Late to Class
Social Class and Schooling in the New Economy
Publication Year: 2007
Published by: State University of New York Press
Series: SUNY series, Power, Social Identity, and Education
Cover
Title Page, Copyright
FOREWORD
As I began writing this foreword, the images of the tragedies unfolding in New Orleans were everywhere. The deaths and destruction, the human drama of trying to survive in conditions that were almost beyond comprehension, all of this and more, were ever-present, and rightly so. There were jarring words that kept emanating from the media, with sentences ...
INTRODUCTION
What does it mean to speak of social class in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century? In times when the social terrain between the “haves” and “have-nots” has grown ever wider, how can renewed consideration of social class deepen our analyses of educational reform—reform that has been invoked in the name of global economic ...
PART 1. GETTING TO CLASS
We came up with the title Late to Class on a walk through downtown Seattle with Bill Johnston. We liked it because of its double entrendre. We are both late in coming to a different understanding of social class and late in rethinking education in terms of social class. We also liked the title because it signaled a small transgression (in school and in social thought). ...
1. GROWING UP AS POOR, WHITE TRASH STORIES OF WHERE I COME FROM
The idea of “poor, white trash” conjures many different images in people’s minds. For some, they think of raggedy clothes, bad teeth, and dirty hair. People also picture trailers and roaches crawling across kitchen counters. A final assumption would probably be that they have “no education.” For me, I think of my family, of people I care deeply about. I ...
2. CLASS/CULTURE/ACTION: REPRESENTATION, IDENTITY, AND AGENCY IN EDUCATIONAL ANALYSIS
This chapter attempts to explore whether and in what manner the construct class remains a useful category for social and educational analysis. At one time class was unabashedly identified as one of, if not the central, category of sociological analysis. This is not to suggest, however, that the class construct has ever been unproblematically embraced. Karl Marx is probably ...
PART 2. CLASS WORK
To participate in the social world, people must engage in class work—in everyday life. Class work is both the embodiment of a class position and work to maintain and change class position. Deborah Hicks and Stephanie Jones reveal how young girls live in an urban neighborhood and school. These girls struggle to find a safe place. Being “good” is linked to class mobility if only in the rhetoric of the school. Being ...
3. LIVING CLASS AS A GIRL
Listen to the voice of a girl growing up in a small, working-poor community in a Midwestern city. Brandie, at the time in the fifth grade, has composed a poem modeled after George Ella Lyon’s (1999) collection, Where I’m From. Brandie’s poetic rendition captures some of the language, experiences, and feelings that are shaping her life as a young girl. ...
4. MARGINALIZATION AND MEMBERSHIP
In high schools across the United States adolescents enter into social relations with many others, some whose backgrounds are similar to their own and others who are racially, ethnically, economically, culturally, and linguistically different. There, they interact with one another, constructing seemingly coherent systems of knowledge and engaging in complex patterns ...
5. ORCHESTRATING HABITUS AND FIGURED WORLDS CHICANA/O EDUCATIONAL MOBILITY AND SOCIAL CLASS
Adalberto Aguirre Jr. aptly expresses some of the frustration facing Latina/o faculty members encountering stereotypes in their careers in academia. His expression, “the field is still a field” is appropriate, but should be contextualized, for as the Native American educational anthropologist Bryan M. J. Brayboy (2003) correctly points out, “doing ...
6. HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS’ EXPLORATION OF CLASS DIFFERENCES IN A MULTICULTURAL LITERATURE CLASS
One of the interesting political developments since the 1980s is the degree to which white working-class people, particularly males, are voting and registering as Republicans. White working-class males continue to identify with the Republican Party despite the fact that conservative Republican economic policies have resulted in no mean wage increase since the ...
7. SOCIAL CLASS AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT
Parental involvement encompasses an array of home- and school-based activities that research frequently associates with student achievement (Epstein, 1995; Stein and Thorkildsen, 1999). In fact, a steady stream of research has led to federal, state, and local mandates that often require schools to include parental involvement in their programs. However, the ...
8. SOCIAL HETEROGLOSSIA: THE CONTENTIOUS PRACTICE OR POTENTIAL PLACE OF MIDDLE-CLASS PARENTS IN HOME–SCHOOL RELATIONS
Within the last several decades researchers have documented the importance of parent involvement in academic achievement, measuring the effects of parents’ activities with schools and children as one influence on school success (Booth and Dunn, 1996). Joyce L. Epstein has argued that the strategies teachers use with parents are key factors in increasing the ...
9. (RE)TURNING TO MARX TO UNDERSTAND THE UNEXPECTED ANGER AMONG “WINNERS” IN SCHOOLING A CRITICAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY PERSPECTIVE
After conducting interviews with high- and low-income youths in Hillsdale, I concluded that the former were the clear winners in school and the latter losers. All school participation and outcome measures indicated this was the case (see table 1). In terms of reported grades, 24% of affluent adolescents received mostly A’s, 67% mostly B’s, and 9% C’s or ...
10. THE PROBLEM OF POVERTY SHIFTING ATTENTION TO THE NON-POOR
Poverty may be the most basic and fundamental form of stratification that exists in many societies. Of all the forms of stratification: race, ethnicity, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion, political affiliation, and even physical attractiveness, class seems different. Class, and particularly poverty, is more at the “bottom of it all” than the others. Social class determines ...
11. INTERSECTIONS ON THE BACK ROAD CLASS, CULTURE, AND EDUCATION IN RURAL AND APPALACHIAN PLACES
This chapter, as it focuses on rural and Appalachian contexts, is about white within white intersectionality, and about how power and privilege are enacted within whiteness. It is also about the juxtaposition of complexities of culture within rurality and Appalachia and the monolithic treatment of that context from outside observers and critics. This analysis ...
12. CLASS—DÉCLASSÉ
This book is devoted to a rethinking of social class in education. The other authors offer perspectives on how social class is useful, and in what ways, for understanding how education works to produce a stratified population both within schools and in the wider society. As coeditor of this volume, I have read and reread these pieces many times and find them all compelling ...
E-ISBN-13: 9780791480144
Print-ISBN-13: 9780791470930
Print-ISBN-10: 0791470938
Page Count: 376
Publication Year: 2007
Series Title: SUNY series, Power, Social Identity, and Education
Series Editor Byline: Lois Weis
See more Books in this Series
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Late to Class
