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While university participation rates among Indigenous Australians have been on the rise in recent years, parity targets remain elusive. In this context, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how aspirations for higher education are formed and nurtured. Studies tend to focus on barriers to access, often in ways that position Indigenous Australians as a homogeneous 'Otherised' group. This paper counter-balances hegemonic narratives of Indigeneity by analysing what Indigenous students from middle-class families say about their aspirations for university. Drawing on interview data collected in 2016 in government schools in New South Wales, Australia, it offers fresh understandings of school–to–university transitions, both empirically and conceptually. Using the lens of four–dimensional social space as conceived by Indigenous scholar Maggie Walter, we illustrate how race and class function in powerful but complex ways to shape the aspirations of two young Indigenous women. We argue that if we are to shift longstanding demographic patterns of university participation, then visible stories of Indigenous success, such as those told here, can help to redefine current discourses on Indigenous aspirations for higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

'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]

The article focuses on passion projects for creating space for adolescents to ask real questions. Topics include how the project has created authentic and relevant learning experiences for middle level students, adaptations for Passion Projects for educators who are not able to teach a quarter-length inquiry course, and once peer feedback has been gathered, students refine their inquiry questions and submit them for teacher approval.

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]

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]

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 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]

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]

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]

The article explores the ways in which concerns of history, in terms of content, concepts and methodology, find space or do not find space within textbooks used for teaching languages. These may be more important as sites of ‘knowledge’ than social science books, because the latter are often regarded as insignificant within the formal schooling system. How are great men (and women) constructed? What are regarded as ‘suitable’ examples of historical achievements? How is change understood and explained? Are there spaces for escaping from a normative, increasingly homogeneous and homogenised understanding of the past dominated by the preoccupations of a visible, majoritarian middle class? These are some of the questions raised. [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]

A major focus of the Louisiana School Effectiveness Study has been the search for characteristics of exemplary schooling in varied economic contexts. In this paper differential results of analyses of effective, typical, and ineffective schools in middle and low socioeconomic neighborhoods are presented. Implications for practitioners and for future research are discussed. [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 analyzes the relationship between individual health status and labor force participation using the first wave of the Colombian Longitudinal Survey. The empirical modeling strategy accounts for the presence of potential endogeneity between these two variables. The results show that there is a positive relationship between health and labor force participation in both directions, indicating that better health is likely to lead to a higher probability of participation in the labor market, but also that individuals who participate in the labor market are more likely to report better health. Interesting differences are uncovered when comparing the results by gender and/or age groups. For instance, for younger females, health status and higher education positively affect the probability of labor participation, whereas having children under the age of 5 and being married reduce their probability of participation. Our findings also highlight the importance of public policy to guarantee good health conditions of the population which could also have a positive impact on labor productivity and consequently on long-run economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the views and experiences of schooling among parents of children with autism from middle-income families in urban India. A total of 18 parents with children attending private mainstream schools in Kolkata were interviewed about their school choice, interactions with the school and perceptions regarding their child’s schooling. The findings position parents as strategic agents, who actively negotiate a range of obstacles, resolve dilemmas and handle tensions to ensure their child’s admission and continuity in school. It was clear that parents shared a precarious and fragile relationship with the school. While parents were, on the face of it, positive about the school, parental accounts show how the school had not made any significant changes to accommodate the needs of their child. The article concludes by reflecting on the complexities inherent in these findings and questions why these agentic middle-class parents who could be the impetus of greater change seemed rather limited in the ways in which they sought the school to change to accommodate their child with disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Findings: Effective preschool mathematics instruction is especially important for low-income children. Previous research demonstrates that low-income children enter kindergarten behind their middle-income peers. They receive less mathematics support at home and from public preschools. The aim of this study was to test Math Shelf, a tablet intervention designed to improve at-risk preschoolers’ mathematics performance. A total of 100 children participated in a randomized controlled trial in a large urban Head Start center. Intervention students played Math Shelf on tablet computers for 6 weeks, whereas comparison students played the most downloaded and best reviewed preschool math apps on tablets for an equal amount of time. During game play, graduate student researchers supervised intervention and comparison students in separate rooms. Intervention and comparison groups did not differ on pretest assessments. Math Shelf students performed statistically significantly better (Cohen’sd= 0.57) than comparison students at posttest.Practice or Policy: Math Shelf results suggest that teachers can enhance low-income preschoolers’ mathematics knowledge in a relatively short amount of time by incorporating developmentally appropriate tablet interventions. [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]

