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Access to education for peasants in the history of Brazilian society has always been denied, with the absence of public policies for peasants, as the result of a political and social process of denial of minority groups. The text address the issue of closure of schools in the countryside as a growing social phenomenon that has been expanding in the countryside of Brazil. Thus, the general objective of this text is to analyze the issue of the right to education for peasants, focusing on the high number of school closures in the countryside, seeking to understand the consequences for the peasantry. The closure of this institutions has become a problem that effects the importance of the countryside in Brazil, given that access to education is a right for everyone, including those who live and are from the countryside. However, public management has closed activities in schools in the countryside, making it difficult the access to education for peasants. The research has a qualitative character, where initially a survey and bibliographic review was carried out supported by Magalhães (2017), Ribeiro (2012), Brasil (2010), Diniz (2010), Nogueira (2019), Silva (2018) and other authors. In a second segment, data was collected on the number of schools closed in Brazil between the years of 1997 to 2022, and finally, data and information processing and analysis thereof. The results indicate that the closure of schools in the countryside violates the right to human development of the peasantry, as it is understood that the uprooting of peasant culture, the lack of educational policies for the countryside and the cutting of spending on education are linked to the closure of these institutions.

Substantial social stratification research conceptualizes education as a series of standard transitions from one stage to the next, such as from high school to college. Yet less research examines mandatory transitions within each educational stage, which we call "intermediate educational transitions." In this article, we examine a crucial intermediate transition in U.S. higher education, shifting from an undeclared to a declared major by major declaration deadlines, to provide a novel perspective on educational transitions. Bridging theoretical approaches from symbolic interactionism, social stratification, structural functionalism, and neo-institutionalism, we argue that successful major declaration transitions depend on students' individual-level alignment between socially structured actions and culturally informed goals and organization-level alignment between organizational intentions and organizational actions. We use longitudinal interview data paired with 4.5 years of administrative records to assess this argument, finding that both individual- and organization-level alignment contribute to whether students experience seamless, stalled and restarted, or persistently stalled major declaration transitions. We further find that access to compensatory college organizational support determines whether stalled students can restart their major declaration trajectories. These findings indicate that colleges and universities can help to mitigate inequality in intermediate transitions by providing timely, high-quality support.

The educational historian Brian Simon is well known for his portrayal of the social and political conflicts surrounding adult working-class education in 19th and early 20th-century England. However, the third and fourth volumes of his classic history of education in Britain, covering the period from 1920 to 1940 and 1940 to 1990 respectively, include very little about adult education. These later volumes, indeed, focus on the development of schooling in these years. Yet during his writing of the fourth volume, begun in the late 1970s and published in 1991, the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci was published in English and became widely supported among British Marxists. Simon himself was attracted to Gramsci's ideas because of the possibilities that they seemed to raise for educational and social change, in contrast with the neo-Marxist theories of others such as Michael Young and Pierre Bourdieu. This paper traces the development of Simon's approach to adult education, and offers an explanation for his failure to develop a more fully Gramscian version of the history of adult education.

This article embodies a kind of backward travelling by revisiting the history of workers' education in a mining community as part of our contemporary struggle to reinvigorate notions of the common good and popular education. Its focus is the complexities of working-class history, disparaged in neoliberal condescension and oversimplified in some progressive thought: a history of contention and struggle, yet rich in experiment in dialogical, democratic and cooperative learning.

Higher education should be a social good for everyone and, despite the intentions of university policy on inclusion and diversity with schemes on widening participation, the truth is that for working-class students, university is still a place where they encounter prejudices and feelings of exclusion. This article uses the method of autoethnography and personal experience to show and to argue that class inequality and the education system are still connected. It argues that policies relating to inclusion or exclusion are not adequate and instead the working-class lens, the experiences of working-class learners and teachers should be valued pedagogy rather than devalued 'baggage' that should be left behind.

In this article the authors explore the notion of 'common good' in relation to adult education. They do this by drawing upon the experiences of working-class family members who were both social learners and autodidacts, and who engaged in learning for their own sake and for what they believed to be the common good. The authors use diaries, letters and interviews to reflect on how these learners used the lens of class to do this and ask whether in a less binary world, which appears fragmented, individualistic and focused on identity, an adult education for the common good is either relevant or possible.

