Search

Information technology (IT) is transforming the world. Therefore, exposing students to computing at an early age is important. And, although computing is being introduced into schools, students from a low socio-economic status background still do not have such an opportunity. Furthermore, existing computing programs may need to be adjusted in accordance to the specific characteristics of these students in order to help them to achieve the learning goals. Aiming at bringing computing education to all middle and high-school students, we performed a systematic literature review, in order to analyze the content, pedagogy, technology, as well as the main findings of instructional units that teach computing in this context. First results show that these students are able to learn computing, including concepts ranging from algorithms and programming languages to artificial intelligence. Difficulties are mainly linked to the lack of infrastructure and the lack of pre-existing knowledge in using IT as well as creating computing artifacts. Solutions include centralized teaching in assistive centers as well as a stronger emphasis on unplugged strategies. However, there seems to be a lack of more research on teaching computing to students from a low socio-economic status background, unlocking their potential as well to foster their participation in an increasing IT market.

In this qualitative study, we investigated the social class worldviews of Chinese International Students (CIS) in the United States. Social class worldviews are a constellation of beliefs, attitudes, and values that individuals use to maintain a sense of psychological equilibrium within their perceived social class groups and culture. Having interviewed eleven CIS in a midwestern city in the United States, the researchers found that their experiences reflected five themes: (1) social class consciousness; (2) social class socialization; (3) social class resources; (4) social class values; and (5) social class challenges. Suggestions for research and implications for higher education are discussed

The goal of this paper is to extend research on parental involvement in education and its relationship to social class and inequalities. We do so by developing a new theoretical framework that helps us to better understand and explain cross-national and cross-cultural differences in how parental involvement in education differs across socio-economic groups. We propose that giving greater analytical attention to the role of institutional factors, cultural processes, and the underlying class and economic structures of particular countries is important for understanding the social mechanisms underpinning patterns of parental involvement in education. Once this framework has been developed, we identify promising directions for future research.

U.S. studies have found that stratified graduate education accounts for most of the relatively strong intergenerational socioeconomic association among postgraduate degree holders. The same association has been observed, but not explained, in countries with higher education systems that differ from that of the United States. We explore the mediation role of undergraduate- and graduate-level stratification in accounting for the intergenerational occupational association among postgraduate degree holders in the United Kingdom. We find that the unequal distribution of undergraduate-level education and path dependency between undergraduate- and graduate-level stratification help to give rise to an unequal occupational outcome by social origin among postgraduate degree holders. We explain this by the tight coupling of undergraduate and graduate education in the United Kingdom. Our analysis also illustrates the need to go beyond graduate education in understanding social origin inequality among postgraduate degree holders to examine the role of undergraduate education and how it is linked to graduate education.

This study presents the case of a multilingual refugee (Maji) of Kirundi, Swahili, French, and English, from Burundi living in the U.S., and examines the language ideologies and identities embedded in his transnational narratives. We analyze our focal participant's multi-layered transnational experiences using Darvin and Norton's (2015) model of investment that foregrounds the intersection of ideology, capital, and identity. Specifically, we center on dominant ideologies in Maji's discourse and how he negotiated his ethnic, social class, and gendered identities. Our findings revealed that Maji, who adhered to discourses that promoted the English superiority, the prestige of dialectal forms of Swahili, Spanish, and English, and English as a global commodity displayed his awareness of language hierarchies and dominance. Yet, Maji, who drew on French for meaning-making, displayed contradictory ideas by framing French as a useless language in the U.S. as compared to English. Our study sheds light on the complexity of multilinguals' identity construction and discusses pedagogical implications on how to support language minority students' multilingualism.

Using interviews with 74 Korean undergraduate students at ten elite U.S. colleges, I explore how intersections of gender and class decide who pursues transnational mobility and cosmopolitan life more successfully. Men from highly-transnational families tried to exert 'agency for becoming' while mapping out their 'choice biographies', aspiring and expected to be high-achieving and influential worldwide, often thanks to their U.S. citizenship or permanent residency. By contrast, women across class and legal statuses tended to accommodate 'normal biographies', prioritising their (future) responsibilities as mothers, wives, and daughters. Regarding class limitations, both women and men from less-transnational families tended to expect to return to Korea upon graduation, feeling culturally and legally limited to utilising their degrees across national borders. Yet, across class lines, men were more ambitious and career-oriented than women, implying gender-based constraints among the skilled diaspora. These findings shed light on multiple forms of inequalities among high-achieving Asian student migrants.