In this qualitative study, I examine the intersections of learner identity, power, and language through the experiences and insights of Latina/o 2nd-generation middle-class children who occupy a unique positionality between the discourses surrounding bilingual education. Through narrative inquiry, emerging bilingual middle-class students actualize nonbinary thinking, able to depict identity as an inherently multifaceted process of construction. Their ways of knowing and experiences as language learners ultimately shape an outsider-within space, rupturing traditional binaries within bilingual education, namely EO/EL (English only versus English learner) and class binaries. They also proffer queer and cyber identities as additional salient variables that plow into language identity. In the end, these learners frame the contradiction and nuance of language learner identity, not as one of struggle, but as one of differential agency, the ability to move in and out of contradictory identities as both strong and advantageous tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides the scientific enterprise of trying to define the dimension and characteristics of the middle class, we try to imagine an artistic find of middle class, seeing it as a woman in the beginning of maturity, capable to come through her own capabilities and her knowledge acquired through educational process, a person who can change the society around her with her innovative ideas, bringing the progress. The documentation activity about this subject lead us to the conclusion that the image of the middle class depends very much on the way you choose to look at her. You can look at her from the distance, without the possibility to say many things about it, if you choose some general criteria in order to separate middle class from other population groups. Or, you can look very closely at it, having in this way the possibility to see all the details of this image. Everything depends on the choices made in defining the criteria which separate middle class from the other social classes. Measurement of middle class is not an easy task due to several reasons. Firstly, it requires the classification of population into social classes, for which it is necessary to take into consideration some objective criteria, as levels of income, occupation or levels of education, skills or others, but also subjective criteria as the prestige of the profession or company, manual or non-manual character of work, social category of family or residential area where the person was born. The larger the number of criteria taken into account is, the bigger the subjectivity of the classification is. Secondly it is difficult to find availability of data sources allowing the estimation of middle class. Ordinary data sources, namely the sample surveys, use major classification classes, which make the analysis less detailed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about twelve middle-class students, previously studying in elite primary and secondary schools, making another attempt at getting into university in Hong Kong. Despite their failure at a critical educational stage, which contradicts a general pattern of middle-class educational success, they decide to seek a second chance by reading an associate degree in community college, a perceived inferior educational option. Despite feeling determined, they are anxious and uneasy with taking up this option. How the middle class feel about their academic pursuits, especially after a critical failure, is under-researched. This article attempts to fill this gap by referring to Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and field to make sense of the complex or contradictory feelings of 12 students with a self-conscious, high-status, middle-class habitus in encountering a perceived low-status community college. I shall conclude this article with the normative implication of our discussion in making sense of educational inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Challenges associated with recruitment and retention of participants from underprivileged social communities, in addition to neuroscience researchers' unfamiliarity with these communities, possibly explain the limited number of individuals from these communities who participate in neuroscience research studies. The consequence is a scarcity of data in this fast-growing segment of the population. In particular, developmental research involving children from ethnic minorities has yet to catch up with the number of studies available for middle-class White children (Flores et al., 2002). This underrepresentation can lead to disparities in health and social services for children from these communities, as well as to a nonrepresentative knowledge base of child neurodevelopment. Developing and utilizing innovative and culturally sensitive approaches to recruiting participants from underprivileged communities can maximize their participation in research, as behavioral researchers have known for some time. Here, based on our experience recruiting low-socioeconomic status ( SES) Latino children from Los Angeles, we offer strategies to improve recruitment, involvement, and retention. We have a special focus on techniques relevant to recruiting for neuroimaging, which is associated with new challenges not faced to the same degree in research historically. Better inclusion of underrepresented children in research can ultimately lead to the development and improvement of effective public polices to support their needs, ranging from education to health care. [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]