This paper provides insight into working-class parents' views of the structural and systemic injustices shaping post-school options and opportunities in contemporary Australia, drawing on interview data with a group of mothers living in growth corridor suburbs in the outer west of Melbourne. Illustrating aspects of Berlant's (2011) notion of "cruel optimism", the paper examines the concepts of diminished society and collective community afforded by success through education, an aspiration and achievement unequal among young Australians. As Reay (2017) argues, an ideological narrative that positions individuals as being responsible for their own achievement through education sets many up to fail. This paper gives voice to the lived experiences of this individual responsibilitisation. We draw on elements of Marxist analysis, a subset of critical theory, whereby economic circumstances are the basis upon which political and ideological realities are built, critiquing the ways in which neoliberal social and economic policy and ideology are normalised (Tyson, 2015).

In this article we connect critical librarianship and its practices of information literacy (IL) with working-class experiences of higher education (HE). Although the research literature and professional body of knowledge of critical information literacy (CIL), is one of the most theoretically-developed areas of wider critical librarianship (Critlib) movement, working-class knowledge and experiences remain underrepresented. One reason for this is that the values, behaviour and assumptions of library and HE workers are shaped by a HE system which inculcates middle-class values and cultural capitals within students, and stigmatises working-class students as lacking or in deficit. Hegemonic, or noncritical, IL proselytises middle-class values and assumptions about academic practices and skills development including the notion of an ideal student with behaviour and markers of identity which reflect those most privileged by wider society. In contrast CIL, framed as "the" socially-just practice of IL is theoretically well-placed to support working-class library workers in destabilising this alongside middle-class accomplices. Employing Yosso's (2005) concept of community and cultural wealth (CCW), we analyse how library workers can recognise working-class cultural wealth within the context of CIL and wider working practices. As such narrative accounts are lacking in the literature, we utilise collaborative autoethnography (CAE) (Chang et al., 2013) to consider and interpret our own experiences of libraries when we were university students ourselves, and more recently as HE workers of working-class heritage.

This article explores and discusses some aspects of autoethnographies from a published collection written by working-class academics. The original objective was for each academic to write an account of their life and their experiences of becoming who they are in an industry steeped in elitism. I was interested in how they experienced becoming a working-class academic, what their journeys had been like, and how they navigated their way into their professional roles. I was also curious about their identities and if they continued to identify as working class, or if their social positioning and/or identities have undergone change. The autoethnographies are powerful and deeply personal accounts of the working-class academics' lives; they make a significant contribution to the field of research on higher education by providing unique insight into personal experiences. Within this article I have explored some of the accounts and considered how the academics overcame, for example, feelings of failure from previous educational experiences, feelings of (un)belonging and tackling imposterism.

Despite efforts to foster a more equitable gender representation, Australia's higher education sector and workforce continue to be highly segregated. This article focusses on the gendered experiences of first-in-family (FIF) students--many who are from low-socioeconomic communities--transitioning to Australian universities. In terms of the gendered nature of widening participation, we know students who are FIF will often study disciplines which align with traditional gender norms. Drawing on the "First-in-Family Project" (n = 48), we present the analysis of our findings in two parts. First, we provide an overview of the cohort where we analyse the gendering of degree choice of FIF students. Second, underpinned by theoretical work focussed on student gendered and classed subjectivities, we address how FIF young people negotiated classed and gendered norms during the transition to university. Our data suggest that young people engage in 'gender work' and 'class work' which informs their identities and how they make choices about their futures. Based on our research, we argue that to achieve social justice there is a need for a renewed attention to gender within the widening participation agenda.