The purpose of this article is to examine academia and the abuse of power based on auto-ethnographic research. I draw on my experiences across 12 universities in different locations in Spain, the UK and the USA that expose the way power is embedded in institutions of higher education and how it is maintained. This article analyses the exploration of inequalities which concerns particular social divisions, for example, gender, social class, ethnicity, non-national status and the intersection of these categories in particular sociocultural and historical contexts where I conducted my studies, research and teaching for more than 30 years. Employing auto-ethnography has allowed me to examine multi-layered lived experiences in the three countries intertwined with axes of inequality. Thanks to the dual focus on individual experiences and social contexts, this article shows how different systems of domination have shaped my experiences as a student and as a member of faculty in a transnational context. This heuristic approach has challenged me to generate meaning within a framework of ethics and social justice, recognizing that academia often excludes and marginalizes. Thus, this qualitative research enables marginal voices and the articulation of silenced narratives, hence expanding our knowledge of the relationship between power and academia.

Drawing insights from an ethnographic study with two young refugee-background children, this paper examines the multiple contexts that influence their identity negotiations during their first three years of resettlement to the United States. The analysis aims to expand the growing literature on funds of identity (FOI) with specific attention to structural barriers that defund their FOIs. The findings are categorised in three intersecting themes: 1) transnational and translinguistic funds of identity, which are challenged by xenophobia, monolingualism and social class barriers; 2) funds of intercultural identity, which are jeopardised by racial and religious exclusion; and 3) funds of academic identity in the home which are threatened by social class challenges. The paper concludes with the implications of the analysis for theory and practice.

In 2015 the Gender Vectors research team received a major research grant to conduct research with and about transgender youth in the Greater Vancouver Area. A unique aspect of this research project involved combining social action research with the development of a prototype of a video game as a knowledge translation tool to depict the life experiences of trans youth. We draw on transformative gender justice theory to document and address the diminished life chances of and the need to promote resilience among trans youth in the region and more broadly, across Canada and the United States. This article provides an overview of the research project and concludes by identifying key insights relating to resiliency that resulted from 15 narrative interviews with transgender youth, focus group meetings with the Project's Youth Advisory Council, and dialog from an intergenerational workshop for transgender youth and adult care/service providers and allies. These themes informed the creation of the prototype.

Elite universities are often believed to represent education's gold standard and to produce highly educated luminaries who rightfully take their places leading all the institutions that matter in societies across the world. We begin by explaining how this is so. Then we discuss what we call monster methodologies, suggesting why and how we employed them to disrupt the seductive appeal of elite universities. Deploying zombie, werewolf, and vampire metaphors, we identify various ways that elite universities are monstrous and the kinds of student monsters that they produce, honour, harbour, and reject. Exploring the zombie culture of elite universities in the Global North, we highlight how the monstrous dynamics of perfectionism place unhuman demands on many students which lead to them becoming the walking dead. Next, we examine the werewolf identities of elite universities and highlight the ongoing dialectical interchange between their highly reputable public and deeply disreputable private abodes. We also acknowledge the magnificent student monsters who challenge these monstrous institutions. We then turn to the Global South and South African elite universities. Illuminating the ways they are infused with the remains of the monstrous alliance between capitalism, colonialism, and apartheid, we analyse the vampire curriculum that sucks the strength, vigour, and energy from students. And we show how students have sought to become vampire slayers. Overall, we illustrate the merits of deploying monsters to disrupt the allure and expose the injurious practices of elite universities.

The purpose of this systematic literature review is to examine global perspectives on the role of parental involvement and social/emotional skills in school-age children's academic success. A multistage filtering analysis process provides relevant information in relation to key issues on the topic of parental involvement in different countries and reveals distinctive characteristics of parental involvement as well as contextual differences from one culture to another. A discussion of the concepts is presented, and recommendations are drawn from the analysis.