This paper advocates for a conceptualization of the African middle class that would be universally valid: security from economic vulnerability and prospects for social mobility. We suggest three minimum criteria that are jointly necessary and sufficient to reflect this conceptualization: secondary schooling completion, decent housing amenities and skilled employment. Using household surveys for nine African countries, we then demonstrate how measures of the middle class based on expenditure thresholds refer to households with vastly different abilities to meet these three criteria. This cautions against overreliance on expenditure-based definitions, which may obscure qualitative differences among the middle class across African countries. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of International Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the issues of education, employment, reservations and the question of creamy layer with reference to Dalit middle class. It examines varied perceptions in deciding the criteria for availing reservations in the context of creamy layer. It examines current utilization of reservation and aspiration for its future utilization by the middle class Dalits. In the post-independence period, the Indian State has adopted 'social justice' as its goal. As a part of which, it has been supporting the Dalits' socio-economic mobility through the policy of 'protective discrimination' or the policy of reservations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate appropriate assessment of overweight and obesity in children and adolescents is a critical aspect of contemporary medical care. The BMI is incomplete, however, without consideration of the complex behavioural factors that influence obesity. The objective of the study was to compare the commonly defined obesity indicators among upper middle class and lower middle class college girls. The study was conducted on forty girls, and the age ranged from 20 to 25 years, who were randomly selected from the School of Law, Guru Ghasidas University, Bilaspur (C.G). Selected variables for the study were Fat Mass (Fat in kg), Waist circumference (WC) and waist hip ratio (WHR). The girls were divided into lower and upper middle class using Kuppuswamy's socioeconomic scale questionnaire (Shankar Reddy Dudala, 2012). The statistical technique employed for this study was Independent t-test. The study depicted that there is no difference in Fat mass and waist circumference among the two groups. The study further reveals that there is a significant difference in waist hip ratio among upper middle and lower middle class girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the notable shift from grants to loans over the past several decades, many researchers have argued the positive impact of financial aid on student college choice, enrollment, and persistence. However, literature indicates that students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to take loans to finance postsecondary education than those from affluent conditions. Qualitative research on the reasons for non-borrowers' aversion to loans and strategies for college payment is rather scant. This study explores 30 lower- or lower-middle-class non-borrowing students' lived experiences surrounding student loans from a qualitative phenomenological research lens. Data are collected from semi-structured interviews. Data analysis shows four main reasons that the participants generally avoid borrowing as they decide where to attend and how to pay for college: parental influence, fear of economic burden, underestimation of the value of college education, and lack of information about the loan system. The strategies they employ for college payment include scholarships and grants, family support, part-time jobs, and prepaid college tuition programs. This study uses peer debriefing to ensure its trustworthiness. Limitations of this study and implications for future research and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

This article examines the relationship between private schooling and the middle classes in urban India. It complicates the argument that private schools have become spaces in which young people come to see themselves less as representatives of one ethnic or caste community and more as indices of their own family’s economic standing and as members of a class group. I argue that a closer look at the way in which students experience and narrativise private schooling reveals a much less straightforward process. Schools, I argue, are mobilised by youth as flexible tools in complex and competing strategies to construct a middle social space for themselves. The article seeks to address the lack of research on the complex and severely contested processes of transformation of the selves implicated in strategies of urban educational opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author reflects on the play-based curriculum or guided-play in prekindergarten in New York and challenges to be faced by teachers. Topics discussed by the author include the success of the program in the state, the benefits provided by the program to middle-class families such as convenience and free child care, and the concerns regarding the readiness of teachers for the curriculum.

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]