The more-than-human turn in early childhood education has highlighted the relevance of children's intra-actions with their environment, as well as the multiple ways in which worlds and literacies emerge in them. The rejection of representationalism as the single source of knowledge leads to the consideration of affect, embodiment, memories, sound and movement as ways of knowing. The ways in which they manifest in a school context deserve close attention to the tiny details of literacy events. Our research presents a diffractive reading of an event in a school classroom, aiming to understand human and more-than-human intra-actions in this context, the re-configurations of time, space and matter, and the ways in which children articulate entanglements with texts and bodies. We focus on the intra-actions of a seven-year old child with a photo of his favourite videogame and the ways in which affect and memory emerge. The child's sounds and movements, the researcher, the photo and the space become entangled to re-configure time, space and matter. Our analysis provides an insight into an event often occurring in schools. We offer some clues to understand it as part of the language and literacy practices of children, and pose the necessity of reconsidering the usual concept of literacy in school.

This study examines how first-generation (FG) college students make meaning of their social class during their first-year of college. As a method, photovoice allowed for the creation of a rich set of data using student photos and accompanying narratives, through which three key themes were derived: (a) broken American dream, (b) honoring family sacrifices, and (c) lifting generations. This study informs both future practice and research by providing a deep understanding of the intersection of students' individual identities, contexts, and motivations through the lens of the social class worldview model (SCWM).

This study explores the contrasting racialized geographies of St. Louis County and factors of local college accessibility by re-framing the concepts of college deserts and oases post the Ferguson uprising. Through a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis of educational divides, capital accumulation, and policing, we found dual spatial landscapes: a geography of Whiteness and higher education capital accumulation in southern St. Louis and a predominantly Black working-class geography of Ferguson in northern St. Louis. These dual landscapes capture the social, economic, and racial contexts of St. Louis as it informs the discourse of college-going.

Disparities across race, gender, and class are important targets of descriptive research. But rather than only describe disparities, research would ideally inform interventions to close those gaps. The gap-closing estimand quantifies how much a gap (e.g., incomes by race) would close if we intervened to equalize a treatment (e.g., access to college). Drawing on causal decomposition analyses, this type of research question yields several benefits. First, gap-closing estimands place categories like race in a causal framework without making them play the role of the treatment (which is philosophically fraught for non-manipulable variables). Second, gap-closing estimands empower researchers to study disparities using new statistical and machine learning estimators designed for causal effects. Third, gap-closing estimands can directly inform policy: if we sampled from the population and actually changed treatment assignments, how much could we close gaps in outcomes? I provide open-source software (the R package gapclosing) to support these methods.

This collaborative autoethnography (Bochner and Ellis, 2016) has created a space for three women academics from working-class heritage, navigating the liminal and temporal space of the COVID-19 pandemic within a post-1992 Higher Education Institution, to explore the social relations of one Higher Education Institution and confront their lived experiences. The stories shared in this paper are analysed through a 'care-less' (Rogers, 2017) lens, which asks the academy to recognise and confront the duplicity and self-glorification of policy and practice, that might be viewed as acts of normalising and supporting care-less cultures and behaviours. The paper raises questions about social justice, diversity and inclusion, the intersectionality of class and gender, and the inequity of the lived experiences from those who sit on the margins. The paper is the first collaborative writing project from a newly formed staff network of academics who come from working-class backgrounds, and we are intentional in our commitment to support each other as new researchers, giving agency in support of the other to find their voice.

This empirical qualitative study investigates the ways in which working-class roots have shaped educator values and identity. Using collaborative autoethnography, we share an honest insight into the stories of seven female educators drawn together from a variety of health and social care disciplines. The five themes emerging from this research: Connection through differences and commonalities; graft; inner tensions; authenticity 'I am who I am' and the bigger picture are tightly interconnected, generating a complex and rich picture of contemporary female educator identity. This supportive and collaborative approach has been transformational in the realisation we are not alone, and it has provided a space to celebrate our 'otherness'. As a result, we have embraced our collective responsibility to challenge inequalities and foster a more open, accessible and authentic HE future for all.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether there are disparities in undergraduate students' access to academic advising during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data were drawn from a multi-institutional survey of 31,575 college students attending 69 U.S. colleges and universities in spring 2021. Approximately one-third (29%) of students did not have access to academic advising during the pandemic, and a variety of demographic, institutional, environmental, and COVID-19 academic, financial, and health-related variables were associated with students' inability to access academic advising during the pandemic. Students from historically marginalized and minoritized identities in higher education were most likely to lack access to academic advising. Recommendations are provided to expand advising resources, use trauma-informed approaches, and offer holistic support to students.