Background/Context: In recent years, Canadian and U.S. schools have increased efforts to recognize gender diversity and reduce gender-based harassment, in large part because a growing number of young people are coming out as transgender or nonbinary in adolescence. However, little research explores nonbinary teachers' experiences or investigates barriers to their entry into the profession. Purpose: This article begins to fill this gap by showing how six nonbinary beginning teachers navigated gender expectations, worked to appear professional, and negotiated racial and gendered power dynamics in their initial teacher education and preservice teaching. Participants: Participants include six nonbinary preservice teachers of diverse gender expression and racial and class backgrounds who were enrolled or had recently completed teacher education in North America when the study was conducted in 2018. Research Design: This qualitative study employed in-depth, phenomenological interviews. This article uses Sara Ahmed's concept of the "willful subject" to consider how participants negotiated the relationship between their gender identities as nonbinary people and their nascent professional identities as teachers. Conclusion: These beginning teachers expressed concern about succeeding in their teacher education programs and worried about how others perceived them because of the expectation of normative gender implicit in teaching's professional norms. This expectation was enforced by the profession's gatekeepers more than by K-12 students and their families, who participants generally described as hospitable or indifferent to having a nonbinary teacher. If the profession is to genuinely welcome gender diversity, it must recognize and work to deconstruct its own gender normativity.

In this autoethnographic tale, I tell the story of my own family's experience with race, class, and language privilege. In particular, I focus on my children's experience with elementary schooling in the United States and Hungary. Their intercultural education experience vividly illuminates the socially and culturally constructed nature of race, class, and language privilege and the many ways these privileges are manifest in schooling.

This article focuses on the ways in which international students from Chile narrate their experiences in the US, and the extent to which mobility across national borders reshapes social class understandings and privilege. To complete this study, I conducted 13 in-depth interviews and a focus group with five Chilean graduate international students who enrolled in an elite research university in the Northeastern region of the United States. The data raised questions about how social class is negotiated in both education and space, challenging how we understand the relationship between social class and education in a global context. I argue that through a process of international mobility, upper-class students from Chile lose class privilege, which in turn influences them to denaturalise their class constructions. Based on discussion of social class within the sociology of education and insights from whiteness studies, the results of my study enable a dialogue about how mobility affects individuals within an international context. I conclude that while international mobility demands students to rethink their class constructions, the affective disruption of silence and guilt emerge as two strategies to justify and perpetuate social class privilege.

Higher education in both India and the United States has been experiencing a neoliberal turn discernable since the 1990s. At the same time, tensions around who does and does not belong on campuses in the neoliberal moment have also plagued universities in the two nations. Drawing from critical geography, this article employs a 'relational comparison' approach to examine together two much-publicized instances of such tensions, one concerning Black students at Washington DC's American University and the other centered around Dalit students at Hyderabad's University of Hyderabad. I consider how the agendas, routines, and narratives inscribed in and by the institutional cultures of the two universities, both of which are being re-worked by neoliberal logics, cultivate the terrain for moments of race and caste violence. I argue that such moments work dialectically with the project of neoliberalizing the university, serving to reproduce race and caste difference and regulate student political life.

The social sciences often discuss the realities of human suffering addressed by the Black Lives Matter, DREAMers, among other significant movements in isolation from one another, seldomly examining the intersectional identities and shared struggles between social movements. Indeed, social movements are often taught through the lens of a single identity group's experience of oppression primarily living in the United States. In this article, Anyeline Mejia-McDonald and Eric Macias explore how studying social movements through a transnational and relational lens facilitates learning in ways that invite students to view their lives in connection to multi-issue struggles within and beyond national borders. That is, they suggest utilizing a transnational and relational approach to learning about social movements to make sense of the actions of individuals across the United States and the globe who adopted the Black Lives Matter slogan, for example, and joined the energetic manifestations demanding an end to racist violence at the hands of the state in an unprecedented act of democratic participation. They demonstrate the potential connection of the Black Lives Matter movement and the longstanding struggles in the Global South. The authors also examine the work of social movements in the Dominican Republic toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community and the ethnic Haitian community to exemplify the possible relationships and intersectional struggles within social movements struggling with racial, class, gender, and LGBTQ inclusion as they negotiate the nation-state and U.S. hegemonic discourse. Additionally, they analyze immigrants' struggles in the United States in connection to their country of origin as they work toward making their hometown communities more democratic, thus highlighting the practices of transborder political solidarity.

