new conceptual framework identifies academic, linguistic, social and professionally-oriented capital as underpinning the logic of practice of this sub-field of higher education, and their influence on the positional tendencies and trajectories of the students operating within it are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article we draw on Peter Marcuse's discussion of different types of displacement using evidence from a recent study we conducted in East London to argue that there is clear evidence of 'exclusionary displacement' and 'displacement pressure' in terms of education and specifically the choice of schooling. We show how the incoming middle classes in the Victoria Park area of inner East London have displaced not only existing poor residents but also many of the less affluent middle class from the favoured state schools in the area by adopting some schools and avoiding others. The preferred schools are often praised to the heavens whilst the shunned schools are similarly disparaged and deemed unacceptable. We suggest that it is this middle-class dichotomization of schooling which accounts for the kind of educational displacement we have observed. The main form that this takes is direct exclusionary displacement when middle-class pressure on favoured schools leads to local people being unable to get their children into them - normally because of 'distance from school' selection criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider identity as a historically emerging discourse that requires genealogical analysis - not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit [ourselves] to its dissipation (Foucault , p. 162). We suggest analyzing identity through the history of socio-economic classes, their life struggles, ambitions, development, and reproduction. We see learning not as a project of transformation of identity, but rather as developing access to socially valuable practices and developing one's own voice within these practices (through addressing and responding to other voices). The access and voice projects free agents from unnecessary finalization and objectivization by oneself and others (Bakhtin ; Bakhtin ). In education, we should develop indigenous discourses of learning and develop a conceptual framework that makes analysis of diverse discourses possible. We argue that learning, as transformation of participation in a sociocultural practice to gain more access, is a better conceptual framework than learning as transformation of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]