Trickle-down economics is a fallacious metaphor that hurts working people and the civic commons. In this paper, we discuss the role and impact metaphors have in economics education. We explore the stickiness of "truthy" but ultimately false metaphors and offer economics educators alternative metaphors to displace this problematic metaphorical language. In its place, we propose a restorying of this fiction to tell a more truthful story in economics classrooms using the dual metaphors of "evaporative economics" and "economic desertification." We end by identifying the limitations of metaphorical language in teaching complex economic concepts, even while we recognize the power of these tools to elicit engagement in and with economics content that has real and lasting impacts on individuals and communities.

St. Patrick's Catholic School is a coeducational Catholic preparatory school located in a large northeastern city. The school serves an exclusively non-white, working-class student population who demonstrates the motivation and potential to attend and graduate from college. The school's mission calls for its staff to be guided by "cura personalis," meaning they will care for the whole person; yet, data show that the school's students were extremely stressed out and that much of their stress was attributable to homework. This study sought to determine if reducing the amount of homework could improve students' mental health while not negatively impacting academic performance. Across ten classrooms, teachers reduced the amount of homework they were assigning by 50% for a period of at least three months with an aim of reducing students' self-reported levels of stress by 30% while maintaining their same academic performance. At the conclusion of the project, the number of students reporting high to moderate levels of stress decreased by nearly 30%. The next step is to expand this pilot from ten classrooms to 20, thus having every teacher reduce the homework they are assigning to more effectively measure the impact it has on both students' mental health and their academic performance. The project this year indicated that reducing homework school-wide would relieve a significant amount of stress for St. Patrick's students while ensuring their academic performance remains steady.

In Italy, the National Evaluation System (SNV), encompassing both internal and external accountability components, is designed not only to hold school actors accountable but also to stimulate innovation and change in pedagogical practices. Nevertheless, existing literature presents inconclusive and contradictory findings regarding the effects and the relationship between school performance-based accountability (PBA) and educational innovation. Utilizing sensemaking and filtering theories, this paper analyses the negotiation of PBA and innovation mandates in Italian schools, emphasizing how school actors interpret, filter, and adapt the policy expectations to their organizational and educational practices. Special attention is given to the influence of local school contexts and performative pressures on this process. The primary data collection method involves interviews with school leadership teams and teachers analysed through an ideal type case analysis. Findings reveal diverse school responses to the double mandates of PBA and innovation. Varied logics of school enactment within the contemporary policy context are identified, influenced by teacher attitudes towards PBA and schools' socio-economic conditions. Innovation is evident in both advantaged and disadvantaged school contexts, albeit with distinct applications and interpretations. Overall, the adaptation of PBA prerogatives in schools to foster innovation and change is neither uniform nor direct, although external pressures impact educational practices across contexts. Beyond socio-economic factors and administrative and marketing accountability pressures, additional intervening elements include school leadership and staff cohesion as well as school infrastructure and material resources.

Despite an extensive body of literature that has examined the role of museums in cultural reproduction and public education, most of the current discussion is western-centred. Whilst explorations of museum education in developing countries often focus on the institution, the agency perspective regarding how different social groups negotiate access to museum resources is relatively understudied. Aiming to address these lacunae, this paper presents a qualitative case study of a major museum in Hangzhou, China, focusing on how people from distinct social groups, with different orientations to cultural consumption, developed multiple strategies for cultural participation in museums. Their practices arguably reinforced and justified a dispositioned judgment of taste and class identities that mirror the social transition of contemporary China. Conceptually addressing Bourdieu's theories of 'cultural capital' and 'taste', this study explores the dialectics between culture and power and demonstrates the complexity of cultural reproduction in a state-funded museum.