In the past decades, income inequality has risen in most developed countries. There is growing interest among economists in international comparisons of economic and educational mobility. This is aided by the availability of internationally comparable, large-scale data. The present paper aims to make three contributions. First, we introduce the Japan Child Panel Survey (JCPS), the first longitudinal survey of school-age children that includes cognitive and non-cognitive measures, and plentiful household information. The JCPS was developed to measure dynamic inter-relationships among children's academic and social outcomes, their family background, and local policy and environment, in a way that allows comparison of the results with international data. Second, based on JCPS data, we present selected results of the dynamics of inequality in multiple indicators of children's educational and behavioral outcomes. We found that changes in cognitive achievement across parental income groups, the degree of mobility of cognitive test scores, and the correlation between the difficulty score and parental education in Japan are similar to those of other countries, such as the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany. Finally we discuss issues underlying the globalization of education research based on our experiences with the JCPS. We discuss reasons and strategies for further globalization of education research in Japan, and propose suggestions as to how Japanese education research can move toward better international collaboration, particularly in research on economic and educational mobility.

This paper discusses the evolution of capitalism in British and American literature. The impact of capitalism on the lives of individuals has been well represented in both American and British literature throughout the centuries. The paper will discuss how seminal British authors such as Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and George Orwell use capitalism as central themes in their writings. In addition, the paper will also discuss how seminal American authors such as Benjamin Franklin, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Ayn Rand use capitalism in the development of the characters and themes in their writings. One dominant theme from both streams of literature is how capitalism impacts the lower class citizens in society. Another dominant theme that will be presented is how wealthy capitalists are portrayed in both American and British Literature. The concluding section of the paper will compare and contrast how British and American writers use capitalism in their writings.

Catalyst is a year-long, bilingual (English/Spanish) fellowship program for high school students and their teachers who live in communities affected by the war on drugs (WoD) that is being waged across the Americas. This educational effort is a response to the social suffering caused by the WoD. Catalyst is working to forge transnational networks of solidarity and analysis among youth on the frontlines of the WoD and to ensure that their voices are heard by the growing drug-policy reform movement. In this field note, I argue that existing abstinence- and prevention-based programs fail to address the structural roots of the WoD and that a radical, more comprehensive approach to drug education is needed. I first lay out the context and rationale for the Catalyst program and then outline some of the challenges and lessons that emerged during its inaugural session. Based on facilitators' and students' experiences at that session, the program is seen as a promising first step toward an alternative approach to drug education. I conclude the field note by suggesting new avenues for inquiry and collaboration between the field of education in emergencies and drug-policy reform.

"Children Crossing Borders" was an ambitious study of the intersection of im/migration and early childhood education in five countries: England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. This article looks back at this study a decade later, presenting the main findings and proposing suggestions about how in the contemporary climate ECEC programs might better address the needs of the im/migrant and refugee children and families they serve. Among the key findings of the study, as already presented in the main publications of the project (Tobin, Adair, Arzubiaga, 2013. "Children Crossing Borders: Immigrant Parents and Teacher Perspectives on Preschool for Children of Immigrants". New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Tobin, ed. 2016. "Preschool and Im/migrants in Five Countries". Brussels: Peter Lang), are that newly arriving parents tend to be pragmatic and strategic in their ECEC preferences; practitioners are often caught between being culturally responsive to parents and following their pedagogical beliefs and principles; bicultural staff play a crucial but also underappreciated role as cultural and linguistic mediators; parents find it difficult for their voices to be heard in their children's ECEC settings; and practitioners are underprepared to deal with the challenges of working with refugees, new im/migrants, and other second language learners.

In most of the scholarly work, the history of lifelong education (LLE) begins in the 1960s, when the concept gathered momentum as part of the agendas of the OECD, World Bank, UNESCO, and Council of Europe. A pre-1960s history is acknowledged with a few names and dates and is generally absorbed into the history of adult education. This paper presents new data that suggests revising the history of the conceptualisation of LLL and LLE prior to 1960. In 2018 and 2019, the author ran a series of queries on Google Books Search with the terms "lifelong education" and "lifelong learning" that turned up results for 161 unique documents published in the UK and the USA between 1839 and 1959. This paper is an overview and a preliminary analysis of the retrieved data that falls within public, academic, official, and creative discourses. Two groups of results are discussed: 1) the body of displayed documents and 2) the approaches, advantages, and limitations of collecting and examining the Google Books data as part of a term-based concept analysis. This study adds to the pre-global history of LLE in the UK and the USA and lays the groundwork for further exploration of the topic.

Recent research has documented the academic disadvantage of low social class students, whose performance is impaired by competitive educational practices. Across 2 experiments, we examined whether the pursuit of performance-approach goals (aiming to outperform others) favors the emergence of this achievement gap. We first manipulated low versus high relative social class positions; participants then solved a reasoning test, for which they had been incited (or not) to outperform others. In Experiment 1, carried out among French students, participants primed with a low relative social class obtained a lower performance than those primed with a high relative social class--but only when performance-approach goals had been made salient. Results of Experiment 2 replicated this pattern among American participants. These findings reveal that the pursuit of performance-approach goals can fuel the social class achievement gap. We consider the advantages associated with the experimental manipulation of relative social class, and discuss how educational practices and policies may jeopardize--in an invisible way--the potential of lower social class students.

This comparative study modifies Cabrera and La Nasa's model to examine social and class stratification in students' college-choice outcomes in the USA and Taiwan, and compares the mechanisms that perpetuate this stratification between the two systems. Students' college-choice outcomes are defined by both institutional selectivity and control, in order to test not only stratification in the quality of institution students attend but also their financial burden of college costs. The findings show that students from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to attend high-selective institutions and institutions that embrace better resources and provide more subsidies to students. Current financing structures embedded in both systems increase stratification, but through different ways. In addition to enhancing academic preparation for socioeconomically disadvantaged students, fundamentally rethinking the financing structures -- especially the distribution of public funds -- is imperative to increase equality for both countries in the cost-sharing era.

In 1903, in the introduction to his ground-breaking, seminal work, "The Souls of Black Folks", W.E. B. Du Bois calls for a vision of our country in which African Americans can become "co-worker[s] in the kingdom of culture." In this article I make the case that the use of a novel like "Gods Go Begging" by Alfredo Vea can help us better understand what is required in implementing Inclusive Excellence, an initiative of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, that takes us a little farther down the road toward Du Bois' vision. (Contains 10 notes.)

Although most Americans know that the U.S. population is aging, they are far less informed about the reality of providing elders with personal care, health care, and social support. Families--particularly women--have always been critical in providing elder care, but the entry of so many women into the paid labor force has made elder care increasingly difficult. Ann Bookman and Delia Kimbrel show how changes in both work and family life are complicating families' efforts to care for elderly relatives. Because almost 60 percent of elder caregivers today are employed, many forms of caregiving must now be "outsourced" to nonfamily members. And because elders are widely diverse by race and socioeconomic status, their families attach differing cultural meanings to care and have widely different resources with which to accomplish their care goals. Although the poorest elders have access to some subsidized services, and the wealthiest can pay for services, many middle-class families cannot afford services that allow elders to age in their homes and avoid even more costly institutional care. Six key groups--health care providers, nongovernmental community-based service providers, employers, government, families, and elders themselves--are engaged in elder care, but their efforts are often fragmented and uncoordinated. All six groups must be able to work in concert and to receive the resources they need. Both employer and government policies must be improved. Although large businesses have taken up the elder care challenge, most small and mid-sized firms still do not offer flexible work arrangements. Social Security and Medicare have provided critical support to families caring for elders, yet both face significant financial shortfalls. The Older American Act and the National Family Caregiver Support Program have broadened access to elder services, but need updating to address the needs of today's employed caregivers and elders who want to "age in place." And just over half the nation's workforce is eligible for the unpaid leave benefits provided by the Family and Medical Leave Act. The authors close by reflecting on the need for a coordinated, cross-sector movement to create an "aging-friendly" society in the United States--a society that values well-being across the life span and supports citizens from diverse cultures and income levels as they age. (Contains 113 endnotes and 1 table.)