This article aims to deepen understanding of the assets within working-class academics (WCA). It is organised into three themes: 1) Class Solidarity, 2) Supporting Students, and 3) A WCA Pedagogy. Within Class Solidarity, the study reveals class unity demonstrated through shared experiences and joint efforts in creating spaces for working-class voices. Supporting Students discusses how WCAs provide unique support, addressing the challenges faced by nontraditional students and aiding in the construction of professional identities. The findings also suggest the possibility of a distinctive WCA pedagogy. This potential approach to teaching includes elements such as incorporating lived experiences, adopting a strengths-based perspective, encouraging the co-creation of knowledge, and integrating social justice principles. These components, if indeed characteristic of WCA teaching methods, could represent a transformative pedagogical framework. However, further comparative research is needed to confirm the extent to which these elements are unique to or more prevalent among WCAs.

Global education policy discourse is based on an unshakable belief that more and improved skills will promote economic prosperity, global competitiveness and social inclusion. In England, the Further Education and Skills sector (FES) has emerged as the vehicle to deliver these skills. However, the portrayal of FES as focusing primarily on vocational education for people often adjudged to be 'not academic' positions the sector at the bottom of the educational hierarchy, with negative ramifications for those who teach and study in it. This paper applies a case study approach to explore the lived experiences of five trainee FES teachers completing their initial teacher education (ITE). Drawing on contemporary interpretations of Bourdieu's theory of habitus, I develop Morrin's notion of hauntings to explain the psycho-social, historical and spatial influences on the trainees' responses as they re-enter the field of education as teachers.

I draw on the work of Bernard Stiegler and Charles Peirce to propose that "negentropic education" is education for "deproletarianizing" society through embracing the possibility of singularities, so we once again know how to live, make and do, and to theorize. We need to pay deep attention to our surroundings and to value our future-oriented desires for a pan-species reality. I argue that education ought to be about inducting individuals into the community of inquiry that seeks the truth, such that flourishing is "agapism;" negentropic education is education for creative love. This is a hopeful form of education, by which students are provided with opportunities to undertake inquiry in creative ways that matter to them and their intergenerational communities.

One of the primary goals of Franco's education policy was to train the working class in the doctrinal principles of the regime. Labour Universities were one of the education institutions created for this purpose; there were three for women (Zaragoza, Cáceres and Huesca). This article focuses on analysing the purposes sought by these macro-institutions when training working-class women, using diverse primary sources: documentary, audiovisual, archive and legal. Findings indicate that Women's Labour Universities aimed to provide specialised vocational training and also to impose the doctrine of the ideological principles advocated by the regime in relation to the model of women. However, these goals were somewhat incompatible as providing women with vocational training promoted their emancipation, contrary to the female ideal mainly advocated.

Even as research on teachers of Color increases, there still are few studies that examine Asian American teachers working cross-culturally with Latinx American students in US K-12 schools. This qualitative case study uses elements from borderlands theory and culturally responsive teaching to examine three Chinese American teachers working with eleven Mexican American students in three ethnically diverse urban secondary schools in the Pacific Northwest. Findings suggest that the Chinese American teachers used borderland teaching (a hybrid of borderlands theory and culturally responsive teaching) to promote academic performance and build kinships with the Mexican American students. Implications of the study include further refining borderland teaching for educational research and practice.

The sifting and sorting mechanisms of Australia's education system continue to work to the detriment of groups put at a disadvantage. For mainstream schools serving working-class communities in particular, the rejection of the offers and advantages of schooling continue to result in differential class consequences and inequalities for working-class young people. In response, this paper pursues a more hopeful project of schooling by considering how schools can work to circumvent the alienation of working-class students from the mainstream secondary school system. Foucault's conceptualisations of 'power relations', 'agonistic freedom' and 'technologies of the self' are used alongside Kamler and Comber's notion of 'turn-around pedagogies' to draw attention to the complex relationships between students' subjectivities, their shifting dispositions towards school and eventual enticement to turn-back-around to mainstream school.