Constance Flanagan and Peter Levine survey research on civic engagement among U.S. adolescents and young adults. Civic engagement, they say, is important both for the functioning of democracies and for the growth and maturation it encourages in young adults, but opportunities for civic engagement are not evenly distributed by social class or race and ethnicity. Today's young adults, note the authors, are less likely than those in earlier generations to exhibit many important characteristics of citizenship, raising the question of whether these differences represent a decline or simply a delay in traditional adult patterns of civic engagement. Flanagan and Levine also briefly discuss the civic and political lives of immigrant youth in the United States, noting that because these youth make up a significant share of the current generation of young adults, their civic engagement is an important barometer of the future of democracy. The authors next survey differences in civic participation for youth from different social, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. They explore two sets of factors that contribute to a lower rate of civic engagement among low-income and minority young adults. The first is cumulative disadvantage--unequal opportunities and influences before adulthood, especially parental education. The second is different institutional opportunities for civic engagement among college and non-college youth during the young-adult years. Flanagan and Levine survey various settings where young adults spend time--schools and colleges, community organizations, faith-based institutions, community organizing and activism projects, and military and other voluntary service programs--and examine the opportunities for civic engagement that each affords. As the transition to adulthood has lengthened, say the authors, colleges have become perhaps the central institution for civic incorporation of younger generations. But no comparable institution exists for young adults who do not attend college. Opportunities for sustained civic engagement by year-long programs such as City Year could provide an alternative opportunity for civic engagement for young adults from disadvantaged families, allowing them to stay connected to mainstream opportunities and to adults who could mentor and guide their way. (Contains 1 figure and 52 endnotes.)

This paper analyses the role that different components of the academic strength of the secondary-school curriculum (i.e. "number," "subjects" and "grades" of advanced academic courses) play in explaining social origin differences in access to prestigious universities (but also to other higher education institutions) in Scotland and the USA. A central aim of the paper is to investigate whether the mechanism behind the studied patterns of inequality differs depending on the characteristics of each educational system. Our results show pronounced social class gaps in entering top higher education institutions in both Scotland and the USA. Academic curriculum plays an important role in explaining these social class differences in both countries. However, while in Scotland "type of subjects" taken at an advanced level is the strongest mediator for the identified social class differences, in the USA, "number" of advanced subjects is the strongest. Moreover, taking into account the three academic components combined entirely explains the social class differences in Scotland. Considerable inequalities which are not explained by the strength of academic curriculum remain in the USA.

In this paper, we develop an information distortion model (IDM) of social class differences in self-beliefs and values. The IDM combines psychological biases on frame-of-reference effects with sociological foci on ability stratification. This combination is hypothesized to lead to working-class children having more positive math self-beliefs and values than equally able salariat children. We further suggest that the same conditions that give rise to the working-class benefit in self-beliefs and values are associated with signaling effects that suppress educational aspirations and attainment. These hypotheses are tested in 1 cross-sectional multinational and 1 longitudinal study. The results in favor of the IDM challenge cultural models of social class differences and have implications for rational action theory.

During the past two decades community colleges and technical institutes in several jurisdictions, including parts of Canada, the United States and Australia, have been given the authority to award bachelor degrees. One of the motivations for this addition to the mandate of these institutions is to improve opportunities for bachelor degree attainment among groups that historically have been underserved by universities. This article addresses the equity implications of extending the authority to award baccalaureate degrees to an additional class of institutions in Canada's largest province, Ontario. The article identifies the conditions that need to be met for reforms of this type to impact positively on social mobility and inequality, and it describes the kinds of data that are necessary to determine the extent to which those conditions are met. Based on interviews with students, faculty, and college leaders, it was found that regulatory restrictions on intra-college transfer from sub-baccalaureate to baccalaureate programs and lack of public awareness of a new type of bachelor degree may be limiting the social impact of this reform.

This essay outlines several ways in which educators might better prepare young people of all backgrounds to understand, enter, and eventually act upon the changing economic landscape. The contributors to this article, which presents perspectives on social class and education in the United States, suggest that one might learn some lessons from the examples of those who have already made the journey. The work collected in this article also suggests intriguing new directions for educating poor and working-class students, while also generating new and complex questions about the scope of that work in these changing economic times.

Social mobility carries with it a sense of loss. To be socially mobile is to move from one place, economically, culturally, personally, to another. One consequence of that loss, sometimes, is immobility--a paralysis brought on by the violent, forceful, uncertain rush of social mobility itself. The immobility of fear, the feeling stuck, the not being sure what educational successes have been hard-won and what scholarly failures should have been easy to swallow: these have been an integral part of saying farewell to the economic, cultural, and personal homes that have, for better or worse, nurtured people. The purpose of this paper is to offer three sets of thematically linked, dialogic narrative accounts of the confusing and complex paths of social mobility and immobility that academic institutions in the United States have provided the authors: two straight-identified, white-appearing American men from working-class backgrounds who are now critical education scholars and professors of communication. The authors hope that their positions of relative privilege can become a meaningful vantage point for reflecting on the unique interrelationship of social class and higher education--specifically in their cases, of working-class histories and academic lives.

This study examined the relationship between sexual content in music and sexual cognitions and risk among emerging adults in the USA and Australia. Music content was examined via lyrics, videos and social media. It was hypothesised that there would be a positive association between sexual content in music and sexual cognitions and risk. Sexual content in music lyrics, videos, and social media was assessed using content analysis of the top artists rated by participants in the USA and Australia. Findings indicated variations in sexual content based on music genre and location, and that music lyrics, videos and social media all contain sexual content. Results from hierarchical regression analyses indicated that sexual lyrical content, sexual content in music videos, and sexual references in the social media posts of artists were related to negative sexual cognitions for both samples. This trend was also found for the degree of sexual risk for both samples. While findings point to the direction of a universal impact of the association between sexual content in music and sexual cognitions and degree of sexual risk, they also highlight trends in these relationships across countries.

This essay considers the role that local control, poverty, access and policy play in providing drama/theatre education opportunities to students in the US. It examines how state and federal initiatives shape and determine the curriculum. While there are studies that suggest robust theatre education in the US, these findings are complicated when poverty statistics are superimposed upon them revealing inequitable access to theatre curricula. Additionally, race and class influence one's access to in-school theatre curricula. Beyond simply a skills-based definition, maintaining a broad understanding of theatre determines how teachers can impact curricula through adaptation and student-centred practices.

This hermeneutical essay demonstrates why and how Pierre Bourdieu's social reproduction theory is neither an adequate explanation for understanding praxis nor the Black/White academic achievement gap in contemporary postindustrial economies like that of the United States and the United Kingdom. The underlining hypothesis of the work is that the origins of Black academic underachievement vis-à-vis Whites in the United States and United Kingdom is structural and grounded in what Paul C. Mocombe refers to as "a mismatch of linguistic structure and social class functions" in postindustrial economies, which renders Bourdieu's theory problematic. In other words, the structurally differentiated divergent identities created by the lack of (social and cultural) capital among Blacks vis-à-vis the capital of the upper-class of owners and high-level executives are no longer marginalized, but are celebrated and commodified in postindustrial economies to produce surplus value for capital, status, and upward economic social mobility. Hence, underclass cultural capital is reified along with bourgeois cultural capital as appropriate praxes for consumption in postindustrial societies, which makes the need for Blacks to succeed academically null and void.

What does cultural capital mean in a transnational context? In this article, Cati Coe and Serah Shani illustrate through the case of Ghanaian immigrants to the United States that the concept of cultural capital offers many insights into immigrants' parenting strategies, but that it also needs to be refined in several ways to account for the transnational context in which migrants and their children operate. The authors argue that, for many immigrants, the folk model of success means that they seek for their children skills, knowledge, and ways of being in the world that are widely valued in the multiple contexts in which they operate. For Ghanaian migrants, parenting includes using social and institutional resources from Ghana as well as the United States. The multiplicity and contradictions in cultural capital across different social fields complicate their parenting "projects" and raise questions about the reproduction of social class through the intergenerational transmission of cultural capital.