This article seeks to introduce a new historical explanation as to why left-wing working-class women engaged in liberal, middle-class organisations during the first wave of feminism. The article specifically deals with middle-class associations and clubs that had educational purposes. Instead of focusing on the larger explanatory scheme of the power of patriarchal societal structures or bourgeois feminisms as a hegemonic force, the account revolves around the political educational functions of liberal feminist engagement for some politically active social democratic women in Sweden. The case of social democratic women who entered the liberal middle class educational organisation Tolfterna (the Dozen) is the point of departure for a micro-historical analysis of the political capital accumulation practices that class collaboration entailed. Finally, the article explores how working-class women's choices and actions can be considered a group-specific strategy to expand their political resources to attain what is called feminist liberal political capital.

Past decades have seen increased emphasis on graduate employability as a driver of higher education policy. In the Australian context, employability discourses in the public domain have become inflected with anti-intellectual sentiment, serving to reproduce the perception that the humanities and social sciences are of less value to graduates' employability than are science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine. Against this backdrop, and with particular reference to the Job-ready Graduates Package, we investigate how diverse notions of employability shape student-hood for working-class female students who are largely engaged in the social sciences. Attending to affective dynamics, we show how employability imperatives 'land' for these students, individually, and as an 'equity group'. While employability policies are typically positioned as a salve for class inequalities, they can also discredit educational and employment endeavours of working-class students, and reproduce class tensions. To enhance employability policies, there is a need to move beyond reductionist models of job-readiness, towards responding to the complexities of policy as enacted through lived relations. We propose attending to the variability of both identity and value positions and recognising the contribution of affect and emotion to this complex set of policy dynamics.

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

Young men from disadvantaged contexts are the least likely to attend university in Australia; furthermore, when they do attend, they are likely to struggle. This article draws on empirical data documenting the aspirations and resilience of first-in-family young men in Australian higher education, with the aim of nuancing their classed experience of university. Drawing on an exploratory longitudinal study (n = 42) and adopting a mixed method approach, we use the 25-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) and semi-structured interviews over a three-year period to explore changes in resilience of first-in-family men from the age of 17 to 20. The mixed-method approach employed in this study allows us to draw connections between the participants' subjective experience of resilience and the more objective measures of resilience as captured by the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, a psychometrically sound and validated instrument. Quantitative analyses of data enable us to document the trends in resilience over time for different groups of first-in-family men, while qualitative data provide insights structured around three key themes: independence and isolation; managing and adjusting; and using support structures. The article draws on analysis across these data to consider the participants' perceptions of their resilience, and how these perceptions change in reference to their experience, in order to paint a more nuanced picture of first-in-family men's classed experience of higher education.

This text aims to demonstrate the contribution of working-class mothers to supporting their children at school and the social factors that determine the effectiveness of the practices these mothers adopt in their efforts. The mothers' involvement in education is a complex and demanding work. It entails practices directly related to schooling, such as communication with teachers and daily homework management, as well as out-of-school time management for their children in relation to other organized activities (educational, sports, cultural) they may attend. These practices create a distinct educational context that runs in parallel with the educational context of the school. However, mothers do not share the same perceptions and practices. On the contrary, there are differences identified among them, which are directly associated with financial ability and, most importantly, the educational level of the mothers, who seem to be the family member responsible for making decisions in respect with children's education.

Given the widened access to Chinese higher education, a large proportion of students studying at Chinese colleges come from rural lower-class families and encounter different challenges in English language learning. By using Bourdieu's social theoretical lenses, this case study explores how the interplay of capital, habitus and social fields affected ten rural lower-class college students' English language learning. This study finds that these students inhabited difficult and inferior positions because they lacked different forms of capital needed for accessing language and cultural learning resources, solidifying their English language foundation, and developing intercultural understanding and competence. Their narrow, test-oriented focus, and the lack of confidence and initiative in English language learning stemmed from their habitus formed in their situated socio-cultural and educational fields. Through reflecting on these complexities and conditions in English language learning, teachers and rural lower-class college students may move from a deficit lens in terms of their knowledge foundation and learning styles, which leads to the lack of confidence in teaching and learning; instead, they might collaboratively explore appropriate strategies and resources that cultivate students' comprehensive English language competence and intercultural competence.