The work of John Furlong on school and classroom ethnography is located in its context and its achievements celebrated. The paper focuses on class, ethnicity and gender issues as it explores the changes and continuities in the ethnography of education over the 66-year period covered. The qualities of a good ethnographer are playfully compared to those of the African-Caribbean trickster figure Anansi used by Furlong in an early article. Looking back to 1954 and forward to 2020, the key themes found in the qualitative research on schools and classrooms in the UK and the USA are compared and contrasted.

This essay describes a vision of social class-sensitive pedagogy aimed at disrupting endemic classism in schools. We argue persistent upward mobility discourses construct classist hierarchies in schools and classroom practice and are founded on misunderstandings of work, lived experiences of social class, and the broader social and economic context of the United States and the world. Educators may unwittingly alienate the very students they hope to inspire, cause for serious inquiry into what a social class-sensitive pedagogy might entail. The manuscript highlights five interrelated principles that provide insights to what research tells us and how it can be used in K-12 and teacher education.

Significant attention has been given to how students become grouped or "tracked" through the courses they share in common. However, this work has yet to be connected to a targeted analysis of the way in which courses are grouped with other courses through the students they co-enroll. Drawing on insights from field theory, the author examines this duality with special attention to the social organization of courses and the curricular discourses they contain. Multidimensional scaling and multiple correspondence analysis are used to analyze course-taking data for a cohort of students (2005-2009, n = 494) at a comprehensive high school in the midwestern United States. The results illustrate a "field" of courses that are distributed vertically according to a principle of status that opposes different forms of curricular discourse and horizontally according to oppositions between symbolic and material forms, artistic and technical skills, and the "inner" work of the household to the "outer" work of certain occupations. While the vertical dimension of courses is associated with a racial and social class hierarchy of students, the horizontal dimension passes through a division of the sexes. (Contains 3 figures and 10 notes.)

This article synthesizes Marxian conceptions of identity construction within capitalist relations of production with the Wittgensteinian notion of "language games" to offer a more appropriate relational framework within which scholars ought to understand the Black-White academic achievement gap in America, the United Kingdom, and globally.

A review of American charter schools and Swedish free-school research is outlined, providing strong evidence that both free-market models are flawed in their claims of enhancing young people's educational experience. A substantial body of work is included that strongly indicates charter and free schools increase social segregation and lower educational attainment. It is also argued that the rationale for and commitment to competition undermines cooperation between schools and reinforces class differentiation, suggesting the view that the model facilitates choice is erroneous. It is also argued its inception in the UK is, like the academies model, driven by a narrow ideological stance and should be replaced by a non-selective, state-funded, comprehensive school model accessible to all.

In a global and increasingly "knowledge-driven" economy where even semi-skilled jobs require qualifications, what may be done with and for young people whose attainment in school is low? This article draws on recent research with head teachers, college principals and administrators in English local authorities, combined with material gathered on visits to a number of foreign countries, to outline the issues. It illuminates that successive English governments have failed to provide a coherent system of vocational education.

In this article, I reopen some of the seminal theoretical debates among critical scholars on the nature of educational reform, arguing that there has been a consistent tendency in the literature to dismiss or downplay the significance of "instrumentalist" analyses in favour of cultural/hegemonic and structuralist explanations. As a result, education scholars who advance the instrumentalist emphasis on elite intervention in the policy process and the importance of organised class action have often been dismissed as one-dimensional and conspiratorial. To support this argument--and, by extension, those made by instrumentalist theorists--I bring together historical evidence from Canada and the United States in three historical periods: the mid-nineteenth century, the early twentieth century and post-Second World War. In each of these historical periods, I demonstrate how the structure and purpose of educational institutions were modified largely at the behest of economic elites (closely associated with political power and the professional educational establishment) in order to shape and implement a particular model of educational reform. Central to my argument is that powerful economic actors have always recognised the political nature of schooling and that elite class consciousness is and has been well-developed with respect to educational issues. The concluding section outlines the implications of my arguments for the future of educational reform. (Contains 100 footnotes.)