A rich literature has argued that so-called aspiration-raising policies tend to individualize structural conditions and thereby reproduce forms of inequality through young people's aspirations. This paper explores how aspiration-raising policy discourses are lived in ways that both accentuate but that might also contest their terms. Drawing on Lauren Berlant, we theorize aspiration as ongoing performances that can be altered and remade in affective scenes of interruption. We put our theorization to work in a longitudinal study that followed a young woman, Marie, throughout her upper secondary education. Whilst Marie's performances of aspiration predominantly chimed with such individualistic policy discourses, she would also describe moments where these performances were seemingly interrupted. These were moments where Marie vividly experienced concerns related to planetary crises. The analysis carefully unpacks these moments, and we argue that they bring Marie into contact with the political stakes in her life and lead her to search for alternative, more sustainable, and collective modalities of aspiration. Hence, supplementing previous studies that have shown how inequality is reproduced through aspirations, the paper contributes with new understandings of how alternative modalities of aspiration may emerge that potentially exceed structural limits.

Based on a case study of two majority-Black public high schools in a highly segregated American school district, the article employs a critical intersectional framework to examine the experiences of ten college-aspiring young Black men as they navigate the college choice process. Findings indicate that working-class Black male students are less likely to have access to college-going resources and social networks than their middle-class peers. However, a well-resourced school that affirms Black identity may increase agency and help crystallize college plans among working-class Black male students. In contrast, the study found that more institutional academic structures constrain agency and channel working-class Black male students towards under-resourced colleges where they are less likely to thrive.

A group of middle school students, working with educators in Washington Heights, NYC, designed a school-wide oral history project as a strategy to enrich the cultural and socio-emotional well-being of our school. As part of New York State's required SEL intervention, we developed a Longitudinal Oral History Project, led by middle school students at S2, where we gathered peer-to-peer narratives about socio-emotional dynamics from middle schoolers growing up in working-class and immigrant households in times of pandemic and racial uprisings. The oral history protocol, the implementation of the interviews, the analysis, and the presentation of our results were youth-led, and compelling. Narrating rich and complex stories of joy, fear, courage, and care, our project centers the expertise of immigrant students of color, coming out of COVID-19 in the throes of early adolescence. The youth found great relief in discovering that their fears and anxieties were widespread and experienced a sense of power by influencing school policy with the compelling results of their inquiry.

This paper explores the ways in which working-class boys negotiated the content and delivery of physical education at a 'typical', white working-class secondary school located in the north of England. The study utilised a quasi-ethnographical case-study design conducted over a non-continuous three-month period involving covert and overt participant observation, guided conversations, and group interviews. A total of 48 key stage 4 (Year 10 and 11) male pupils were selected to take part in eight focus groups following the observation of approximately 340 key stage four (KS4) pupils in PE lessons. The data revealed that the vast majority of these male pupils arrived at the school with a narrow sporting repertoire as result of the upbringings and lifestyles made up of 'traditional' working-class activities such as football and fishing. Their strong predisposition for recreational involvement in these activities impacted directly on what the young males would, and could, do during PE at school and in this way were able to influence (to lesser and greater degrees) the content and delivery of their PE experiences. The findings of the study, therefore, go some way explaining how PE in many working-class secondary schools may come to influence the long standing, class-related adult participation anomalies that continue to exist in the UK.

There is growing interest in the role of schools in supporting children facing adversity, including children with refugee and immigrant backgrounds. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork (December 2018 to June 2019) and interviews with teachers in two classes for adolescent newcomer refugee and immigrant learners in Denmark, this paper explores teacher responses to everyday dilemmas in supporting and caring for refugee and immigrant learners at school with a focus on three key areas: 1) in relation to teaching while safeguarding the adolescents' self-image, 2) in caring for the adolescents emotionally, socially and physically, and 3) in building trust and being the adolescents' confidants. Based on the findings, we argue that caring for newcomer adolescents cannot be reduced to questions of formal training and technical skills. Rather, it is intimately linked to attentiveness, experimentation and sensitivity to learners' needs. Furthermore, we discuss how scholarly analysis of teacher responses to care-related dilemmas can help generate contextualised insights into the broader support needs of teachers engaging in care work in specific social contexts.

Low completion rates amongst students from Black working-class backgrounds remain a persistent challenge to post-apartheid university transformation in South Africa. Notions of universities as colour-blind, meritocratic, and post-racial have developed around a deficit and victim-blaming majoritarian narrative that individualises educational under-achievement, blaming victims and downplaying the complicity of universities in reproducing inequity. This article analyses the narratives of a group of Black working-class students, and academics on their in-depth experiences of educational success and failure in post-apartheid South African universities. Counter-storytelling is employed to foreground and promote the voice and lived experiences of those who often go unheard; and to highlight their narratives as valuable and critical in understanding persistent inequity in higher education. This article looks beyond the fixation on what students from marginalised communities are perceived to lack to reassert a place for institutional context in studying their experiences, to minimise the de-contextualisation of such experiences; and to illuminate areas of universities' complicity in reproducing untenable educational experiences and outcomes for those already in the margins. Participants' counter-stories are presented to deepen our understanding and theorisation of Black working-class students' lived experiences in a manner that enriches the work of researchers, policy makers and practitioners.

This article presents the results of two projects exploring the experiences of working-class students in elite colleges. The first project is a nation-wide study that included 19 focus groups with 183 program participants of a condonable loan program, and additional interviews and focus groups with non-scholarship students, professors and administrators. The second project is an in-depth ethnographic project including 61 interviews with beneficiaries of the same condonable loan program and multiple ethnographic observations over 4 years. Two main consistent related themes appeared in the data. First, cultural capital and, more generally, social class differences are perceived as the result of personal preferences and individual choice. Second, this perception helps making social class invisible and allows the interpretation of college segregation as independent of the class structure. Both themes are related with the lack of open conversations about class in elite colleges and to the frames of abstract liberalism previously identified for the case of racism.

Internationally, boys from working-class backgrounds are often the most likely to disengage from their formal education. Research on the educational experience of working-class boys has focused heavily on their identity barriers, often positioning these young men as either vulnerable or volatile in their formal education. Social theorists have sought to address the historical and cultural embedded (gendered) practices which influence the identity work of working-class boys. This conceptual article contributes to the study of working-class boyhood and education through first synthesizing key themes present in the historic and contemporary literature before adopting a feminist post-structural stance to consider how these themes are informed by our understandings of the discursive production of masculinities. Then, in the second half of the paper, we make visible what has been at the margins in the scholarship -- identity versatility -- which we define as contextual and agentic adaptation. Attention to versatility, we feel, offers the potential for a nuanced analysis regarding working-class boyhood, learner identities and educational engagement.

Results from a growing body of correlational and qualitative research have illustrated the ways in which students who are poor or working class manage their social class identities in higher education. Strategies of class code-switching (e.g., altering language) and disassociation (e.g., hiding status) were commonly used by students to manage the stigma associated with their lower social class statuses as well as pressures toward upward mobility in college settings. The study was conducted between September 2018 and May 2019 in a large, selective, public land grant university in the US Midwest. In this study, participants' concealment frequency was linked with their interaction partners' social status. Overall, findings demonstrate that participants' experiences of social class concealment were more relationally dependent (i.e., others' statuses) and less dispositional in nature.

In the last few decades, universities in India have witnessed the joining of a record number of students from marginalized communities and oftentimes struggle. This expansion of access has brought about changes within classrooms and college campuses, sometimes giving rise to contention and causing numerous conflicts as well. Centered around my experiences of teaching in a working-class college in Bangalore, a metropolitan city in Southern India, this paper offers reflections on education in challenging circumstances. Further, the essay explores the possibilities of democratic pedagogic practices through the theoretical framework of Maitri.

The purpose of this article was to examine the effects of having an academic or student affairs professional mentor on working-class first-generation students' sense of belonging and resilience. The authors used propensity score matching techniques to develop matched pairs of working-class first-generation students who did and did not have a mentor. The results suggest that working-class first-generation students who had an academic or student affairs professional mentor had a significantly higher sense of belonging and resilience.